What is Custom audience in advertising?

Custom audience: what it means in advertising

Definition

A custom audience is an audience built from your own data rather than from platform interest categories: a customer email list, site visitors captured by the pixel, app users, or people who engaged with your content on the platform. It is the source material for both retargeting and lookalike audiences, so its quality sets the quality of everything built on top of it.

What to know

Uploaded lists are matched on hashed identifiers and the match rate is never 100%. A 40,000-row file can produce a much smaller usable audience, which matters when you are sizing a campaign around it.

Segment before you upload. All purchasers is a weak seed. Purchasers in the last 90 days above your average order value is a strong one, and it produces a noticeably better lookalike.

Related terms

Lookalike audienceA lookalike audience is an audience the platform builds by finding users who resemble a source list you provid...RetargetingRetargeting is advertising to people who have already interacted with your business, such as site visitors, vi...Audience exclusionAudience exclusion stops your ads showing to a defined group, such as existing customers, recent purchasers, c...PixelA pixel is a snippet of JavaScript on your site that reports visitor actions back to an ad platform: page view...

Track this across every platform at once

Muze reads Custom audience and everything around it straight from your Meta, Google, Amazon and Shopify accounts, inside ChatGPT or Claude. Free to start.

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