Legacy: Manage Audiences Effectively for Facebook Ads

Last updated: September 25, 2023

🔍 Please note: this article is for customers on Standard Bundle, Enrichment, or Clearbit Platform plans.


Audience management
is a practice that Clearbit designed to ensure you can easily manage complex audience combinations, at scale. Implementing this practice may save your team hours each week spent creating, managing, and launching audiences for your campaigns.

Specifically, audience management is designed to ensure that audiences are:

  • Easy to understand. Understand exactly who is being included and excluded from an audience, so that you can quickly select and deploy the right audiences for each campaign. 
  • Easy to use (and reuse). Reduce time spent deploying audiences for new campaigns, and make replicating successful targeting strategies fast and easy. 
  • Easy to manage changes. Minimize the number of audiences you need to update if targeting criteria changes. Instead of updating 50 audiences, update one... and watch it propagate across all of your campaigns instantly.

How to Manage Audiences Effectively

Effective audience management is done in three steps: Create, Combine, Save.

  1. Create inclusion and exclusion audiences separately
  2. Combine audiences in your ad set
  3. Save common combinations for future use

Create inclusion and exclusion audiences separately

Excluding specific companies is a great way of reducing wasted spending, across all of your Facebook and Google campaigns.

For example, if you are running a Prospecting Campaign, you may want to exclude paying customers, accounts with open sales opportunities, and people who work for your competitors.

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Instead of adding this exclusion criterion to every new audience, you create in Clearbit, we recommend you create a single Exclusion Audience that can be layered on in any of your campaigns.

This will ensure that you only have to set the exclusion criteria once since you can easily reuse the Exclusion Audience in any future campaign.

It will make deploying changes to your exclusion criteria fast and easy. For example, if you want to add a new account to your list of competitors, you only have to update one audience and the changes will propagate across every campaign using that exclusion audience.

Combine audiences in your ad set

Facebook and Google both support adding multiple inclusion and exclusion audiences together in a single ad set. Take advantage of this audience layering to easily mix and match different audiences, depending on your campaign targeting strategy.

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This modular approach to audience building makes targeting across personas and buyer stages easy.

Want to include customers in your next Prospecting Campaign? No problem. Simply remove the customer audience from your exclusion criteria, and they will be available to target in your campaign.

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To add exclusion audiences in Facebook, click the Exclude link in the Custom Audiences section of your ad set and select the audiences you would like to avoid.

Save common combinations for future use

As you begin to scale your advertising efforts, you will notice that you are using the same targeting strategies over and over again.

For example, if you promote new webinars to the same personas every month you may want to target the same people over and over again (and exclude the same people too).

However, replicating the same combination of inclusion and exclusion audiences is tedious, and may require training and documentation to standardize across teams.

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Instead, use Saved Audiences (Facebook) or Combine Audiences (Google) to save and reuse standard targeting sets.

As an added benefit, Saved Audiences will also save the additional filter criteria that you have decided to add or remove in Facebook.

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