There are three types of Intended audiences available to be used which are described in brief as follows:
1. Target Interests: This one refers to new customers with specific interests, language, gender or Age range. Dropdown with interests of specific niche or industry can be selected for specific targeting of people who align with the one selected. Multiple Interests can be selected from the dropdown.
2. Lookalike audiences: This type of target audience refers to a new group of people who align in choices with your current customer base. A lookalike audience uses an existing custom audience you select as its source audience and when you use a lookalike audience, your ad is delivered to that audience of people who are similar to your existing customers which are used as the source for this lookalike group.
Note: Lookalike audiences support is limited or unavailable for Special Ad categories.
An estimated audience size is calculated based on the lookalike source and geographic location selected by you.
When user selects lookalike audience as their choice of intended audience, there will be a dropdown present under it and the dropdown items will be the list of lookalike audiences imported from the connected ad account.
3. Retargeting: This type of target audience refers to a group of people who are familiar with your brand/product and have interacted with it earlier at some point in any of the Meta platform. We use custom audience curated especially to target these set of people with our ad campaign with hopes of a conversion.
When the user selects Retargeting as the choice of intended audience, a dropdown will be present under it and the dropdown items will be the list of retargeting audiences created using custom audiences or imported from the connected ad account.
Please note:
Up to 15 lookalike and 15 retargeting audiences can be selected from the respective dropdown.
The ready and not ready state of the audience in the dropdown refers to their eligibility to be used as an audience to draw enough traction for the ad campaign. If state is "Ready" audience can be selected and will give satisfactory results and if the status of any audience is "Not Ready" we do not allow that to be selected as designed by Facebook and the reason on why it cannot be selected will be shown as a tooltip next to it.
Combination of all three or any two intended audiences can also be used for a campaign but it is not advised as it will narrow down the audience size considerably resulting in undesired turnaround.