Previewing an Audience

Run a preview on an Ours Privacy audience to see an estimated member count and a sample of matching visitors, and learn what a preview does not tell you.

Use this page to check that an audience matches the people you meant before you export or sync it. Preview is the only feedback loop between writing conditions and sending data somewhere, so it is worth reading properly rather than glancing at the number.

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.

Running a preview

Save your changes. Preview runs against the saved definition, so the button waits until nothing is unsaved.
Press Preview in the Audience Preview card.
Read the estimated count and the sample table.
Adjust conditions, save, and press Refresh Preview to run it again.

Preview runs a query over your data and takes a moment on larger audiences. It does not create anything, send anything, or count against any limit.

What you get

An estimated visitor count shown as an approximate figure. Treat it as the right order of magnitude rather than an exact number, and use it for the questions that matter: is this audience roughly the size I expected, and is it big enough to be usable.

A sample of matching visitors in a table with email, first name, last name, city, state, country, first seen, last seen, and consent. The sample is there to answer a different question from the count: do these look like the people I meant?

Read both. A plausible count with an obviously wrong sample is the most common way a broken audience passes inspection.

Reading the result

The count is much larger than expected

Almost always an event condition with no nested filter. A page view condition with no URL filter counts every page on your site, so "viewed a page at least twice" matches most returning visitors. Add a nested condition narrowing it to the pages that indicate the interest you care about. See Event conditions.

The second most common cause is an OR connector where you meant AND.

The count is much smaller than expected, or zero

Work through these in order.

Mismatched time windows. Two conditions in the same funnel using different day counts can describe a sequence almost nobody performed. Align them.
A condition that is exactly right and matches nothing. An event name with a typo, a URL fragment that does not appear on your site, or a date value that is not a valid date all silently make a condition false rather than raising an error.
Too many ANDs. Each one narrows. Remove them one at a time to find which one collapses the audience.
A consent condition that is stricter than your data. Requiring an accepted advertising category only matches visitors who actively accepted it. If most of your traffic predates your consent banner, that is a small group.

The count looks right but the sample does not

Look at what the sample rows have in common. Visitors from a country you did not intend, or all with a first-seen date years ago, point at a missing condition rather than a wrong one.

Most sample rows have no email address

This one matters more than it looks. A synced audience matches on email and nothing else, so members without one are skipped on delivery. An audience that previews at 40,000 visitors and has an email on a tenth of them delivers a tenth of that.

Add a visitor condition requiring email to be not null and preview again. That number is your realistic deliverable size. See Audience Destinations.

What a preview does not tell you

Whether the platform will match anyone. Preview counts the people in your data. A platform matches a hashed email only against people it already recognizes, and the audience there will be smaller. Nothing about the gap produces an error on either side.

Whether the audience is large enough for the platform. Platform minimums are the platform's rule, not ours. Meta's guidance for a customer list is at least 1,000 people; Google recommends uploading at least 5,000 members for a Customer Match list to have a reasonable chance of serving. See the individual destination pages.

What the sync will exclude. A sync automatically excludes visitors who rejected the advertising consent category. Preview shows the audience as defined, so a synced audience can be slightly smaller than its preview. If that distinction matters to you, add the consent condition to the audience itself and the two numbers converge. See Compliance for audiences.

How fresh the data is. Events become queryable within about fifteen minutes of collection, so a preview reflects behavior up to a few minutes ago rather than this second.

Habits worth having

Preview before every export and every sync change. It costs a moment and catches the mistakes that are expensive to notice later.

Start broad, then narrow. Build the simplest version of the audience, preview it, and add one condition at a time. The count after each change tells you what that condition did, which is information you lose if you add five at once.

Write down what you expected. A count only means something against an expectation. "This should be a few thousand people" turns the preview into a test rather than a number.

Next Steps

Visitor conditions and Event conditions to adjust what you built.
Exporting a CSV to download the audience once it looks right.
Syncing to destinations to send it daily instead.
Audience FAQs for sizing and match-rate questions.

Need help? Contact support@oursprivacy.com.