Snap Audiences

Snapchat's system of audience types: custom audiences from your own data, lookalikes built from those, and predefined segments Snap supplies.

You build custom audiences from customer lists, pixel activity, engagement, or app events, and those become the foundation for everything else. From a custom audience you generate lookalikes to find similar users, and separately you can layer Snap's predefined audiences, its ready-made interest and lifestyle segments, on top. You run all of this in Ads Manager at the ad set level.

You upload a list of past purchasers as a custom audience, exclude them from a prospecting campaign so you are not paying to reach people who already bought, and use that same list as the seed for a lookalike aimed at new users. One data source, three jobs: target, exclude, and expand.

Custom audiences are only as fresh as the data you feed them. Upload a stale list once and forget it, and it decays as people churn and identifiers age out. The advertisers who get real lift refresh their source lists and let the pixel keep audiences current instead of treating them as set-and-forget.

Your first-party data is the asset. The audience types are just how you point it.