Skip to main content
An ad audience is a list in your ad account, filled with people from InstantCampaign. Use one to show ads to existing contacts, to exclude customers from prospecting ads, or as the seed for a lookalike. Open Advertising → Audiences. You can also get there from Manage audiences on the Google Ads or Meta Ads card on the Integrations page.
Only Owners and Admins can create, sync, check and delete audiences. You need a connected ad account first. See Connect your ad accounts.

​
What gets uploaded

  • Only email addresses are sent, and they are hashed (SHA-256) before they leave InstantCampaign. The ad platform matches the hashes against its own users.
  • Only contacts with the Active status are uploaded. Unsubscribed, bounced and complained contacts are never sent.
  • When a contact leaves the segment or stops being active, the next sync removes them from the audience.

​
Create an audience

1

Start

Click Create audience.
2

Pick the platform

Under Ad platform, choose Google Ads or Meta Ads. Platforms you haven’t connected are marked Not connected.
3

Choose the audience type

  • Linked to segment (kept in sync automatically): pick the Segment whose active contacts fill the audience.
  • Standalone (managed by journey actions): the audience starts empty. Journeys add and remove people one at a time. See Advertising in journeys.
4

Name it

Enter an Audience name. This is the name shown in your ad account.
5

Google Ads only: membership duration

Set Membership duration (days), from 1 to 540 (default 540). This is how long Google keeps someone on the list after they’re added.
6

Segment-linked only: auto-sync

Leave Auto-sync on to re-sync the audience as the segment changes. Then click Create audience.
A segment-linked audience starts its first sync straight away (“Audience created — initial sync started.”). A standalone audience waits for a journey to add contacts.

​
Keep an audience up to date

The audience table shows each audience’s Platform, Segment, Status, Synced (how many contacts were sent), Platform verdict, Match / Size and Last synced.
  • Auto-sync: when this is on, the audience is compared with its segment about every six hours. Only the differences are uploaded.
  • Sync now (the refresh icon): runs a sync immediately. It’s unavailable for standalone audiences, which journeys fill, and for lookalikes, which the platform fills.
  • Check with the platform (the magnifier icon): asks Google or Meta what it actually holds for this audience.
  • Delete mapping (the bin icon): stops syncing. The audience itself stays in your ad account and isn’t deleted.
Click an audience’s name to open its details, including What the platform reports and the Upload history.

​
”Synced” is not the same as “populated”

InstantCampaign knows what it sent. Only the platform knows what it did with it. Google in particular accepts an upload straight away but rules on it 30 minutes to 24 hours later. The Platform verdict column shows that ruling: Verdicts are fetched automatically. To fetch one now, click Check with the platform. In the details dialog, What the platform reports lists the Membership status, Account access, Match rate, Size by network and whether the list is Eligible for targeting. For Meta audiences it shows the Delivery status and approximate size.
Google shows a size, and lets you target a Customer Match list, only once at least 100 members have matched a Google account. Addresses that don’t belong to a Google account never match, so an audience of test contacts stays at 0.

​
Verify an audience in Google Ads

When Google Ads is connected, the Audiences page has a Verify in Google Ads panel. It lists every audience Google holds under the connected account, which are the same rows as Audience Manager → Your data segments in Google Ads. Each row is marked Managed here or Not managed here. If the panel says “Google does not return these audiences under this account”, those audiences were created under a different customer ID or deleted in Google Ads. Check the account selected on the Integrations page.

​
Troubleshooting