Audience Targeting

Audience targeting shows your ad to specific groups you define: uploaded customer lists, past site visitors, engagers, and actalike audiences.

You build these three main ways. Upload a customer list of hashed emails or mobile ad IDs, which needs no tag. Build a visitor audience from people who hit your site, which needs the Pinterest Tag and a claimed domain. Or build an actalike from any of those to find new people who behave like your source. You target them directly or exclude them, which is how you keep existing buyers out of prospecting.

A subscription brand uploads its buyer list, excludes it from a prospecting campaign, and builds an actalike off it so budget goes to new people instead of re-serving customers who already pay.

Exclusions matter as much as inclusions. Advertisers upload the customer list and target it, then congratulate themselves on a low cost per acquisition that is just repeat buyers they would have kept anyway. The list is often more useful as an exclusion and a seed than as an audience you pay to reach again.

Your own list is a floor, not a strategy.