A few weeks ago, Meta started rolling out the Engaged Customers Audience Segment for Advantage+ Shopping CampaignsThe campaign is the foundation of your Facebook ad. This is where you’ll set an advertising objective, which defines what you want your ad to achieve. More. This gives advertisers more insight into their reporting.

I finally have it, and Meta made a worthwhile change: It’s now called “Engaged AudienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. More.”

Many advertisers questioned the original name of this audience segment because the entire point was that these people weren’t “customers” yet. The Engaged Audience label makes a whole lot more sense.

How to Create Engaged Audience

If you’re not familiar with it, you define these people by creating or selecting custom audiences in your Ad Account Settings (or Advertising Settings, depending on what you have right now). So, it’s important that you properly and thoroughly use custom audiences to accurately define who your Engaged Audience of non-customers is.

You can select from existing custom audiences or create new ones. If creating new custom audiences, you can select from Website, App Activity, Catalog, Customer List, Offline Activity, Shopping, or Augmented Reality.

Some Confusion

What still isn’t clear to me is if you need to exclude current customers when creating the custom audiences or if Meta automatically sorts that out because you’ve also defined your current customers. It would be way easier and accurate if Meta does this automatically.

For example, I could create a website custom audienceA website custom audience matches people who visit your website with people on Facebook. You can then create ads to show to that audience. More of people who visited my website during the past 180 days and exclude those who bought during that time.

And I could create a custom audience of people on my email list who have never bought (which could go back years). But, since that website custom audience only goes back 180 days, it’s bound to include people who bought before that point.

This may seem like a minor issue, but it’s all about accuracy of data. Once it’s set up, you can then use BreakdownsBreakdown is a way to get insights into your ad performance related to time, delivery, action, or dynamic creative element. More by Audience Segment to see performance by new customers, existing customers, and engaged audience.

If Meta doesn’t automatically adjust this, there’s bound to be overlap between Existing Customers and Engaged Audience.

Regardless, this is a notable addition to Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, and I’d love to see it offered for all campaign types.

Do you have this yet?