Target B2B contacts from CSV on Meta?
I am looking to target a csv list from Apollo with Meta ads. (CEOs) I spoke to a saas company that does this but they charge $2.5k/ mo which is out of my budget at the moment.
Anybody have a solution/product they can recommend?
The short answer is:
You absolutely do not need to pay $2.5k per month for this; you can target your Apollo CSV list of CEOs on Meta for practically nothing using the platform’s native tools.
The solution is simply to use Meta’s Custom Audiences feature and manually upload your CSV file of contact data like emails, first names, and company names.
For an automated, continuous, and highly accurate solution that keeps your CEO list constantly updated on Meta, the best and cheapest route is to use an integrated setup: specifically, leveraging the Apollo API to extract your list and then using an integration platform or a custom server-side setup like Google Tag Manager (GTM) with a server provider like Stape or Google Cloud Platform to send that data via the Facebook Conversions API.
This bypasses high-cost third-party synchronizers entirely.
The long answer is:
The $2.5k per month service you encountered is likely an expensive “data onboarding” or “data sync” solution.
This is entirely overkill for your goal, especially since Apollo gives you the data directly.
To achieve your goal for free, go into your Meta Ads Manager, select “Audiences,” and choose “Create Custom Audience”.
Select “Customer List” as the source.
You will then upload your CSV file from Apollo.
Meta will hash (anonymize) the data on your computer, so it’s secure, and then match it against its user base using identifiers like email, phone number, first name, last name, and company name.
This is the simplest, most direct, and free method, but its limitation is that it’s a static list – you have to re-upload the CSV every time you want to refresh the list with new CEOs or remove old ones.
For a dynamic, “set it and forget it” solution that still keeps costs minimal, the advanced setup is the way to go.
You would build a workflow that automatically pulls data from Apollo and pushes it to Meta’s system, and this is where the APIs come in.
First, you use the Apollo API to automatically export and update your list of CEOs based on your saved searches.
Second, instead of relying on a high-cost third-party tool to facilitate the data transfer, you use a custom integration.
A cheap and robust way to manage this is with a server-side setup involving Google Tag Manager (GTM) and a server.
Using a service like Stape, which is specifically designed for server-side GTM hosting, or a basic virtual machine on Google Cloud Platform, you create a dedicated endpoint.
This setup is far cheaper than the $2.5k price tag, often costing less than $50 a month for the infrastructure.
Your GTM server-side container then receives the data from the Apollo API and formats it perfectly to send to Meta via the Facebook Conversions API.
The Conversions API is Meta’s preferred, server-to-server data channel, which results in a much higher match rate and more accurate targeting compared to the simple CSV upload.
This is because the Conversions API allows you to send highly descriptive customer information parameters like email, phone, and external_idother or crm.
This combination of the Apollo API for data source, server-side GTM/Stape for control and processing, and the Facebook Conversions API for high-quality delivery creates an incredibly powerful, automated, and extremely cost-effective B2B targeting system that solves your problem without the outrageous subscription fee.
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