What you need

  • Your contacts with an email address, a phone number or both. First and last names help Meta match more people.

  • Phone numbers with the country code, for example +971501234567. A number without one may not match anyone.

  • A connected ad account: Google Ads, Meta or both.

  • Permission: only upload people who agreed to hear from your business.

How to do it in Lead10

  1. Go to Ad Campaigns → Audience Lists and click New List. Name it, choose Google, Meta or Both, and pick your ad accounts.

  2. Open the list, click Add Members → Upload CSV, choose your file and check the preview. It warns you about phone numbers or emails that cannot be used. Or build the list from a segment of your CRM instead.

  3. Push the list. Emails and phone numbers are turned into an unreadable code (hashed) before they leave Lead10, so Google and Meta never receive your contacts' actual details.

  4. Use the list in your ad. In New Campaign, on the Audience step, open Custom Audiences and set the list to Show to. On Meta, that limits the ad set to people on the list; Lead10 also turns off Meta's automatic audience expansion. On Google, also tick Show ads only to these customers: unticked, the ad still shows to everyone and Google only reports on your list (Observation).

  5. For a campaign already running, include the list on the Meta ad set, or connect it on the Google campaign's Audiences tab as Targeting.

What to expect

Google and Meta can only show your ad to people they can match to an account, typically somewhere between a third and two thirds of a list. Meta needs at least about 100 matched people before it will run ads to a list; Google needs about 1,000 for Search and YouTube and about 100 for Display. Matching can take from a few hours to two days. Lead10 then shows each list's matched size and which campaigns use it. Google also only allows customer lists on ad accounts in good standing, and Performance Max campaigns use a list as a hint rather than a limit.

To keep a list away from an ad instead, read How do I stop my Google or Meta ads showing to existing customers? For the full walkthrough with screenshots, read our guide to targeting or excluding your customer list, or see Ads Manager in Lead10.