Audiences: who sees your ads

An audience is the group of people a platform tries to show your ads to. Search ads mostly find people through what they type (see Keywords). Social and display ads find people through who they are and what they do.

The three kinds of audience

1. People you describe

You tell the platform who you want to reach: where they live, their age, the language they speak, and their interests or behaviour. For example, "people aged 25 to 45 in Surrey who are interested in home improvement". Every platform offers this.

2. People who already know you

• Website visitors: people who have been on your site, so you can remind them to come back. This is often called remarketing or retargeting. It needs a tracking tag on your website. See Tracking 101.
• Customer lists: a list of your customers' email addresses or phone numbers. The platform matches them to its users without sharing who they are. You must have permission to use your customers' details this way.
• People who engaged: people who have watched your videos, followed your page or interacted with your posts.

3. People like them

The platform looks at one of your existing audiences and finds new people who behave in similar ways. These usually perform well, because they start from people who already like you.

What each platform calls them

• Google Ads: "audience segments". "Your data" covers website visitors and Customer Match. Google also offers custom segments, interests (affinity), in-market and life events. Lookalike segments are only available in Demand Gen campaigns.
• Meta: Custom Audiences (website, customer lists, engagement and more) and Lookalike Audiences, plus detailed targeting by demographics, interests and behaviour.
• TikTok: custom audiences and lookalike audiences, plus demographics, interests, behaviours and device.
• Microsoft Advertising: remarketing, Customer Match, in-market audiences, similar audiences, and targeting by LinkedIn profile details such as company and job function.

Platforms now treat audiences as a starting point

Most platforms now use their own AI to find buyers, and treat your audience as a hint rather than a hard rule. On Meta, Advantage+ audience is the default: locations, minimum age, languages and excluded custom audiences are strict limits, but other choices are treated as suggestions, and Meta may show your ads beyond them if it expects better results. Google's Performance Max uses audiences as "signals" in the same way.

So a broad, sensible audience plus good tracking often works better than a very narrow one.

How Snifferdog sets your audience

Snifferdog builds the targeting for each platform from the target audience, locations and age range in your brief. You can review and change locations in the campaign editor before launch.

Uploading your own customer lists and website visitor audiences is coming soon.

Tips

• Describe your customers in your brief. Who buys from you, where they are, and why. The more specific you are, the better the targeting.
• Don't go too narrow. Small audiences cost more to reach and leave the platform little room to learn.
• Install your tracking tags. They give the platforms the data they need to find more people like your customers.

Read more: Google's guide, About audience segments.