Custom Audiences are people who have already had some interaction with you - they visited your website, watched your videos, followed you on Instagram, or bought from you before. Targeting them on Meta is fundamentally different from targeting strangers, and usually far more efficient.
For most art stores, Custom Audiences are the foundation of the entire ad strategy. Cold prospecting brings new people in. Custom Audiences are what you show ads to once they've shown some level of interest.
This guide walks through the four Custom Audiences every artist store should have, how to create them, and how to use them.
Why Custom Audiences matter
When you target a cold interest-based audience on Meta - "people aged 25-55 who are interested in art and interior design" - you're paying to reach people who might be a good fit. Some will be. Most won't.
When you target a Custom Audience, you're paying to reach people who have already raised their hand in some way. They visited your store. They watched your process video. They followed your Instagram. They bought from you six months ago.
The conversion rates are higher, the CPAs are lower, and the creative doesn't need to do as much heavy lifting because some trust already exists.
Custom Audiences are also the seed from which Lookalike Audiences grow - which is where the real scaling potential lies. But that's a separate article. Start here first.
The 4 Custom Audiences every art store should build
1. Website visitors
This audience is built from your Meta Pixel - the tracking code that fires when someone visits your site. If you don't have a Pixel installed and firing on your store, this is the first thing to fix. Everything else depends on it.
How to create it:
In Meta Business Manager, go to Audiences, click "Create Audience," and select "Custom Audience." Choose "Website" as the source. Select "All website visitors" and choose a time window: 30, 60, or 90 days.
What time window to use:
- 30 days: most recent and most engaged - these people visited recently and are more likely to still remember you
- 60 days: broader pool, slightly colder
- 90 days: widest pool for retargeting; useful when your 30-day audience is too small to target efficiently
For most art stores starting out, create all three windows. Use 30-day for retargeting campaigns, 90-day as a fallback if 30-day is under 1,000 people.
Audience size to aim for: 5,000+ people for targeting to work efficiently. Under 1,000 and Meta doesn't have enough data to optimise delivery well.
2. Website purchasers
This audience is built from the same Pixel, but specifically fires when someone reaches your order confirmation page - meaning they've purchased.
Why you need it:
Two reasons. First, you want to exclude purchasers from your retargeting campaigns - showing a product ad to someone who already bought it is a waste of money and can annoy existing customers.
Second, this audience is the highest-quality source for Lookalike Audiences. Meta will find people who share characteristics with your actual buyers - which is far more valuable than finding people who share characteristics with anyone who visited your site.
How to create it:
Same process as above. Under the website custom audience options, choose "Purchase" from the event dropdown instead of "All website visitors." Use a 180-day window to capture as many purchasers as possible.
3. Instagram and Facebook engagers
These audiences are built from engagement on your social profiles - people who have followed you, liked posts, watched videos, sent DMs, or visited your profile. No Pixel required.
How to create it:
In Audiences, select "Custom Audience," then choose "Instagram account" or "Facebook page" as the source. From there, you can select by engagement type:
- "Everyone who engaged with your professional account" (broadest)
- "Anyone who visited your profile"
- "People who engaged with any post or ad"
- "People who sent you a message"
- "People who saved any post or ad"
Use a 90-day or 180-day window. The longer window gives you a larger pool, though people at the outer edge of 180 days are colder.
The video view audience: If you're running video ads, you can also create audiences based on how much of your video someone watched - "People who watched 25% of your video" or "75%." Someone who watched 75% of your process video is a warm prospect. This audience is particularly valuable and often overlooked.
4. Customer list
Upload your existing customer email list directly to Meta. Meta will match the email addresses to Facebook and Instagram accounts and create a targetable audience.
How to get the list: Export from Klaviyo, Mailchimp, or directly from Shopify. You want a CSV with at minimum an email column. More columns (first name, last name, phone, postcode) improve the match rate.
How to upload it: In Audiences, select "Custom Audience," then choose "Customer list." Follow the upload process, mapping your columns to Meta's fields.
What to do with it: Use this audience for win-back campaigns ("you bought 8 months ago - here's what's new"), for excluding from prospecting (don't spend money reaching people who already know you well), and as a source for high-quality Lookalike Audiences.
Important: Meta can only match emails to accounts. If someone used a different email to sign up for Meta than the one they used to buy from you, they won't be matched. Match rates typically sit between 40-70%. A list of 1,000 customers might produce a matchable audience of 400-700 people - which is often too small to target directly, but still useful as a Lookalike source.
How to use these audiences in your campaigns
The structure most Artvertise clients use:
Prospecting (cold): Interest-based targeting or Lookalike Audiences. Custom Audiences are excluded - you don't want to spend prospecting budget on people who already know you.
Warm retargeting: Website visitors (30-90 day), video viewers (25-75%), Instagram engagers. Use dynamic product ads for people who visited product pages or added to cart. Use story-led creative for people who engaged with content but haven't visited the store.
Customer retargeting: Customer list - for win-back campaigns to people who bought previously. Separate from the general retargeting audience.
The separation matters. Each audience is at a different temperature and responds to different messaging and creative. Bundling them together gives you blended data that's hard to read and optimise.
A note on audience sizes
Custom Audiences that are too small don't work well on Meta. The algorithm needs enough people in the audience to find patterns and optimise delivery. Below ~1,000 people, you'll often see "Audience too small" warnings or poor delivery.
If your audiences are small, increase the time window (go from 30 to 90 days), combine similar sources (Instagram engagers + Facebook engagers into one audience), or hold off on targeting them directly and use them for Lookalikes instead.
Audience size grows as your traffic and following grows. Early on, focus on getting the Pixel firing and building the infrastructure - even if the audiences are too small to use immediately, they'll get there.
Not sure if your Custom Audiences are set up correctly, or whether your Pixel is tracking properly? Artvertise offers a free ad account audit - we'll look at your setup and tell you exactly what to fix. [Book your free audit here.]
Want this done for you?
Get a free audit →