Audience FAQs

Common questions about Ours Privacy audiences - HIPAA and BAAs, hashed emails, blocked names, match rates, consent, sync frequency, limits, and permissions.

Common questions about building, naming, exporting, and syncing audiences. For the underlying model, see Audience concepts.

Important: Advertising platforms are not HIPAA business associates and do not sign BAAs. Hashing an email does not make it anonymous. Read Compliance for audiences before sending an audience to any platform.

Compliance and privacy

Not as protected health information or consumer health data. Advertising platforms do not sign business associate agreements and their own terms prohibit uploading that data. Whether a given audience crosses that line is a question for your counsel, not for the product. Ours Privacy enforces the parts it can enforce, which are the destination-facing name and the advertising consent exclusion, and the terms you accept before syncing set out the rest. See Compliance for audiences.

Does hashing the email make the audience anonymous?

No. The platform matches the hash back to a person, which is the entire purpose of the upload. The FTC has treated hashed identifier uploads as disclosures of the underlying identity. Hashing protects the value in transit and at rest; it does not de-identify the person.

Why was my audience name rejected?

The Export Name is displayed verbatim in the advertising platform's interface, so a name that describes a condition, treatment, medication, or clinical event discloses health context on its own. Ours Privacy checks the name against a clinical vocabulary and refuses to save one that matches, showing you the term it found. Put the description in Name, which stays internal, and press Generate for the Export Name. See Health context in audience names.

Can I get a term unblocked?

Ask support@oursprivacy.com. The vocabulary is deliberately written to leave ordinary marketing language alone, so a false positive is a bug worth reporting. Rewording around a block is not the fix: a slightly less obvious description of a condition is the same disclosure.

Does the health check look at my conditions too?

No. You can build an audience on any criteria your data supports, and no condition, property, or criterion is ever sent to a destination. The check covers the destination-facing name only.

Every sync excludes visitors who rejected the advertising consent category. It does not exclude visitors with no consent record at all, because an absence is not a rejection. If you need affirmative opt-in, add a visitor condition that Accepted Consent Categories contains advertising. CSV downloads are not gated at all. See Compliance for audiences.

What exactly leaves Ours Privacy on a sync?

Two things: the audience's Export Name, and one SHA-256 hashed email address per member. Not names, not phone numbers, not addresses, not your conditions, not your internal audience name, not counts.

Accepting the terms and selecting destinations are governed by permissions, and the acknowledgement is a statement about your organization's authority and lawful basis. Ask your account administrator about who should hold that access.

Building audiences

What is the difference between Visitor Properties and Event Behavior?

Visitor Properties filter on attributes: consent, attribution, location, identity, custom properties. Event Behavior filters on what somebody did, as a count inside a rolling day window. A visitor has to satisfy both sections. See Visitor conditions and Event conditions.

How do I exclude people who already converted?

Add an event condition for the conversion event with a count of is exactly 0. Combined with an interest signal, that is the standard retargeting shape and the single most useful pattern in the product. See The zero-count pattern.

My page view condition matches almost everybody. Why?

Because every page on your site fires a page view. Add a nested condition on the page URL so only the occurrences you care about count toward the total.

Should I use the current or the initial attribution properties?

Initial, for almost everything. The initial values record how the visitor first found you and do not change on later visits, which is what you want when you are segmenting by acquisition channel. The current values describe the most recent session.

Can I build an audience from an experiment variant?

Yes. Use From experiment in the Event Behavior card and it fills in the impression event and the variant filter for you. See Experimentation.

How fresh is the data?

Event data becomes queryable within about fifteen minutes of collection, so an audience built on this morning's behavior works this afternoon.

Is a preview count exact?

It is an estimate of how many visitors match, and it is the right number for sanity-checking a definition. It is not a prediction of how many people a platform will recognize, which is always lower. See Previewing an audience.

Can I copy an audience?

Yes. Duplicate it from the audience list, then edit the copy. It is the fastest way to build a set of related audiences with different windows or different exclusions.

Exporting

What are the three export formats for?

All Fields is raw values and every visitor column, for CRM uploads, warehouse loads, and analysis. Google Ads Format and Facebook Ads Format are hashed and normalized to each platform's specification, for uploading by hand. See Exporting a CSV.

Why does my export say only some rows had matchable data?

Because a platform can only match on an email address or a phone number. A visitor with a city and a name but no identifier cannot be matched by anybody, so those rows are filtered out of the file rather than shipped as unmatched. A large gap is telling you about your data collection, not about the export. Adding an Email is not null condition makes the deliverable size visible in Preview instead.

How long can I download an export?

A finished export stays available to re-download for a limited window, then drops off the Recent Exports list and you run it again. Each download link is also issued fresh when you press Download and an individual link is short-lived, so if a link stops working, go back to the audience and press Download again rather than reusing an old URL. See Data Retention.

Can I export several audiences at once?

Yes. Select them in the audience list and export. Each produces its own file in the format you choose, named after its own Export Name.

Why is Export CSV greyed out?

The button needs three things: a name, at least one condition, and nothing unsaved. Save your changes and it becomes available.

Syncing

How often does a sync run?

Daily, a little after midnight UTC. There is nothing to schedule and nothing to trigger.

Does a sync add people, or replace the list?

It replaces the full membership every run. That is what makes removals automatic: anyone who no longer matches your conditions drops out of the platform's audience on the next run, and you never maintain a suppression list for it. It also means a missed run has no backlog, because the next successful run brings the platform fully up to date.

Which platforms can I sync to?

Vibe CTV Audiences today. Facebook Custom Audiences, Google Customer Match, and MNTN Audiences accept credentials so your setup is ready in advance, but do not deliver yet, so do not plan campaigns around them.

Can I sync an audience to a destination I already use for events?

No. Audience syncing works with Audience Destinations only. Event destinations receive events as they happen and have no concept of membership, so they are not offered in the sync card even when the same company appears in both lists.

Why did my sync get skipped?

The usual reasons are that the destination is disabled, the audience is not published, or the destination has not been included in a published version of your destination settings. An empty membership is also refused rather than sent, because uploading an empty list would clear the audience on the platform.

My audience synced but the platform shows far fewer people. Is something broken?

Almost certainly not. A platform matches a hashed email only against people already in its own graph, so the audience there is always smaller than what you delivered. A low match rate produces no error anywhere: the upload succeeds and the platform reports the audience as active. Check the platform's own match figure, and check the delivered count in Ours Privacy to separate a matching problem from a deliverability one.

How long until I can target a synced audience?

After a sync lands, a platform may take a day or two to finish processing an audience update before it is usable. That is platform-side and is not something Ours Privacy reports on. Platforms also enforce minimum sizes: Meta's guidance is at least 1,000 people and Google recommends at least 5,000 for a Customer Match list.

How do I stop a sync?

Remove the destination from the Sync to Destinations card. The list already on the platform stays until you delete it there. Removing the last destination clears the data-sharing acknowledgement, so turning the sync back on later means accepting the terms again rather than inheriting a decision from months ago.

I renamed the audience and cannot find it in the ad platform. Why?

The platform shows the Export Name, not your internal name, and renaming changes the label going forward. Copy the platform-facing name from the Sync to Destinations card. Rename before attaching campaigns rather than after, where you have the choice.

Access and limits

How many audiences can I have?

Your plan sets a limit on audiences per account. When you reach it, delete audiences you no longer use or contact your account representative about raising it.

Who can create and publish audiences?

Access is granted per action, so viewing, creating, editing, previewing, publishing, and deleting can be granted separately. Selecting sync destinations and accepting the data-sharing terms are governed the same way. Ask your account administrator about your access.

Is Audience Builder generally available?

Yes. Audience Performance, the reporting product that measures how audiences convert, is a separate feature in Public Beta.

Can I create audiences through the API?

Audience membership is not exposed through the Platform API today. See Platform API for what is available.

Next Steps

Audience concepts for the model behind these answers.
Building an audience to build your first one.
Recipes for worked configurations.
Compliance for audiences for the obligations that come with sharing one.

Need help? Contact support@oursprivacy.com.