How to Connect Your Meta Ad Account to SMLLR: Meta Sync Setup Guide

Connecting Meta Sync (Pro plan and above) is a one-time, three-step Partner connection — no OAuth login, no Meta app-review wait. Add SMLLR's Business ID as a partner in your own Meta Business Settings, grant that partner access to the ad account you want synced, then paste your numeric Ad Account ID into SMLLR's Setup tab and click Verify. Because this uses Meta's standard Business partner-access model rather than a custom login integration, there's nothing waiting on Meta's approval queue between finishing this walkthrough and running your first sync.

You need an active Pro plan or above, and you need a Meta ad account you already control — Meta Sync connects to an existing ad account, it doesn't create one for you. If you don't have an ad account yet, set one up in Meta Business Manager first and come back once it exists. You'll also want at least one Lead Hub contact who's granted ad-targeting consent before your first sync does anything meaningful — connecting works either way, but a sync against zero eligible contacts has nothing to push.

Open Meta Sync from your SMLLR dashboard and land on the Setup tab. SMLLR's Business ID is shown right there with a copy button — this is the identifier you'll add as a partner in your own Meta Business Settings in the next step, not something you need to look up anywhere else.

In a separate tab, go to your own Meta Business Settings — the connection is initiated from your side, not by logging into Meta from inside SMLLR.

Back in SMLLR's Setup tab, paste your numeric Ad Account ID — the number itself, without the "act_" prefix Meta sometimes shows alongside it — into the Ad Account ID field, then click Verify (it reads "Re-verify" if you're reconnecting or checking an existing connection). SMLLR checks that the partner access from Step 2 is actually in place and, on a first successful connection, creates your Custom Audience inside that ad account automatically. If verification fails, the most common cause is a mismatch: double-check the Ad Account ID was copied correctly and that the partner access was granted on that exact account, not a different one under the same Business Manager.

Once connected, the Audience tab unlocks and shows your current eligible, pending-add, and pending-remove counts, along with the credit cost a sync would take right now. Click "Sync Now" to actually push that batch to Meta — nothing syncs automatically before this click. Check the Sync History tab afterward to see the exact number of contacts added and removed on that run, which is also where every future sync's log lives.

The most common first-connection snags, and what they actually mean:

A live connection doesn't mean anything syncs on its own — every future sync still needs a deliberate click on "Sync Now," typically folded into whatever routine you already run (after a marketing push, weekly, or monthly). Each sync only pushes the delta since the last one and only charges credits for contacts actually touched, so there's no cost to checking the Audience tab's preview counts before deciding whether a given sync is worth running yet. See what a sync actually costs for the credit math, or the full pillar guide if you're still deciding whether this is the right feature for your business.