Seamlessly integrating Meta with Salesforce empowers businesses to synchronise their data, target specific audiences with personalised ad campaigns and analyse ad performance to optimise future campaigns.
Sounds great in theory, right? But how exactly does this integration work in practice?
If you’ve been wondering how to connect Salesforce data to Facebook, you’re in the right place.
In this post, we’ll walk you through two methods to make the connection and help you unlock the full potential of your marketing efforts.
Pro Tip
Manually uploading Salesforce data to Meta is the simplest option, but it’s far from ideal. Leads move fast, so your targeting can get outdated quickly, and let’s be honest—uploading data over and over is a hassle.
A smarter way to handle this is with a first-party data platform like Ruler. It tracks the entire customer journey, picking up marketing sources, UTM tags, click IDs, and cookie IDs along the way. When someone converts—whether through a call, form, or demo—Ruler connects the dots between digital touchpoints and conversion details, syncing revenue data back to its dashboard for accurate ROI tracking.
Best part? It automatically sends this data to Facebook via the conversion API, so you’re always working with up-to-date insights, no extra effort required.
Skip to learn more about this integration or book a demo to see it in action.
Integrating Salesforce with Facebook (Meta) brings a host of benefits, making it easier to target the right audiences, personalise ad campaigns, and improve reporting accuracy. Let’s dive into the details to understand how this integration can elevate your marketing efforts.
Most advertisers rely on demographic data, interests, recent searches, and social media activity to define their audiences.
They might also use basic retargeting campaigns aimed at website visitors.
While this approach works in theory, it comes with challenges.
First, it’s a bit of a shot in the dark.
Visitors land on your website for all sorts of reasons, and they’re at different stages in their journey.
Some might be researching a topic after a quick Google search, while others might’ve been referred to your product after a meeting.
That means you could end up showing the wrong ads to the wrong people at the wrong time—wasting precious ad budget.
Then there’s the challenge of running ads to bring in new business. Without the right insights, you might accidentally target existing customers with ads designed for fresh leads.
This is where smarter data, like what you get from Salesforce, can make all the difference.
It can help you:
By leveraging data intelligently, you’re not just running ads—you’re crafting personalised experiences that deliver better results for your audience and your bottom line.
This ties in perfectly with our next point. The Facebook and Salesforce integration doesn’t just improve your ad campaigns with better targeting—it also levels up your reporting.
Meta’s ad platform is great at giving you the standard metrics—impressions, clicks, CTR, and so on.
When it comes to the bigger picture, like tracking pipeline, revenue, or ROAS, it falls short.
First, there’s Facebook’s native attribution. It does a decent job tracking online conversions (like e-commerce purchases) and the revenue from them.
But it struggles with offline conversions—the stuff that happens beyond the digital realm, like
Zoom demos, in-person meetings, or in-store purchases.
Second, the attribution window is frustratingly short—just 7 days for clicks and 1 day for views.
This limited timeframe means longer sales cycles often go untracked, leaving valuable insights out of the equation.
Here’s where the Salesforce and Facebook integration comes to the rescue.
By connecting the two, you can bring offline conversions into Facebook’s platform, ensuring those sales are accounted for.
This not only gives you more accurate reporting but also helps Facebook’s algorithm optimise your campaigns better.
Now that you know how powerful the Salesforce and Facebook integration can be, let’s dive into how to actually set it up.
For this guide, we’re focusing on how to send Salesforce data to Meta to boost your audience targeting and improve reporting. But if you’re looking to send Facebook data to Salesforce, there are a few options for that too:
1. Native integration via Salesforce Marketing Cloud
With the Marketing Cloud Social Studio, you can manage your social media accounts, schedule posts, and pull in insights from Facebook directly into Salesforce.
2. Facebook Lead Ads integration
This one’s simple—sync Facebook Lead Ad submissions directly to Salesforce as leads or contacts, making it easy to follow up.
3. Third-party tools
If you prefer more customisation, platforms like Zapier, Workato, or MuleSoft let you create workflows between Salesforce and Facebook, offering more flexibility in how you sync data.
Each of these methods has its perks, depending on what you’re aiming for with your integration. Anyway, let’s get back on track.
When it comes to sending Salesforce data to Meta, there are a few different ways to make it happen. They are:
1. Export Salesforce data and upload to Meta
2. Use a first-party data platform
If you’re looking to upload Salesforce data to Meta, it’s actually pretty straightforward to do it manually.
Salesforce has a built-in “Data Export” feature that lets you download your data as a CSV file, which you can then manually upload to the relevant Meta platform (like Ads Manager or Business Suite).
The key here is to map your Salesforce fields correctly to the corresponding Meta fields during the upload process.
Here’s how to do it:
This process might take a few steps, but once you’ve got it down, it’s a quick and easy way to sync your Salesforce data with Meta.
While the manual data export method works, it does come with some challenges.
For starters, leads move through the pipeline quickly, so by the time you upload your contact list, they might already be at a different stage or out of the pipeline, making your audience targeting less reliable.
On top of that, when you manually send leads to Salesforce, they usually don’t have any specific lead source data attached to them.
Often, leads are just labeled as “web,” and even if you try to capture more details through hidden web forms, they still don’t paint the full picture.
Leads engage with multiple touchpoints before converting, and this lack of accurate lead source data can result in Meta having incomplete information, which can lead to bad budget allocation decisions—like pulling funds from a campaign that’s actually performing well.
Additionally, manually uploading data can be time-consuming and repetitive, especially when dealing with large datasets.
A more sophisticated solution is using a first-party data platform, like Ruler, which tracks the entire customer journey using first-party data.
Ruler collects detailed information such as marketing sources, UTM tags, click IDs, and cookie IDs, providing you with a clearer view of how a visitor engages with your content across multiple touchpoints.
When a lead converts, whether that’s through a phone call, form submission, or during a demo, Ruler connects the digital touchpoints with the conversion details.
As the lead progresses through the funnel and turns into a deal, Ruler brings back the revenue data to its dashboard, giving you a precise look at your marketing ROI and ROAS.
But how does this help with Salesforce and Meta integration? Basically, this data can be sent straight to Facebook via the conversion API, so you always have the latest info without any extra work.
Even better, Ruler’s tracking isn’t just for closed deals. If a contact moves from MQL to SQL, Ruler will capture that and pass the updated data to your Meta ads account, keeping things fresh and relevant.
Here’s the bottom line—using a first-party data platform means:
At the end of the day, it’s all about making your life easier and your campaigns smarter.
Integrating Salesforce data with Facebook opens up a world of opportunities—from smarter audience targeting to more accurate in-platform reporting.
Sure, manual uploads can get you started, but let’s face it—they’re prone to human error, miss out on the full customer journey, and struggle to keep up when leads jump between stages.
By tracking the entire click path with first-party data tracking, syncing marketing source data into Salesforce, and seamlessly integrating with Meta’s ecosystem, you can overcome these challenges and make your campaigns more effective.
Ready to level up your targeting, streamline your processes, and get better results? Book a demo with Ruler and see how it can help.