Understanding your target audience is the cornerstone of any successful Meta Ads campaign. By defining who your ideal customers are, you can reach people most likely to engage, convert, and spread your brand message.
In Meta Ads Manager, you can create three audience types: new, custom, and lookalike audiences. In this guide, we’ll focus on creating a new audience, using a real-world example of a flower shop in Amsterdam, Calla and Ivy, to make it actionable.
Why a New Audience Matters
A new audience allows you to manually define who should see your ads based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. This ensures:
- Ads reach people who match your ideal customer profile
- Budget is spent efficiently
- Campaigns are highly targeted and relevant
Think of it as building a curated list of potential customers who are most likely to engage with your business.
Step 1: Start at the Ad Set Level
You create a new audience at the ad set level after selecting your campaign objective. Meta gives you the choice to create a new audience or use a saved one. For this guide, we’ll create a new audience from scratch.
Step 2: Define the Location
Location targeting is critical. Ads Manager offers four options:
- People living in or recently in this location
- People living in this location
- People recently in this location
- People traveling in this location
For Calla and Ivy, we’ll target people living in Amsterdam. You can narrow it further using a radius slider or by selecting specific neighborhoods.
Step 3: Set Age and Gender
Next, define your audience’s age and gender. Based on prior research, Calla and Ivy’s target audience is between 25 and 55 years old, and all genders are relevant. This step helps refine audience size while staying aligned with your marketing goals.
Step 4: Use Detail Targeting
The detail targeting section lets you refine your audience using:
- Demographics: Education level, occupation, relationship status
- Interests: Hobbies, shopping preferences, topics like flowers or floral design
- Behaviors: Online shopping habits, device usage, travel activity
For Calla and Ivy, we’ll include:
- Interests: Flowers, flower bouquet, floral design
- Demographics: College graduates, master’s degree, doctorate holders
- Behaviors: People who shop online
Using the narrow audience option ensures that all criteria overlap, creating a more focused target group.
Step 5: Exclude or Include Connections
Under connections, you can:
- Exclude people who already like your page to reach new customers
- Include people similar to your existing followers to expand reach
- Target users connected to your events or app
For this campaign, we’ll exclude current followers to focus on acquiring new customers.
Step 6: Monitor Audience Size
Ads Manager provides a real-time audience definition meter. This shows how many people match your criteria. For Calla and Ivy, after adding all criteria, our audience size is around 61,000 potential users on Facebook and Instagram.
A well-defined audience ensures ads are seen by people likely to be interested, avoiding wasted budget on irrelevant users.
Step 7: Enable Advantage Detailed Targeting (Optional)
Meta offers Advantage Detailed Targeting, which allows the platform to expand your audience slightly to include people who may be interested in your ads but are not captured by your manual selections.
This option works for all objectives except brand awareness campaigns and can improve reach without losing relevance.
Step 8: Save Your Audience
Once satisfied with your settings, save your audience for future campaigns. This allows you to:
- Reuse the audience
- Create lookalike audiences from it
- Edit criteria later if needed
Saved audiences simplify workflow and improve consistency across campaigns.
Bonus Tips for Creating New Audiences
- Start broad, then narrow: Begin with core demographics and interests, then refine using narrow targeting.
- Use real customer data: Prior research on buyer personas improves targeting accuracy.
- Test multiple audiences: Compare performance of slightly different audiences to find the best ROI.
- Keep audience size balanced: Too small may limit reach; too broad may dilute relevance.
Internal Links for Further Learning
- Meta Ads Placement: Complete Guide to Facebook & Instagram Ad Placements
- Meta Advertising Tools: Complete Guide to Ads Manager and Business Growth
- Meta Ads Auction Explained: How Facebook Decides Which Ads to Show
External Resources
Summary of the Content
Creating a new audience in Meta Ads Manager requires defining location, age, gender, interests, behaviors, and connections. By carefully using detail targeting and optional features like Advantage Detailed Targeting, advertisers can create highly relevant audiences. Proper audience setup increases engagement, optimizes ad spend, and lays the foundation for future custom and lookalike audiences.