While the goal of defining your Engaged Audience is to be as broad as possible, your Existing Customers need to be precise. You will use custom audiences in every way possible to reflect your paying customers.
If you set up purchase events properly, the first method is to create a website custom audience based on all purchase events during the widest window possible. Note that Meta recently extended the widest retention for custom audiences using purchase events to 730 days (or two years).
The next most likely audience you can use would be your segmented email list. That’s where things get more complicated.
How this is done will be different from CRM to CRM. You could export customers based on a product purchased or a tag applied. Ideally, you’ll sync new purchases to the custom audience using a third-party tool to keep it updated.
Your goal will be to use whatever custom audiences are relevant to your business that reflect your paying customers. Ideally, you’ll include all customers, regardless of when they purchased. Though this may not be reasonable or necessary beyond a few years of data.
Once again, it’s important to remember the “why” behind this. When you break down your results, it’s helpful to know whether impressions and results are coming from people who have bought from you before. For this to be complete, you’ll need your Existing Customers to be defined accurately and thoroughly.
Example
I’ve gone through many iterations of defining my Existing Customers. Originally, I included separate custom audiences for every product that I was selling. But that was overkill, and you shouldn’t need to do it either.
I use only two custom audiences to define my Existing Customers: a website custom audience and an email custom audience of all purchases.
For those struggling with the email list custom audience, I can relate. I use Keap/Infusionsoft as my CRM, and I add a tag for all purchases to indicate that a purchase was made. Whenever someone gets this tag, they’re added to the custom audience. I use Make to keep it synced and current.
How Meta Handles Overlap
When I first defined my Engaged Audience and Existing Customers, I faced a confusing dilemma. Do I need to define my Engaged Audience in a way that removes all customers? How would I do that? And if I’m unable to eliminate that overlap, would that create duplicate data in my results?
Luckily, Meta engineers read my content. When I created a video that asked this question, I received clarification about how Meta handles overlap:
If there is an overlap, such that a user will fit into both the ‘Engaged’ and ‘Existing’ category, we will prioritize the association that is lowest in the funnel (i.e., ‘Existing’).
This was a relief, and it makes good, logical sense. It would be virtually impossible to remove all customers from the Engaged Audience segment, so requiring it would create endless problems.
Next, you’ll learn what you can do once these Audience Segments are defined.
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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.
