How to Use a Shared Meta Custom Audience Without Giving a Supplier Ad Account Access

Suppliers, brands and marketing partners often build valuable audiences of their own: customer lists, site visitors, engagement audiences. If one of them offers to share an audience with you so you can advertise to it, you do not need to hand over your ad account, your campaigns or your billing details. Meta has a built-in mechanism for exactly this, and it keeps both sides in control.

What is actually being shared

A shared Custom Audience is a pointer, not a data dump. The provider keeps ownership of the audience and the underlying data. You receive permission to target it inside your own ad account. You cannot see the individual people in it, you cannot export it, and you cannot re-share it onward. Equally, the provider never sees your campaign structure, your creative, your results or your spend.

What you both need before you start

• Both parties need a Meta Business Manager (Business Portfolio) account.
• You need your Business Manager ID, a 15 or 16 digit number found under Business Settings, Business Info.
• The provider needs admin access to the audience they intend to share.
• The audience must meet Meta's minimum size to be usable for targeting.

Step one: connect the two businesses

Audience sharing happens business to business, so the two Business Managers must be connected first. In Business Settings, Partners, click Add and choose the option to share assets with another business. Enter the other party's Business Manager ID. The other side accepts the request in their own Partners screen. No ad account access is granted by this step. It only establishes that the two businesses know each other.

Step two: the provider shares the audience

The provider opens Business Settings, Data Sources, Audiences, selects the audience, and chooses to share it with a partner or an ad account. They enter your Business Manager ID, or your ad account ID if they prefer to scope the share tightly to one account. Sharing to a single ad account is the safer default: it limits the audience to the exact account that needs it.

Step three: use it in Ads Manager

Once shared, the audience appears in your Ads Manager audience picker, usually labelled as shared or owned by another business. Select it at the ad set level as you would any of your own audiences. You can exclude it, layer it with your own targeting, and build lookalikes from it only if the provider granted that permission.

Why this is safer than giving ad account access

Handing a third party access to your ad account gives them visibility of your spend, your results and your creative strategy, and in some cases the ability to change or pause campaigns. Audience sharing gives you the one thing you actually need, the targeting, and nothing else. It is reversible in a click, it leaves an audit trail in Business Settings, and it survives staff changes on both sides because the relationship sits between businesses rather than between individual logins.

Housekeeping and compliance

• Confirm the provider collected the data lawfully and has consent to use it for advertising. In South Africa this includes POPIA obligations.
• Agree in writing how long the share stays in place and who may build lookalikes from it.
• Review shared assets quarterly and revoke anything no longer in use.
• Remember that a revoked audience stops delivering, so pause or reassign affected ad sets first.

Common problems

If the audience does not appear, the usual causes are a pending partner request, a share sent to the wrong Business Manager ID, an audience below the minimum size, or a share scoped to a different ad account than the one you are working in. Check the Partners and Audiences screens on both sides before assuming a platform fault.

If you would like help setting this up, or you want your Meta campaigns audited before you connect a partner, talk to Net Age. You can also read more about how we run paid advertising for South African brands.