Audience segments and remarketing

TL;DR

• In Advertising settings → audience segments, define two groups. Existing customers: a dynamically updated customer list. Engaged audience: the broadest website custom audience plus your email list. Everyone else is new audience.¹²
• Then run the breakdown by audience segment on sales campaigns. It shows how budget and results split across new, engaged and existing customers.³
• Meta already prioritises warm people under broad targeting. Loomer typically sees 10–30%+ of budget going to remarketing with no remarketing ad set.⁴
• Jon Loomer treats an account without defined segments as a red flag. To him it’s “sloppy, amateur, and possibly even lazy” agency work.⁵
• Remarketing results are often inflated and non-incremental, and they don’t scale, because the audience exhausts.⁶⁷

Details

Why it matters. Without segments you can’t see where the money goes, so you assume remarketing must be forced. Agencies then build separate remarketing campaigns and report impressive, misleading numbers.³⁶ Defined segments also let Meta apportion budget between the three groups. Ben Heath treats this as standard at ~$100K/month, including email-list engagers whom Meta can’t see on-platform.⁸ CTC calls the new / engaged / existing setup “paramount”. Meta has brought back optional lifecycle settings at campaign level, similar to the old ASC existing-customer cap, and those depend on segments being configured at account level.⁹

How to define them well (Loomer):

• Engaged audience: the broadest website custom audience plus a dynamically updated customer/email list. It should capture everyone engaging with your site or list.
• Existing customers: purchasers only.
• He doesn’t trust most advertisers’ definitions, so he also cross-checks with 1-day click or incremental attribution.²¹⁰

Uses of the breakdown

1. Is it really scalable? Isolate the cost per conversion or ROAS for new audience only. Prospecting scales; remarketing exhausts.¹¹
2. Is it really fatigue? Early in an ad’s life, a high share of spend goes to remarketing. That share falls as warm people are used up. See Is it really creative fatigue? Diagnosing a Meta ad's performance drop.¹²
3. Is it really working? Combine the breakdown with attribution settings. View-through and engaged-through conversions cluster in the remarketing-heavy periods.¹³

Disagreements / caveats

• Separate retargeting campaigns. Loomer and Dara Denney run essentially none. Smart Marketer keeps a win-back campaign. CTC splits evergreen campaigns into acquisition and retention. Savannah Sanchez’s 2020 structure put ~30% of budget into re-engagement, remarketing and DPA campaigns. See How to structure a Meta ads account in 2025–2026.
• Segments describe who got the impressions, not causality. Pair them with Meta's incremental attribution model — should you switch from standard?.

See also

• Meta's incremental attribution model — should you switch from standard?
• Broad targeting vs interests, lookalikes and retargeting on Meta (2023 → 2026)
• People: Jon Loomer, Ben Heath, Tony Chopp

Footnotes

1. The Mistakes I See in Almost Every Ad Account @ 00:00 — Jon Loomer ↩

2. Why You Are Misdiagnosing Creative Fatigue @ 04:20 — Jon Loomer ↩ ↩²

3. The Mistakes I See in Almost Every Ad Account @ 01:34 — Jon Loomer ↩ ↩²

4. The Foundational Elements of Meta Advertising Today @ 03:56 — Jon Loomer ↩

5. The Mistakes I See in Almost Every Ad Account @ 00:48 — Jon Loomer ↩

6. The Mistakes I See in Almost Every Ad Account @ 02:24 — Jon Loomer ↩ ↩²

7. How Do You Scale Your Meta Ads Budget? @ 00:46 — Jon Loomer ↩

8. $100 vs $100,000 Facebook Ads Strategy @ 03:52 — Ben Heath ↩

9. How Meta Actually Works in 2026 @ 10:34 — Tony Chopp ↩

10. How Do You Scale Your Meta Ads Budget? @ 01:35 — Jon Loomer ↩

11. How Do You Scale Your Meta Ads Budget? @ 01:35 — Jon Loomer ↩

12. Why You Are Misdiagnosing Creative Fatigue @ 05:08 — Jon Loomer ↩

13. Why You Are Misdiagnosing Creative Fatigue @ 05:57 — Jon Loomer ↩