Skip to main content
Two journey steps connect your automations to paid advertising:
  • Sync to Ad Audience adds a contact to, or removes them from, a Google Ads or Meta audience at that point in the journey.
  • Advertising campaign adds the contact to the audience of an ad campaign made for the journey, so they start seeing that ad.
Both are in the journey builder’s step palette with the other actions. For building journeys in general, see Automations.
Only contacts with the Active status and an email address are sent to the ad platform. Contacts are matched by their hashed email, as for synced audiences.

​
Sync to Ad Audience

Use this step to retarget people at a particular moment, for example after they abandon a cart, or to stop showing them ads once they buy.
1

Create the audience

Under Advertising → Audiences, create an audience. A Standalone audience is filled only by journeys, which is usually what you want here. See Sync audiences.
2

Add the step

In the journey, add Sync to Ad Audience.
3

Configure it

Pick the Ad audience (each is labelled Google Ads or Meta Ads) and the Operation: Add to audience or Remove from audience.
If no audiences exist yet, the step says “No ad audiences set up yet.” and links to Integrations.

​
Advertising campaign

This step works like an advertising activity in a customer journey: the journey decides who sees the ad.
1

Create a campaign for this journey

In the step’s settings, click Create an ad campaign for this journey. The campaign editor opens in a new tab with the note: “This campaign is driven by a journey: a journey-managed audience will be created for it and filled by the journey’s Advertising campaign step.”
2

Build and publish the campaign

Complete the five steps as usual. See Create an ad campaign. When you save, an audience named after the campaign with “(journey)” at the end is created in your ad account and added to the campaign’s Include audiences. Publish the campaign, then Resume it when you’re ready for it to deliver.
3

Select it in the step

Back in the journey, choose the campaign under Advertising campaign.
Each contact who reaches the step joins the campaign’s audience and starts seeing the ad. Contacts aren’t removed from the audience by this step. To take people out later, for example after a purchase, add a Sync to Ad Audience step with Remove from audience for the same audience.
Only campaigns created from a journey have an audience this step can fill. If you pick a campaign made directly under Ad campaigns, the step warns “This campaign was not created from a journey, so it has no audience this step can add contacts to.” Contacts are skipped at that step.
On Google Ads, the journey audience is a Customer Match list. Google only lets accounts that meet its requirements target Customer Match lists, and a list shows no size until at least 100 members have matched. For small journeys, Meta is usually the better fit.

​
When a step is skipped

When a prerequisite is missing, the ad step is skipped instead of failing. The contact moves on to the next step, and the skip is recorded with a reason, when:
  • the ad platform has been disconnected, no ad account is selected, or the connection has expired
  • on Meta, the Custom Audience Terms haven’t been accepted
  • the workspace’s plan no longer includes ad audience sync
  • the contact being added isn’t Active or has no email address (this check applies only when adding, not when removing)
  • the audience is a lookalike audience
  • the selected campaign no longer exists, or has no journey audience
Any other error from the ad platform fails the step.

​
Let AI draft it

When you describe a journey to the AI journey builder, for example “run a Facebook ad to people who…”, it can propose an Advertising campaign step. The campaign is left empty for you to choose or create.