With Facebook’s announcement to end their relationship with third-party data, it would be the norm for marketing teams and social advertisers to wonder what the status of their advertising campaigns with Facebook would be.

Yes, I was one of those marketers—but before making a comment or assumption as to where this would take us, I needed to do some research, and of course, wait to talk to our Facebook Partner Manager.

After speaking with Facebook today, I decided now it is time to relay some information and incorporate the motto of “keep calm” during these changes.

Third-party data incorporated into Facebook’s ad manager is widely used by many—especially in the automotive space. Having access to reach in-market auto shoppers based on behavior guaranteed that social ads were being seen by your serious shoppers. I will say that as a consumer, I love having my newsfeed specifically tailored to my wants and needs. I’ve used Facebook and Instagram as window shopping for years, so I’m nervous this change will affect the way that I use the platforms daily. But as a marketer, I’m optimistic.Two years ago, the social team at PCG started to run less campaigns per ad account—but have more ad sets within each campaign—with a focus on creating more custom audiences out of website traffic, Facebook engagement, and customer data from dealership’s CRM.

If you have not incorporated custom audiences into your advertising funnels on social, you will “feel” this “change” in your marketing results. Using first-party data in your Facebook advertising isn’t something that’s new, and if you haven’t been practicing with them, you may want to start now.

The time is now to meet with your digital team or marketing vendors about what the strategy will be moving forward. What objectives will your ads have? How will you start to test different techniques to see what fits best? These are the hard hitting questions you want to start asking now before third-party data ends on July 1st. Are you working with a third-party data company? Talk to them, ask them how they’re accommodating to these changes. There may be a chance that the companies you’re working with can create the audiences they’ve segmented for you into custom audience lists for you to import into Facebook. Don’t be afraid to ask because you may not know all the facts.

Research in every way you can. Stay away from headlines that read “The End is Near, Goodbye Facebook” because this is far from the truth. Facebook is still here to help its users and businesses connect. Whether it’s B2B, B2C, C2C or even F2F (friend to friend), Facebook wants to stay within its mission to have a more connected, user-friendly world. Don’t know where to start?

Look at the bigger picture of how your ads will market. I mentioned to our Facebook Partner Manager today about doing more local awareness and reach ads to generate quality traffic to the website, and then use pixel traffic to create custom audiences for retargeting. That’s a start for us.

The rise of first-party data isn’t the worst thing. Yes, we will see results in metrics and KPI’s change. I’m going to predict that cost-per-click (CPC) will go slightly up, while cost-per-impression (CPM) will probably lower, and landing Page Views are going to prove more of a connection than a link click. More campaigns won’t equal success—your results will improve based off of the number of ad sets you have within a campaign.

Download this white paper. It will walk you through step by step instructions on how to create custom audiences from first-party data using pixel traffic. Contact the PCG team, your digital vendor, Facebook, and your third-party data provider with any questions you may have.

Keep calm, we’re all in this together.