You will produce an audience plan for one campaign with prospecting, retargeting and exclusions.
Ask most small advertisers who their ads are aimed at, and you get a description of the ad set they built last month: these interests, this age range, maybe a lookalike. Ask why, and the answer is usually that it seemed sensible at the time. Nothing is written down, so nothing can be checked, and when results disappoint nobody knows whether the audience was the problem.
This exercise gives you a written audience plan for one campaign. It covers the three audience decisions every campaign needs: who you are trying to reach for the first time, who you are bringing back, and who you are keeping out. It takes about twenty minutes and uses what you learned in lessons 4.1 to 4.3.
Prospecting means reaching people who have not interacted with you yet. Write down one prospecting audience for the campaign, and next to it, why it fits your budget and data.
Use the reasoning from lesson 4.2, Broad targeting and why platforms now push it. If your conversion tracking is working and the campaign optimises for a real conversion, start broad within your genuine limits, such as location and language, and let the creative do the rest. If you have little conversion data yet, a lookalike of your best customers or a modest set of interests can be a reasonable starting point, with a note to test broad later.
On Google Search, prospecting is your keyword groups rather than an audience, and module seven covers them. You can still note any location or language limits here.
Write down one retargeting audience: people who visited, engaged or nearly acted. Be specific about the source and the time window, such as website visitors to the pricing page in the last 30 days, or people who watched most of a video in the last two weeks. The windows here are examples; choose ones that match how long your customers usually take to decide.
Then write the message this audience will see. Lesson 4.3, Custom audiences, lookalikes and retargeting, made the point that these people already saw your first ad and did not act. Name the most likely reason and the ad that answers it.
If your audience is too small for retargeting to run usefully, the platform will usually warn you. In that case, note it and keep retargeting for later, once the prospecting campaign has built up visitors.
Write down who should not see each audience's ads. At minimum, exclude existing customers from prospecting, and exclude people who already converted from retargeting. Add any others that waste money in your business, such as staff, job applicants who visited your careers page, or people outside your service area.
For each audience, write its source: platform targeting, your pixel, engagement on the platform, or an uploaded list. For any uploaded list, note how the people on it agreed to that use, following lesson 3.3, Consent, privacy and the PDPA. If you cannot say, leave that list out for now.
Here is Priya's plan for a Meta leads campaign promoting a free P5 maths trial class at her centre in Tampines.
Prospecting: broad targeting limited to the eastern part of Singapore, because parents are unlikely to travel further twice a week, and to English, the language her classes are taught in. Her tracking records trial bookings reliably, so she lets the platform find bookers. Her video ad, a tutor solving a fractions problem with the words for parents of P5 children, does the targeting. Source: platform targeting.
Retargeting: people who visited her trial class page in the past 30 days without booking, plus people who watched most of the fractions video in the past 14 days. Message: a short clip of a parent saying her daughter was nervous before the first class and fine after it, with the evening timetable on screen, because she believes nerves and timing are what stop most parents. Sources: her pixel and video engagement on Meta.
Exclusions: parents of current students, uploaded as a list of families who agreed on her enrolment form to receive updates and advertising, and anyone who completed the booking form in the past 90 days, from her pixel. Both are excluded from prospecting and retargeting.
Consent check: the uploaded list comes from her enrolment form, which since last year includes a line about advertising use. Families who enrolled before that change are not on the list.
When you finish, the plan is one page with three short sections, prospecting, retargeting and exclusions, each with a reason and a source. Someone building the campaign in module six could set it up from your page without asking a question. If any audience has no reason next to it, cut it.
Pick the campaign from your account plan in lesson 2.4 and work through the four steps. The activity below asks you to write the full plan.
Write a one-page audience plan with prospecting, retargeting and exclusions, plus a note on where each audience comes from.
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