Custom audience
Custom audience takes a list of customers you hold and turns it into a targetable audience on an advertising platform. The platform matches the hashed identifiers you send against its own users, and the matched subset becomes the audience.
The usual uses are exclusion, retention and lookalike seeding: suppress existing customers from acquisition campaigns, re-engage lapsed ones, or give the platform a high quality seed to model against.
Sources and destinations
Section titled “Sources and destinations”Select the audience Integration Type on the source.
Supported sources
| Category | Supported |
|---|---|
| API | |
| CRM | |
| Database | |
| File & storage | |
| Warehouse |
Supported destinations
| Category | Supported |
|---|---|
| Custom Audience |
How the sync behaves
Section titled “How the sync behaves”Each run sends only the records that are new since the last one, not the full list.
Syncs are additive: new members join the platform audience and existing members stay in it, whether or not they are still in the source segment.
Getting the match rate up
Section titled “Getting the match rate up”Audience match rate is decided almost entirely by identifier quality, and the failures are the same ones that hurt conversions.
- Send as many identifiers per record as you hold. Email and phone carry the most weight.
- Lowercase emails and strip whitespace before hashing.
- Put phone numbers in international format with the country code, always, even for single country data.
Hash the identifiers before you send them wherever you can. Where your source cannot, Signals normalizes and hashes them on the way through. See Apply SHA-256 hashing to PII for how to produce the hashes in Google Sheets, SQL or code.