Creating the right audience is the backbone of any successful Meta Ads campaign. While broad targeting can reach many people, precision targeting ensures your ads reach users who are already interested in your business. That’s where the Meta Custom Audience comes in.
A Meta Custom Audience allows you to retarget people who have already interacted with your business—whether they visited your website, engaged with your social media posts, made a purchase, or subscribed to a newsletter. In this guide, we’ll walk through all types of custom audiences, how to set them up, and how to use them effectively, using real-world examples from the flower shop Kellan Ivy in Amsterdam.
What is a Meta Custom Audience?
A Meta Custom Audience is a targeted group of users created from your existing customer data or engagement on Meta platforms. These audiences can be built from:
- Website traffic (via the Meta Pixel)
- Customer lists (emails, phone numbers)
- App activity (via SDK integration)
- Offline interactions (events, in-person sign-ups)
- Engagement on Facebook and Instagram (videos, posts, lead forms, events, pages, shops)
Custom audiences allow marketers to reach users who are already familiar with their brand, increasing the chances of conversion.
Why Use Meta Custom Audiences?
The benefits of using custom audiences include:
- Retargeting visitors who haven’t completed purchases
- Engaging users who subscribed to newsletters or downloaded content
- Reconnecting with customers from offline events
- Driving higher ROI with targeted messaging
- Reducing wasted ad spend on uninterested users
By combining your data with Meta’s powerful resources, you can create highly precise audiences for your campaigns.
Step 1: Creating a Website Visitor Audience
To create a custom audience of website visitors:
- Go to Ads Manager → Audiences → Create Audience → Custom Audience
- Choose Website as the source
- Select your active Meta Pixel (green circle indicates it’s working)
- Define the timeframe (e.g., past 30 days)
- Optionally, target specific pages or actions, such as blog visits, product views, or completed purchases
- Name your audience and click Create Audience
For Kellan Ivy, this means retargeting users who recently visited their site due to increased organic traffic, ensuring they stay top of mind.
Step 2: Using Customer Lists
If you have customer data, you can upload it to Meta to create a custom audience:
- Select Customer List in the custom audience setup
- Prepare your file in CSV or TXT format with identifiers like email addresses or phone numbers
- Upload the file to Ads Manager
- Meta anonymizes the data and matches it with their user database
- Name your audience and click Next
For example, Kellan Ivy collected sign-ups at a pop-up shop. By uploading this list, Meta can match these users and allow for targeted ads, even for offline interactions.
Step 3: Creating App Activity Audiences
If your business has an app:
- Use the SDK (similar to the Pixel for apps)
- Track users’ in-app purchases, sign-ups, or other key actions
- Build a custom audience based on this data
This method ensures you retain app users and guide them toward conversion or repeat engagement.
Step 4: Engagement-Based Audiences
Meta also allows you to create custom audiences using engagement on Facebook or Instagram:
- Video viewers (e.g., users who watched 50% of a tutorial)
- People who interacted with your posts or page
- Lead form submitters
- Event attendees
- Users who browsed or purchased from your Facebook or Instagram shop
For Kellan Ivy, a video engagement audience could include users who watched a flower bouquet tutorial, targeting them with ads for an upcoming six-week flower arranging course.
Step 5: Setting Timeframes and Criteria
You can adjust your audience based on:
- Recency of engagement (e.g., past 7, 15, or 30 days)
- Specific pages or actions completed
- Combination of behaviors (e.g., visited blog post and made a purchase)
- Time spent on the website
This granularity ensures your retargeting ads reach the most relevant users.
Step 6: Combining Custom Audiences with Other Targeting
Once a custom audience is created, you can still refine it using:
- Location targeting
- Demographics (age, gender, education)
- Interests and behaviors
However, since custom audiences are usually highly specific, additional narrowing is often unnecessary.
Step 7: Creating Lookalike Audiences from Custom Audiences
After setting up custom audiences, you can create lookalike audiences to reach new users similar to your best customers:
- Expands your reach while maintaining relevance
- Leverages existing engagement data
- Improves conversion potential for campaigns targeting new users
Step 8: Practical Example – Kellan Ivy
Kellan Ivy can leverage custom audiences to:
- Retarget website visitors from the past 30 days
- Engage users who signed up for newsletters at a pop-up shop
- Target video viewers who watched flower tutorial videos
- Combine these audiences with location and demographic data for precise campaigns
This strategy ensures higher ad relevance, better engagement, and improved ROI.
Bonus Tips for Custom Audience Success
- Use multiple custom audiences for different campaigns
- Regularly update customer lists to include new sign-ups or purchases
- Test various engagement criteria (e.g., 25%, 50%, 75% video view)
- Avoid overlapping audiences to prevent ad fatigue
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
External Resources
Summary of the Content
Meta Custom Audiences allow businesses to retarget users who have already engaged with their website, app, or social media. By leveraging website visitors, customer lists, app activity, and engagement data, marketers like Kellan Ivy can create highly precise audiences, improve ad relevance, and maximize ROI. These audiences can be further used to build lookalike audiences, expanding reach to new users with similar interests and behaviors.