How to Create a Custom Audience in Facebook

Stop wasting money showing your Facebook ads to people who will never buy from you. The secret to effective advertising isn't just a great ad creative, it's getting that creative in front of the right eyeballs at the right time. This guide will walk you through exactly how to create Facebook Custom Audiences, a powerful tool for targeting people who already know and have engaged with your brand.

What Exactly Is a Facebook Custom Audience?

A Facebook Custom Audience is a hyper-specific ad targeting option that lets you find and market to people who have already interacted with your business in some way. Instead of guessing at demographics, interests, or behaviors, you're building an audience based on concrete, real-world actions. These are your "warmest" leads - your past customers, your website visitors, your most engaged social media followers - all grouped together, ready for your next campaign.

Think about it: who is more likely to buy from you?

• Someone who matches a broad interest like "fitness"?
• Or someone who visited your running shoe product page, added a pair to their cart yesterday, but didn't complete the purchase?

The answer is obvious. Custom Audiences let you reach that second person. It's the difference between shouting into a stadium and having a direct conversation with someone who's already leaning in to listen.

Getting Started: Your Quick Guide to the Audiences Dashboard

Before you build your first audience, you need to know where to go. Meta's Ads Manager can feel like a labyrinth, but finding the Audiences section is actually quite straightforward.

Here’s how to get there:

1. Log into your Facebook Ads Manager.
2. Click the "All Tools" icon (it looks like a hamburger menu with nine dots) on the left-hand navigation panel.
3. Under the "Advertise" section, you’ll see an option labeled "Audiences." Click on that.

That's it! You've arrived at the central hub for all your audience management. From here, you’ll click the blue "Create Audience" button and select "Custom Audience" from the dropdown. This is where the magic begins.

Building Audiences from Your Sources

When you start creating a Custom Audience, Meta will present you with two main categories of data sources: "Your Sources" and "Meta Sources." "Your Sources" refers to data that you own and feed to Facebook, like your website traffic or customer contact information. These are some of the most powerful and high-intent audiences you can build.

Website Visitors: Retargeting with the Meta Pixel

One of the most common and effective custom audiences is built from your website traffic. This requires you to have the Meta Pixel installed on your site, which is a small piece of code that tracks visitor activity.

Why it's great: You can create audiences of people based on a huge variety of actions, from general browsing to specific, high-intent behaviors. It’s perfect for reminding people what they were interested in.

How to set it up:

1. Select "Website" as your source.
2. Choose your Pixel.
3. Under "Events," decide who to include. Your options are incredibly granular:
   • All website visitors: A broad audience, great for general brand awareness.
   • People who visited specific web pages: Perfect for creating audiences based on product categories or services. For example, show ads for dresses to everyone who visited your `/dresses` page.
   • Visitors by time spent: Target your most engaged readers by creating an audience of people who spent the most time on your blog.
   • From your events: This is where it gets really powerful. You can target people who completed specific Pixel events, like AddToCart, InitiateCheckout, or Purchase. The classic "abandoned cart" reminder ad is built using an audience of people who triggered AddToCart but not Purchase in the last 7–14 days.
4. Set your retention window (how many days people will stay in this audience after their last action). A 30-day window is a common starting point for retargeting, but you can go up to 180 days.
5. Give your audience a clear, descriptive name (e.g., "Website Visitors - Abandoned Cart - Last 14 Days") and click "Create Audience."

Customer List: Reach Your Existing Contacts

If you have an email list, a phone list from your CRM, or any other customer information, you can upload it directly to Facebook. Meta will hash the data and match it securely to Facebook profiles, allowing you to target your known customers and leads.

Why it's great: This is a slam dunk for re-engaging past purchasers, upselling existing clients, or activating a list of leads who haven't yet converted.

How to set it up:

1. Select "Customer List" as your source.
2. Follow the steps to prepare your file. Facebook provides a downloadable template, but the key is to have a CSV file with clear column headers like `email`, `phone`, `firstname`, `lastname`, etc. The more data points you provide, the higher your match rate will be.
3. Upload your CSV file. You’ll need to map your columns to the correct identifiers that Meta recognizes.
4. Name your audience (e.g., "Mailing List - Active Subscribers - Oct 2024") and click to upload.

Important Note: It can take a few hours for the list to finish matching. Don't worry if the audience size says "Populating" for a while. Also, make sure you have permission to market to this list of people before uploading.

App Activity &, Offline Activity

While less common for many small businesses, it's worth knowing two other "Your Sources" options exist:

• App Activity: If you have a mobile app, you can track user events (like completing a level or making an in-app purchase) and create audiences based on that activity.
• Offline Activity: For brick-and-mortar businesses, this allows you to upload data from in-store purchases (through loyalty programs or CRM records) and target those customers online.

Building Audiences from Meta Sources

Meta also lets you build audiences of people who have engaged with your content directly on Facebook or Instagram. This is perfect for businesses that don't get much website traffic but have an active social media presence. The best part? No Pixel is needed.

Video Views: Target Your Most Captivated Viewers

If you're creating video content (which you should be!), this is one of your most valuable audience sources. You can create audiences based on how much of your videos people watched.

Why it's great: Watching a significant portion of a video is a strong signal of interest. Someone who watched 75% of your 2-minute product demo is far more qualified than someone who just scrolled past your image ad.

How to set it up:

1. Select "Video" as your source.
2. Choose your engagement level. Options include:
   • People who watched at least 3 seconds
   • People who watched at least 10 seconds
   • People who watched 50%, 75%, or 95% of your video (ThruPlay)
3. For targeting, focus on the higher-percentage viewers (75% or 95%) - this is your super-engaged crowd.
4. Click "Choose videos" to select which videos you want to pull data from. You can choose specific videos from your Facebook Page or Instagram profile.
5. Set your retention period (up to 365 days!), name the audience (e.g., "Video Viewers - 95% - Product Demos"), and create it.

Instagram Account Engagement

Turn your Instagram followers and visitors into a powerful ad audience. This lets you connect with people who are already familiar with your brand on the platform where they engaged.

Why it's great: It's a fantastic way to move people from casual follower to customer. You can retarget people who have shown interest but haven't yet gone to your website.

How to set it up:

1. Select "Instagram Account" as your source.
2. Pick your Instagram profile.
3. Choose your engagement criteria. The options are amazing:
   • Everyone who engaged with your professional account: Very broad. Includes anyone who visited your profile, liked, commented, saved, etc.
   • Anyone who visited your professional account profile: Good for targeting people who were curious enough to check you out.
   • People who engaged with any post or ad: The powerhouse group. You know they've actively interacted with your content.
   • People who saved any post or ad: A super high-intent audience! Saving a post is a strong signal that they found it valuable and want to come back to it.
4. Set your retention window (up to 365 days) and name your audience.

Facebook Page Engagement

This works almost identically to the Instagram Account source but pulls data from your Facebook Page instead. You can create audiences of people who have visited your page, engaged with posts, clicked a call-to-action button, or sent you a message. The strategy is the same: find your engaged users on the platform and show them a relevant, targeted ad.

Lead Form and Shopping Engagement

A couple more worth mentioning:

• Lead Form: If you run Facebook Lead Ads, you can create audiences of people who opened your form, as well as those who opened but didn't submit it - perfect for a gentle follow-up ad.
• Shopping: For businesses using Instagram Shopping or Facebook Shops, you can target users who viewed products, added to a cart, or initiated a purchase entirely within the platform.

Smart Ways to Use Your New Custom Audiences

Creating audiences is just the first step. The real success comes from using them strategically in your campaigns.

• Exclude Your Converters: Always exclude your recent purchasers from campaigns promoting that same product. No one likes seeing ads for something they just bought. Create a "Purchasers - Last 30 Days" audience from your Pixel or customer list and add it to your ad set's "Exclude" field.
• Build a Funnel: Use audiences to move people along their journey. For example, show a brand awareness ad to an "IG Engagers" audience. Then, show a product ad to a "Website Visitors" audience. Finally, show a special offer to your "Abandoned Cart" audience.
• Create Lookalike Audiences: Once you have a high-quality Custom Audience (like one from your customer list or 95% video viewers), you can tell Facebook to create a "Lookalike Audience." This tells Meta to find millions of new people who share similar characteristics to your best existing customers, massively expanding your reach with highly relevant targeting.

Final Thoughts

Creating Facebook Custom Audiences transforms your ad campaigns from hopeful guesses into targeted conversations with your most valuable prospects and customers. By focusing on people who've already shown interest in your brand, you dramatically increase the efficiency of your ad spend and pave the way for real growth.

Of course, a killer ad audience deserves killer content to go with it. Consistently showing up with valuable videos, well-designed graphics, and engaging stories is what turns targeted viewers into loyal fans. We know firsthand how chaotic managing that content across multiple platforms can be, forcing you to juggle different apps just to stay organized. That frustration is exactly why we built Postbase - to give creators and brands a simple, visual way to plan, schedule, and analyze their social media content without the headache.