Using a Custom Audience is a great way to quickly and easily target your ads to a specific segment of the population. The data segments in the Turn It Blue Ads platform are hand-curated from thousands of data points and from dozens of sources to make sure your audiences are as robust as needed.
*Please note: the custom targeting options have changed in 2024—please use this guide to build your custom audiences using the updated Turn It Blue Ads platform.
To create a custom audience, you will choose "My Audiences" from the left sidebar, then click "Create Audience" in the top-right corner of the screen. If you've previously created audiences, you will see all of your audiences on this screen. *You can also create a custom audience from within the campaign builder, but it's often easier to create your audience ahead of time.
Next, choose "Build a Custom Audience" from the available options in the Audience Creator.
This will launch the Audience Creator, allowing you to construct a tailored audience. The first step is to name your audience something descriptive enough that you will be able to identify it later ("My Custom Audience" is actually a terrible audience name because it doesn't tell you anything about the audience you created). Something like "Candidate Primary Persuasion Audience" or "Candidate Primary GOTV Audience" is usually sufficient, though multiple campaigns will require more clearly labeled audiences.
Step 1: Create your core audience. You can choose as many demographic or political segments as you'd like to add people into your audience. These are additive segments, meaning that each segment you add will put that group into your audience. For example, if you choose "Age: 18-24" and you choose "Gender: Male" your audience will include all genders aged 18-24 AND males of all ages. You will have the opportunity to narrow your audience in the next step.
Demographic segments describe people's age, gender, income, employment, education level, and other details about individuals. Each of these are additive segments, so every box you check will add all of those individuals into your audience.
You can also add individuals using political data—information like registration status, voting history, partisan affiliation, or opinions on key political issues are all in the political segments.
You can then choose to add even more people based on these data points, just as you did in the demographic segments section. Remember, these are additive segments—so everyone who meets the definition you choose will be added into your audience, then you can narrow your audience in the next step.
Here you can see an example of a group of people targeted for inclusion into an audience. The audience created below will include all women, all teachers/educators, all healthcare workers, all adults with children present in the household, all parents, all new parents, all individuals who support vaccine science, all individuals who support racial justice and equality, and all individuals who support reducing income inequality. An individual may meet more than one of these criteria, but any individual who meets at least one of these criteria will be added to the audience.
When you have chosen who you would like in your audience, select "Add Selection" in the bottom right corner to add those individuals to the "Selected Audience Targeting" window on the right.
You can see exactly who is targeted in your audience by seeing who shows up in the "Selected Audience Targeting" window, and you can use this window to remove any segments, too:
Step 2: Narrow your audience. Once you have created your core audience, you can choose up to five additional segments to narrow your audience to meet your specific needs. Once segments are added to narrow your audience, only those individuals who meet one criteria in step 1 AND meet all the criteria in step 2 will remain in your audience.
In the sample audience below, we have chosen to narrow our audience to only those individuals between the age of 18-44 who are registered voters. When you have selected up to five narrowing segments, just click "Add Selection" in the bottom right corner of the screen.
After you click "Add Selection," you'll see your narrowed targets will show in the "Selected Audience Targeting" window. The audience in this example will now include registered voters age 18-44 who is either a women, teacher/educator, healthcare worker, adult with children present in the household, parent, new parent, individual who supports vaccine science, individual who supports racial justice and equality, or an individual who supports reducing income inequality.
Lastly, if you would like to exclude a particular group from your audience, such as a voter file & CRM audience or a retargeting audience, you can do that in Step 3. Just choose your audience and click "Add Selection." If you have not used any CRM/voter file audiences or retargeting audiences, you can skip this step.
If you want to exclude particular demographic or political segments from your audience, you should attempt to remove those through narrowing your audience.
When you have your audience exactly how you like it, you can click "Save Audience" in the bottom right corner of your screen.
You will receive a notification that your audience has been saved successfully. Just click "OK" to go back to the "My Audiences" page.
Now, you will see your newly created audience showing as "Active" in your "My Audiences" dashboard. This audience is ready to use to run ads!