skills-ws/skills/paid-ads/references/audience-targeting.md

87 agent skills for AI coding assistants — marketing, growth, web3, dev, design & operations. Built for OpenClaw, Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex.

## Contents

- Audience Targeting
- Meta Ads — Audience Layering Strategy
- Google Ads Audiences
- LinkedIn Targeting

## Audience Targeting

### Meta Ads — Audience Layering Strategy

**Layer 1: Broad (Prospecting)**
- Advantage+ audience (let Meta optimize)
- Interest stacking: 3-5 related interests per ad set
- Lookalike audiences: 1% of purchasers/high-value customers

**Layer 2: Warm (Consideration)**
- Website visitors (30-90 days)
- Video viewers (50%+ watched)
- Social engagers (90 days)
- Email list uploads (non-customers)

**Layer 3: Hot (Retargeting)**
- Add-to-cart but no purchase (7-14 days)
- Pricing page visitors (14 days)
- Trial users who haven't converted
- Past purchasers for upsell (exclude from prospecting!)

**Audience size guidance:**
- Prospecting: 1M-10M+ (let the algorithm work)
- Retargeting: As large as your traffic allows
- Lookalikes: Seed audience of 1,000+ for quality; 1% for precision, 3-5% for scale

### Google Ads Audiences

| Type | Use Case |
|------|----------|
| In-Market | Users actively researching your category |
| Affinity | Broad interest targeting for awareness |
| Custom Segments | Your own keyword/URL/app-based audience (replaced custom intent and custom affinity) |
| Customer Match | Upload email lists for targeting/exclusion |
| RLSA | Layer search with site visitor data |
| Similar Audiences | Deprecated — use optimized targeting instead |

### LinkedIn Targeting

Best-performing combos (layer these):
- **Job Title + Company Size** — most precise
- **Job Function + Seniority + Industry** — broader reach
- **Skills + Seniority** — catches non-obvious titles
- **Member Groups + Seniority** — high-intent communities

**Matched Audiences (current options, as of Jun 2026):**
- **Website retargeting** — segment by URL visited (needs the Insight Tag firing)
- **Contact/email list upload** — match against LinkedIn members for targeting or *exclusion* (suppress current customers/closed-lost)
- **Company list upload** — ABM: upload your target-account list (CSV of up to ~300k companies)
- **Engagement retargeting** — people who engaged with your single-image/video ads, opened/submitted a Lead Gen Form, viewed your company page or event
- **Audience Expansion** — opt-in toggle that broadens delivery to members similar to your defined audience (the closest live replacement for the old lookalikes)
- **Predictive Audiences** — LinkedIn builds a model from a seed (matched audience, conversions, or Lead Gen Form data) to find net-new high-propensity members; verify availability for your account/region at https://www.linkedin.com/help/lms

> **Discontinued:** LinkedIn **Lookalike Audiences were retired on 29 Feb 2024.** Do not promise lookalikes — use **Audience Expansion** or **Predictive Audiences** plus strict profile + matched-audience targeting instead.

Minimum audience size: **300 members** to launch; aim for **50,000+** for sponsored content delivery. Below ~50k, delivery and learning stall.

---