Custom Audiences

Interest targeting guesses at who might like you. A custom audience does not guess: it is built from your own contacts, matched against the ad network's users, so the ad goes to people who have already bought from you, signed up, or come to a show. That is usually the cheapest audience you will ever advertise to.

Audiences live on the ad account, so each one belongs to the account you built it on.

Where to find it

Go to Ads then Ad Accounts, and click Audiences in the top right. You can also reach it from the Audience step of the campaign builder, where a Build one link appears if the account has no audiences yet.

The page opens on Custom Audiences. If you have no active ad account, it tells you to connect one first. See connecting an ad account.

Creating an audience

1. Pick the Ad account the audience should live on.
2. Under Create an audience, give it a Name. Something you will recognise in the campaign builder, like "All fans" or "Bought merch".
3. Add a Description if you want. It is optional and only for you.
4. Click Create audience.

The audience appears in the table below, empty. Nothing has been sent to it yet.

Syncing your contacts in

An empty audience targets nobody. Filling it is one click.

1. Find the audience in the table.
2. Click Sync contacts.
3. A message confirms how many contacts went up.

What gets sent:

• Every contact in your TribeNest account that has an email address or a phone number.
• Contacts with neither are skipped, since there is nothing for the network to match on.
• Email addresses and phone numbers are scrambled before they leave, so the network matches them without ever receiving a readable list of your fans.

Reading the table

• Name is what you called it.
• Size is the network's approximate count of how many people it managed to match. It shows a dash until the network has finished working that out, which takes a while after the first sync, and it is always smaller than the number of contacts you sent. Not everyone on your list uses that network under the same email or number.

Using an audience in a campaign

1. Create a campaign, or edit a draft. See creating a campaign.
2. On the Audience step, look for Custom audience. Every audience on that campaign's ad account appears as a chip with its approximate size.
3. Click one to use it. Click it again to clear it.
4. Finish the campaign as normal. The Review step shows that a custom audience is selected.

Only audiences built on the same ad account as the campaign are offered, so if a chip you expected is missing, check you are on the right account.

Deleting an audience

Click the bin icon on the audience's row and confirm. This cannot be undone.

Deleting removes the audience from the ad account, so any live campaign pointed at it loses its targeting. Pause or repoint those campaigns first.

Good audiences to build

• All fans. Everyone in your contacts. The simplest one, and the one to build first.
• Buyers. Sync after a merch drop or a ticket release, so you can go back to the people who actually paid.
• List sign-ups. People who joined an email list but have never bought anything, which is a very different ad from the one you would show a repeat buyer.

Since a sync sends whichever contacts exist at that moment, one practical approach is a fresh audience per campaign, named after the campaign, synced right before you publish.

Where to go next

• Point a campaign at your new audience with creating a campaign.
• Grow the contact list feeding it from contacts.
• Publish and watch it run with managing campaigns.
• Back to the ads overview.