This clarifies things…
There was something about Advantage+ Shopping audience segments that’s been bothering me.
The Question
You’re supposed to use custom audiences to define your Engaged AudienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. More and Existing Customers. This is used to segment results by Existing Customers, Engaged Audience, and New Customers.
But, it was entirely unclear if you needed to exclude Existing Customers when creating the Engaged Audience.
The Answer
Luckily, I received a message from someone who says they are an engineer at Meta (you can never be sure, but they seem to check out):
I wanted to clarify something from this post about how we treat overlaps in audience. 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’).
In other words, you don’t need to exclude existing customers when creating the Engaged Audience. Go ahead and define it based on email subscribers and website visitors. If you’ve defined Existing Customers thoroughly, they’ll be pulled out when there’s overlap.
A special thanks to that helpful Meta engineer! I tried to pry for info about whether there were any plans to apply Audience Segments to other campaign types in the future but received the typical “I can’t share future plans” non-answer.
