Audiences
Build an audience once. Use it everywhere you advertise.
Group the people who matter, from pricing-page visitors to past customers, using your first-party data and search intent. Sync each audience to the networks you run and keep it current without exporting a single file.
Ask Brigham.aiWhich audience should bike.co retarget first, and who should we exclude so we stop paying to reach existing customers?- 1
- Definition, many networks
- Auto
- Membership refresh
- Consent
- Respected at collection
- $20
- One plan, all tools
Why it exists
The best audience is usually the one you already have.
- Sources
- Pixel, lists, GA4, intent
- Destinations
- Google Ads, Meta and other major networks
- Refresh
- Automatic
- Privacy
- Consent-aware
People who read your pricing page, started a checkout or bought last year are far more likely to act than a stranger. Yet many advertisers spend most of their budget on cold prospecting and treat retargeting as an afterthought.
Part of the reason is effort. Each network has its own audience builder, its own rules and its own upload format. Keeping a customer list current in three places means three manual exports every month, so lists go stale and existing customers keep seeing “first order” discounts.
Audiences in search.co, powered by the built-in ROI.me ad engine, fix the plumbing. You define a segment once, using signals from the search.co pixel, your CRM lists and the search intent behind a visit. It syncs to Google Ads, Meta and other major networks, and membership updates on its own.
Intent segments
Group people by what they were looking for.
Search.co already knows which keywords bring people to which pages. That lets you build segments around intent, not just URLs: everyone who arrived on a comparison topic, everyone who read about repairs, everyone who landed from a pricing query.
Each cluster becomes a ready-made audience with its size shown, so you can see which ones are large enough to advertise to.
Buying
Comparing
Servicing
Learning
What you can build
Segments from the signals you already collect.
Site behavior
Pages viewed, events fired, time since last visit, and how far someone got in a form or checkout.
Search intent
Group visitors by the topic or keyword cluster that brought them to your site.
Customer lists
Upload a list or connect one, then use it to target, exclude or seed lookalikes on networks that support them.
Exclusions
Keep recent buyers, employees and existing customers out of acquisition campaigns.
Automatic refresh
Membership updates as people qualify or age out, so every network gets the current list.
Consent-aware
Only visitors whose consent settings allow it are added to advertising audiences.
Sync status
Every audience, every network, one table.
See where each audience lives, how large it is, and when it last synced. If a network rejects an audience or match rates drop, you see it here first.
| Audience | Members | Google Ads | Meta | Last sync |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cart abandoners · 14 days | 1,240 | Synced | Synced | 2 hrs ago |
| Pricing visitors · 30 days | 3,860 | Synced | Synced | 2 hrs ago |
| Past customers · exclude | 5,410 | Synced | Synced | Today |
| Servicing intent | 2,600 | Synced | Too small | Today |
| Lookalike seed · top buyers | 820 | Not used | Synced | Yesterday |
01
Size checks
Networks set minimum audience sizes. Audiences below the threshold are flagged instead of failing silently.
02
Same definition
An audience means the same people on every network, so results are comparable.
03
Health alerts
Get an email or Slack alert if a sync fails or an audience shrinks sharply.
How it works
From signal to synced audience in four steps.
- 01
Install the pixel
Add the search.co first-party pixel or connect GA4 so site behavior is available for segments.
- 02
Define the audience
Combine rules: pages, events, intent clusters, list membership and a time window such as the last 30 days.
- 03
Choose destinations
Pick the connected networks that should receive it. Use it to target, exclude or seed lookalikes.
- 04
Let it run
Membership refreshes automatically. You review size and performance, not spreadsheets.
Retargeting by stage
Speak to people where they stopped.
Someone who read one blog post and someone who abandoned a cart need different messages. Stage-based audiences let you match the ad to how close a person came to buying.
Each stage becomes its own audience, with its own creative and budget. Pair them with the creative studio to write a message per stage, and with the budget optimizer to see which stage returns the most.
Shorter windows near the bottom
Cart abandoners for 7 to 14 days, readers for longer.
Exclude the next stage
Remove people from early-stage audiences once they move forward.
Where your audience budget goes
See which audiences actually return.
Once audiences are live, the question becomes which ones deserve more money. Search.co reports conversions by audience across networks, using the conversion source you choose.
The chart shows how attributed revenue splits across audience types. If cold prospecting takes most of the budget but warm audiences bring most of the revenue, you will see it in one glance.
Ask Brigham
Ask who to reach, and who to leave alone.
Brigham reads your audiences, pixel data and campaign results, then suggests segments to build or fix.
About one in six people reached by your prospecting campaigns bought from you in the last year, because no customer exclusion is applied on Meta. You also have 1,240 recent cart abandoners with no retargeting campaign, and a large group of visitors who read service pages but were never shown a service offer.
Recommended fixes
Sorted by impact
- 1
Exclude past customers from prospecting
5 minYour customer list audience is already synced. Apply it as an exclusion on both prospecting campaigns.
- 2
Launch a 14-day cart abandoner audience
20 minThe audience is defined and large enough for both networks. Pair it with a reminder ad.
- 3
Build a servicing-intent audience
15 minVisitors who read repair and tune-up pages are a natural fit for a service booking offer.
- 4
Seed a lookalike from top buyers
10 minUse repeat customers as the seed on networks that support it, rather than all visitors.
What the numbers mean
Audience terms, defined.
- Members
- People currently in the audience by your rules and time window, counted before each network’s matching.
- Match rate
- The share of an uploaded list a network could match to its own users. It varies by network.
- Window
- How long a person stays in an audience after the qualifying action, such as 14 or 30 days.
- Exclusion
- An audience applied to stop ads from reaching its members, such as recent customers.
- Lookalike seed
- An audience given to a network that supports similar-audience targeting, so it can find people who resemble it.
Which networks can I sync audiences to?
Google Ads, Meta and other major networks you connect. Each audience shows its sync status per network, along with any size or match-rate warnings.
Do I need the search.co pixel?
Not for list-based audiences. For behavior and intent audiences you need site data, either from the search.co first-party pixel or a GA4 connection.
How do you handle consent?
Audiences only include visitors whose consent settings allow advertising use. If someone declines or withdraws consent, they are not added, and they drop out of audiences on the next refresh.
How often do audiences update?
Membership refreshes automatically, so people join when they qualify and leave when their window ends. You can see the last sync time for every network in the sync table.
Is this included in the plan?
Yes. The $20 plan includes every tool, ads included, with 1,500 credits a month and a 7-day free trial.
Stop paying to reach your own customers.
Connect your ad accounts and the pixel, and build your first synced audience in minutes. Free for 7 days.
Look at my site traffic and ad accounts and suggest three audiences to build and one exclusion I am missing.