Custom Audience

Custom Audience (custom audiences) are user segments that you collect from your data, and not taken “out of thin air” from the platform. Sources: loaded CRM database (phones, email), site visitors through the pixel, people who interacted with your content (opened the form, watched the video >50%), buyers from e-com.

Custom Audience is the basis of any normal retargeting funnel. The scheme I use in projects: Lookalike 1% of the customer base → retargeting site visitors (for 30 days) → retargeting “abandoned carts” (for 7 days) → excluding current customers. Each segment is a separate campaign with its own creatives and bids.

The quality of Custom Audience directly depends on the size of the database. Meta recommends a minimum of 1,000 people to build an audience and a minimum of 10,000 for a high-quality Lookalike (similar audiences). VK employs 300 or more people, but the accuracy is lower. A small database means expensive reach and poor algorithm training.

The key problem is audience burnout. If you run the same creative on the same Custom Audience for more than 3-4 weeks, the frequency of impressions increases, but CTR and conversions drop. To achieve this, I rotate creatives every 2-3 weeks and expand the audience through Lookalike by 2-3%.