TikTok Advertising 
Are you struggling to find the right audience for your TikTok ads? Have you tried using TikTok Custom Audiences? This ad targeting option allows you to connect with people who have already engaged with your brand, making them more likely to convert.
In this blog, we’ll dive into the different types of TikTok Custom Audiences and show you how to create them in just four simple steps. Plus, we’ll share some tips on how to make the most out of this powerful targeting tool. So, whether you’re a TikTok pro or just getting started, keep reading to learn how to reach the right audience with TikTok Custom Audiences.
What is Custom Audiences on TikTok?
Custom Audience is known as an ad targeting option that helps you identify people who are familiar with or have interacted with your brand. This kind of targeting is a great tool for remarketing, contacting potential repeat buyers, gaining more followers, and also boosting your engagement.
How TikTok Custom Audiences works and its benefits
TikTok keeps track of how people interact with your content directly inside the app. It creates lists of users who watch your videos, click your links, or submit forms on your profile.
TikTok Custom Audiences allow you to use someone’s information to re-engage them with an ad after they have liked or commented on one of your earlier TikTok ads.
This tactic can help you connect with high-intent buyers, raise brand awareness (and your TikTok following), transfer app engagement to other platforms, and develop TikTok Lookalike Audiences.
Remember, to target custom audiences in an ad group, the minimum audience size is 1,000. Before executing your retargeting strategies, you need to upload an email list with 1,000 names and email addresses or gain more information from 1,000 visitors to your site.
When to use Custom Audiences? 5 common uses cases
Once your Custom Audiences are populated, you can leverage them to achieve specific goals across different stages of your marketing funnel:
- Abandonment Retargeting: Reach website or app visitors who added products to their cart or viewed specific pages in the past 7 to 30 days but didn’t complete a purchase.
- Customer Upselling & Cross-Selling: Upload a list of existing buyers to present them with complementary products, seasonal updates, or exclusive discounts.
- Lead Nurturing: Re-engage users who opened or submitted a TikTok Lead Generation form with tailored follow-up ads to guide them further down your sales funnel.
- Exclusion Targeting (Saving Ad Spend): Exclude existing customers or recent converters from broad-targeting campaigns so you aren’t wasting budget on people who have already bought from you.
- Building Lookalike Audiences: Use your highest-value Custom Audiences (e.g., your top 10% spenders) as a seed list to let TikTok’s algorithm find millions of new users with similar characteristics.
How to create TikTok Custom Audiences in 3 simple steps
After you’ve enabled retargeting on your app in TikTok Ads Manager, you’ll need to build a Custom Audience to identify TikTok users who have acted on your app. Even if you use any source between the six sources mentioned, to accomplish this, let’s follow our 4 steps.
Step 1: Open TikTok Ads Manager.
Step 2: Go to the Audiences section from Assets.
Step 3: Choose the source you want to make your TikTok Custom Audiences.
7 types of ad group to create Custom Audiences (and what to use)
TikTok allows advertisers to create different types of custom audiences at ad groups level including
- Customer file
- App Activity
- Lead Generation
- Engagement
- Website Traffic
- Business Account
- Shop Activity
Customer file
You can use TikTok Ads Manager to create a Custom Audience by uploading your own Customer File.
These might be clients who have already purchased from you, subscribers to your email list, or those who have registered for a webinar, a new product launch, etc. These people have already interacted with your brand, so trust has already been gained.
To make sure that you will be successful to create a customer file, here are some important notes:
- A minimum matched audience size of 1,000 is necessary to target Custom Audiences in an ad group.
- You are allowed to have up to 400 custom audiences at one time within the account.
Website traffic
People who have been to your website or have engaged in a certain action there should be gathered into a customized audience. Once more, this is a fantastic approach to connecting with people who are familiar with you and have previously interacted with your business.
You can target users on TikTok who:
- Clicked a particular CTA or button on your website
- Bought something
- Completed and delivered a form
- Started a free trial
- Spoke with your support staff
- Visited a specific blog post or piece of material
Engagement
How about creating segments based on your TikTok engagement rate?
On any of the TikTok family of apps, build an audience of users who have expressed interest in your content. Clicks, impressions, and lists of people who have previously interacted with your content, brand, or items are examples of this.
To maintain the momentum and remain relevant, for instance, you might retarget the viewers of a video that has received a lot of likes.
App activity
Apart from website traffic and engagement, you can also create custom segments based on certain events that happen within your company’s app.
Make a customized audience out of users that have used your app and performed particular behaviors. Because they have downloaded and used your software, these leads are really interested (and maybe even bought something through it).
Here are some example app activities that are supported by TikTok:
- Purchase: When someone buys a product
- Register: When someone registers with your brand or creates an account
- Checkout: When someone makes it to checkout
- Add to Cart: When someone adds an item to their cart (even if they don’t check out)
- View Content: When someone views a product or service page, blog post, or other content in your app
Lead generation
Users who interacted with your lead ads (view or submit a form) can be used to create an audience. For example, to increase the efficiency of your campaign, you can retarget viewers who only saw your Lead Ads’ form page.
However, please do note that
- Up to 400 customized audiences can be active for one advertiser at once.
- Lead Generation only permits placement on TikTok.
Business account audience
The new custom audience type known as “Business Account Audience”. You are only allowed to use your TikTok Business Account to retarget audiences when your organic profile has finished one of the following activities:
- Follow, visit the profile, and watch the video (2, 6, or 100% of the time).
- Like, share and leave a TikTok comment.
Shop Activity
Basically, TikTok’s Shop Activity Custom Audience feature helps businesses to connect with their interested and existing customers, and also expand their customer base.
With this feature, you can create a custom audience based on user actions such as Product Detail Page View, Add to Cart, Initiate Checkout, and Purchase. This audience includes both paid and organic activity.
It’s recommended to start with broader audiences and monitor performance before narrowing down. Also, leaving the “Auto-Refresh” option on ensures that your audience stays updated and relevant.
7 best practices to get the most out of TikTok Custom Audiences
Implement server-side signal tracking
Relying solely on a traditional browser pixel can cause you to miss user actions due to ad blockers and modern browser privacy settings. Connecting TikTok’s Events API directly from your server alongside your website pixel ensures a continuous flow of high-quality data. This setup keeps your custom audiences populated with real-time website purchases and sign-ups without losing tracking signals.
You can also use NestAds – a dedicated TikTok ads analysis tool to identify winning ad creative, track customer LTV with cohort analysis and develop better retargeting ads.
Prioritize phone numbers over email addresses
While email lists are helpful, phone numbers consistently generate significantly higher match rates on TikTok because most users register their accounts through mobile devices.
When preparing customer spreadsheets, format all phone numbers using international standards (including the country code) and clean out typos or duplicates to give TikTok the best chance to identify active profiles.
Layer engagement signals to avoid tiny audience sizes
Very narrow custom audiences often fail to deliver ads because they struggle to maintain the required minimum size or cause your ads to suffer from quick audience fatigue. Rather than retargeting only website cart abandoners, combine multiple upper-funnel signals into one audience segment—such as users who watched 75% of your video ads, clicked your ad links, or opened your lead generation forms.
Keep retargeting recency windows short
Re-engaging a website visitor from four months ago is rarely as profitable as reaching someone who browsed your store yesterday. Adjust your audience retargeting windows to shorter timeframes, such as 7 to 14 days for cart abandoners and up to 30 days for video engagers. This concentrates your ad budget on users whose interest and buyer intent are still fresh.
Build lookalikes from high-value seed lists
Creating lookalike audiences based on generic website visitors can introduce low-intent users into your campaign funnel. Instead, build your seed custom audiences using value-based data, such as your top 10% highest-spending buyers or multi-time repeat customers. This gives TikTok’s algorithm a far stronger template to find high-converting new users.
Always exclude active customers from prospecting ads
A common way to waste ad spend is paying to show general awareness ads to people who already purchase from you. Add your custom audience of recent buyers into the exclusion setting for your prospecting campaigns. This ensures your acquisition budget is spent strictly on reaching brand-new prospective customers.
Choose your proper file type
If the campaign’s objective is about apps, in order to properly select the operating system when creating the campaign and prevent unnecessary data loss, we advise using a custom audience that only includes IDFA or GAID file types.
Your IDFA and GAID data ought to come from the same region that your advertisement is targeting (for example, if you want to advertise in Japan, both types of data should come from Japan).
FAQs about TikTok Custom Audience
Yes, Custom Audiences can actually auto-update! Basically, TikTok Ads Manager lets you enable auto-refresh when you create your audience, and then it will refresh the audience daily based on the lookback window you chose.
Just keep in mind that if you disable auto-refresh later on, you’ll need to create a new audience to start auto-refreshing again. And if your audience is too small, it might become unavailable after the refresh unless it has over 1,000 users.
Custom Audiences are people who have already engaged with your business, while TikTok Lookalike Audiences are people who have not interacted with your brand yet, but have similar characteristics to those who have.
This targeting option allows you to re-engage with people who have already interacted with your company, either by liking or commenting on one of your TikTok ads. By targeting these people with personalized ads, you have the opportunity to turn them into loyal customers or repeat buyers.
