51-audience-research

Start by consolidating existing customer data from CRM, page insights, and orders into a core profile covering age, gender, location, income, and device. Then map 10-15 related interests into separate groups for testing and define exclusions for existing customers and submitted leads.

Cold audiences have never interacted with the brand and are reached via interests, behaviors, broad targeting, or lookalikes. Warm audiences engaged with content such as watching over 50% of a video, while hot audiences visited the landing page, added to cart, or messaged without converting.

Cold audiences should stay between 100K and 500K people. Audiences that are too small drive CPM up and saturate quickly, while overly broad audiences without strong creative dilute delivery and waste budget.

A lookalike seed needs at least 100 past buyers, 500 quality leads, 1000 video viewers at 75%, or 300 email contacts. Higher-quality seeds like purchasers produce better lookalikes than viewer-based seeds, typically at 1-3% LAL.

Avoid stacking many interests into one ad set, since mixed interests make it impossible to identify which group performs. Also avoid narrow targeting before testing broad audiences, because current ad algorithms often optimize better with broad targeting plus strong creative.