Custom Audience
A custom audience is a targeting group built from your own data, such as a customer email list, website visitors, or people who engaged with your content.
What it actually means
Custom audiences let you target people who already have a relationship with your business. Sources include uploaded customer lists (matched to Meta accounts by email or phone), website visitors captured by the pixel, app users, and engagement audiences of people who watched your videos or interacted with your page. They power both retargeting (re-reaching warm prospects) and exclusion (preventing wasted spend on existing customers). Custom audiences also serve as the seed for lookalike audiences. Because they rely on your first-party data, they are increasingly valuable as third-party tracking erodes — your customer list is an asset no privacy change can take from you.
A local business can upload its past-customer list to win repeat business, or exclude current clients so ad budget only chases new ones.
Related terms
An audience is the defined group of people your ads are eligible to reach, built from location, demographics, interests, behaviors, or your own data.
A lookalike audience is a group Meta builds to resemble an existing source audience, finding new people who share traits with your best customers.
Retargeting is showing ads to people who have already interacted with your business — visited your site, watched a video, or engaged with your page.
The Meta Pixel is a snippet of code on your website that tracks visitor actions and sends them back to Meta for measurement and ad optimization.
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