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Ad audiences let you control who sees your ads. Instead of broad demographic targeting, audiences let you retarget people who already know your business (custom audiences) or find new prospects who resemble your best customers (lookalike audiences).

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Custom audiences

Custom audiences are built from people who have already interacted with your business.

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Source types

Customer list

Upload a CSV of contacts (emails, phone numbers) and match them against the ad platform’s user database.

Website visitors

Target people who visited your website or specific pages. Requires the Facebook Pixel or Google tag to be installed.

Page / profile engagement

Target people who interacted with your Facebook Page, Instagram profile, or LinkedIn Page.

Lead form engagement

Target people who opened or submitted a lead form on Facebook, LinkedIn, or TikTok.

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Creating a custom audience

1

Open the Audiences tab

Go to Marketing > Ad Manager > Settings > Audiences and click + Create New Audience.
2

Select Custom Audience

Choose the source type (customer list, website, engagement, or lead form).
3

Configure the audience

  • Customer list — upload a CSV with email and/or phone columns
  • Website visitors — set the time window (e.g., last 30 days) and optionally filter by pages visited
  • Engagement — choose the type of interaction (page visit, post reaction, video view)
  • Lead form — select the form and interaction type (opened vs. submitted)
4

Name and save

Give the audience a descriptive name and click Create. The audience begins populating immediately.

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Lookalike audiences

Lookalike audiences find new people who share characteristics with an existing audience — typically your best customers. The ad platform analyzes the source audience and finds similar users.
1

Select a source audience

Choose an existing custom audience or your Facebook Page followers as the seed.
2

Set the target location

Choose the country or region where you want to find lookalike users.
3

Set the audience size

Choose a percentage (1-10%). Lower percentages are more similar to your source; higher percentages reach more people but with less precision.
  • 1% — closest match, smallest reach
  • 3-5% — balanced
  • 10% — broadest reach, least similar
4

Create

Click Create. Lookalike audiences take 6-24 hours to populate.

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Audience controls during campaign setup

When creating a campaign in the Ad Manager, the Budget and Audience step includes:
  • Retargeting tab — select or create custom audiences to include
  • Exclusion — exclude custom audiences (e.g., existing customers)
  • Lookalike tab — select or create lookalike audiences
  • Audience overlap — the platform warns if your targeting and exclusion audiences overlap significantly

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Uploading customer lists

When uploading a CSV for a customer list audience:
  • Include columns for email and phone (both increase match rate)
  • Additional columns (first name, last name, city, state, country) improve matching
  • Remove headers that do not match standard field names
  • File format: CSV with UTF-8 encoding
  • Minimum 100 contacts for the platform to create the audience

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Retargeting strategies

Show ads to people who visited your site but did not convert. Segment by pages visited — for example, retarget pricing page visitors with a special offer.
Retarget people who interacted with your social posts or watched your videos. These users have shown interest but have not yet visited your site.
Retarget people who opened your lead form but did not submit it. This captures users who were interested but dropped off before completing the form.
Exclude existing customers from acquisition campaigns to avoid wasting spend on people who have already purchased. Create a custom audience from your customer list and add it as an exclusion.

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Frequently asked questions

Customer list audiences match within a few hours. Website visitor audiences start populating immediately but grow over time as more visitors are tracked. Lead form and engagement audiences populate within 24 hours.
A match rate of 50-70% is typical. Lower rates indicate that many email addresses or phone numbers in your list do not correspond to accounts on the ad platform. Ensure data quality is high.
Audiences are platform-specific. You need to create separate audiences for Meta and Google. However, you can use the same source data (CSV) to create audiences on both platforms.
Last modified on March 6, 2026