Recipes

Converter exclusion list

Use when you are running any acquisition campaign. This is the first audience most accounts should build, and the one with the clearest return.

Name:         Converters, last 90 days
Export Name:  amber-harbor-drum  (press Generate)

Event Behavior
  Event:  Purchase
  Count:  is greater than or equal to  1
  Window: 90 days

Attach this audience as an excluded or negative audience on your acquisition campaigns in the ad platform. Ours Privacy sends the membership; the platform applies the exclusion.

Set the window to how long somebody stays a customer, not to a reporting period. If your product is bought once a year, 90 days is too short.

Step-level exclusion

Use when a campaign asks for a specific action and you do not want to ask people who already took it.

Name:         Already booked an appointment, last 60 days
Export Name:  copper-lantern-cove

Event Behavior
  Event:  Appointment Confirmed
  Count:  is greater than or equal to  1
  Window: 60 days

Build one of these per live campaign, matched to the action the campaign asks for. An ad asking a current patient to become a patient is a worse outcome than a wasted impression.

Abandoned form

Use when visitors start an application or booking form and leave. The highest-intent retargeting audience most sites have.

Name:         Started booking form, did not complete, 14 days
Export Name:  bright-compass-trail

Event Behavior  (combine with AND)
  Event:  Form Started
  Count:  is greater than or equal to  1
  Window: 14 days

  Event:  Appointment Confirmed
  Count:  is exactly  0
  Window: 14 days

The second condition is the one that matters. Without it you are paying to retarget people who completed the booking.

Match the two windows. A 14-day intent window against a 30-day conversion window means somebody who booked 20 days ago is still in the audience.

High-intent page viewers who did not convert

Use when you have service, pricing, or product pages that only interested visitors reach.

Name:         Viewed pricing, no purchase, 30 days
Export Name:  Q3-A

Event Behavior  (combine with AND)
  Event:  Page View
  Count:  is greater than or equal to  1
  Window: 30 days
  Nested: Page URL  contains  /pricing

  Event:  Purchase
  Count:  is exactly  0
  Window: 30 days

The nested URL condition is not optional here. A bare page view condition matches nearly every visitor to your site, because every page fires one.

Repeat visitors who never converted

Use when you want a broader retargeting pool than a single page can give you, without dropping to everyone who has ever visited.

Name:         Three or more visits, no conversion, 60 days
Export Name:  blue-harbor

Event Behavior  (combine with AND)
  Event:  Page View
  Count:  is greater than or equal to  3
  Window: 60 days

  Event:  Purchase
  Count:  is exactly  0
  Window: 60 days

Sustained interest is a more durable signal than a single visit, and this audience is usually large enough to clear platform minimums when a single-page audience is not.

Paid-search visitors only

Use when you want to retarget people your paid campaigns brought in, without re-reaching people who arrived from your own email or from organic search.

Name:         Paid search intent, no conversion, 30 days
Export Name:  north-star

Visitor Properties
  Initial UTM Medium  is  cpc

Event Behavior  (combine with AND)
  Event:  Page View
  Count:  is greater than or equal to  1
  Window: 30 days
  Nested: Page URL  contains  /services

  Event:  Purchase
  Count:  is exactly  0
  Window: 30 days

Use the initial attribution properties rather than the current ones. Initial values record how the visitor first found you and do not change on later visits.

Both sections apply, so a visitor has to satisfy the visitor property and every event condition.

Service-area audience

Use when you only serve certain states or regions and do not want to advertise outside them.

Name:         High intent, serviceable states
Export Name:  silver-maple

Visitor Properties  (combine with AND)
  State  is found in  CA, OR, WA
  Email  is not null

Event Behavior
  Event:  Page View
  Count:  is greater than or equal to  1
  Window: 30 days
  Nested: Page URL  contains  /locations

The Email is not null condition is doing quiet work: it removes visitors a platform could never match anyway, which makes the previewed size much closer to the number you will actually deliver. See Previewing an audience.

Best-customer seed

Use when you want a platform to build a lookalike or similar audience and you want it modeled on customers worth having more of.

Name:         Repeat purchasers, seed for lookalikes
Export Name:  list-north

Event Behavior
  Event:  Purchase
  Count:  is greater than or equal to  2
  Window: 180 days

Seed quality beats seed size, up to a point. A seed of repeat purchasers models a better customer than a seed of everyone who ever bought, but a platform still needs enough people to find a pattern: Meta's guidance is at least 1,000 and Google recommends at least 5,000. If Preview comes back under those figures, loosen the count or widen the window rather than accepting a seed too small to work.

Two things to do in the platform after this syncs. Build the lookalike from it, then exclude this same seed audience from the lookalike campaign so you are not paying to re-reach the customers you modeled on.

Affirmative advertising opt-in only

Use when your compliance position is opt-in rather than opt-out, so it is not enough to exclude people who rejected advertising.

Name:         Opted in to advertising, high intent, 30 days
Export Name:  clever-orbit-basin

Visitor Properties
  Accepted Consent Categories  contains  advertising

Event Behavior
  Event:  Page View
  Count:  is greater than or equal to  1
  Window: 30 days
  Nested: Page URL  contains  /services

Every sync already excludes visitors who rejected the advertising category. It does not exclude visitors with no consent record at all, because an absence is not a rejection. This condition is what turns the exclusion into a requirement. See Compliance for audiences.

This is also the condition to add when you plan to export a CSV and upload it to a platform by hand, since a download is not gated on consent.

Suppression list

Use when there are people who should be left out of everything: opt-outs, active escalations, anyone you have a reason not to contact.

Name:         Do not contact
Export Name:  humble-cedar-vault

Event Behavior
  Event:  Contact Preference Updated
  Count:  is greater than or equal to  1
  Window: 365 days
  Nested: Preference  is  do_not_contact

The point of this audience is that it is only ever used as an exclusion. Syncing it keeps it current, which is the whole reason to build it rather than maintaining a list by hand.

Internal list with full detail

Use when the audience is going to your CRM, a spreadsheet, or an analysis rather than to an advertising platform.

Name:         Q3 pipeline review, engaged no purchase
Export Name:  Q3-review

Visitor Properties
  Email  is not null

Event Behavior  (combine with AND)
  Event:  Page View
  Count:  is greater than or equal to  2
  Window: 90 days

  Event:  Purchase
  Count:  is exactly  0
  Window: 90 days

Export format: All Fields

The all-fields export gives you raw values and every visitor column, including first-touch attribution and click IDs, which is what makes it useful for analysis and useless for uploading to a platform.

It is also the only format containing raw email addresses, so it is the file to be most careful with. Note the Export Name still lands in the file name, which is the reason to keep it uninformative even for an internal export. See Exporting a CSV.