Audience Segments are one of my favorite features, but they feel like my little secret. That’s not a good thing because I wish more advertisers used them and understood their value.
When I write about Audience Segments, know that I’m not focusing on ways to isolate audiences for targeting. While Audience Segments require custom audiences and can uncover information related to remarketing, this is not about taking control over who sees your ads.
If anything, it’s the opposite. Audience Segments gave me the confidence in algorithmic targeting to relinquish control. And that’s a big deal, considering I prioritized controlling my targeting for more than a decade.
Before we move forward, let’s take a step back in time for a little history lesson. It’s important you understand the origins of Audience Segments to provide context for why they were necessary and what value they provide now.
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns
The original Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns provided no targeting control. Initially, the only thing an advertiser could do to control who saw their ads was to define a location.
In 2023 or so (it’s a blur now), Meta added Existing Customers, the first Audience Segment. This feature would have two primary purposes.
1. Control Delivery to Existing Customers.
One of the primary complaints advertisers had was that Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns leaned too much into existing customers. So Meta created the Existing Customer Audience Segment and an Existing Customer Budget Cap so that advertisers could cap the amount of budget spent on them.
2. View Budget and Performance Distribution.
Meta then created a breakdown option so that advertisers could view the distribution of their budget and results between new and existing customers. This helped verify that the Existing Customer Budget Cap worked or was necessary.
Meta would later introduce the Engaged Customer (which became Engaged Audience) segment. This allowed advertisers to add an additional layer to reporting. While Existing Customers were those who bought from a brand before, the Engaged Audience was expected to be anyone else who was connected to a brand.
Unlike Existing Customers, there wouldn’t be a way to cap budget spent on the Engaged Audience segment. It was only used for reporting purposes.
Expansion to All Sales Campaigns
In June of 2024, Meta would eventually roll out Audience Segments to all Sales campaigns. This is important because Meta eventually replaced Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns with Advantage+ Sales Campaigns.
If you want to take advantage of Audience Segments today, the only requirement is that you use the Sales campaign objective. It doesn’t matter what performance goal or other settings you use.
This is why I prioritize the Sales objective whenever possible. It’s the only way to get access to Audience Segments (which is a requirement I’ve long hoped would be expanded). If there’s something you can do with either the Sales or Leads objective, for example, I’ll use Sales.
While Audience Segments were initially for both reporting and audience control (via Existing Customer Cap) when used with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, there’s no indication that Audience Segments impact delivery now — or that they did after Meta eliminated the Existing Customer Budget Cap from ASC. But that doesn’t make this feature any less valuable.
What You’ll Learn
You now have a general understanding of the history of Audience Segments. As you take this course, there are four core elements that I want you to learn and understand:
- Why Audience Segments matter
- How to thoroughly and accurately define your Audience Segments
- How to utilize the breakdown by Audience Segments
- What we can learn from these results
By the time we’re done, you’ll have your Audience Segments defined properly so that you can begin learning about the distribution of your ads between Audience Segments. And when you do, it will likely transform your outlook on targeting control and remarketing.
I hope you enjoy this course!
Free Mini-Course
So Meta Reaches the Right People. But How?
Audience Segments showed you that Meta already prioritizes your remarketing audiences automatically. But there’s a reason that’s possible now — and it’s called Andromeda. It’s Meta’s retrieval engine, and it’s why your creative is the new targeting. In my free Andromeda mini-course, I cover what it actually is (most advertisers get this wrong), what it isn’t, and how to use creative diversification to reach the right people without touching a single audience setting.
