Audiences: Web Audiences and Custom Audiences

Beyond demographics and geography, each strategy can include or exclude specific groups of people. Bronco supports two kinds: web audiences, built automatically from your web pixel, and custom audiences, built from your own customer lists.

Web audiences

Web audiences are groups of people who took an action on your website in the last 60 days, captured by your web pixel:

• Page View
• Add To Cart
• Checkout Started
• Lead Submitted
• Purchase

You don't create these — they're provisioned automatically once your pixel is installed and sending data. (If the section says "Audiences will appear here once your advertiser is fully provisioned," your pixel setup isn't complete yet — see Setting Up the Web Pixel.)

How you use web audiences depends on your campaign objective:

• Awareness, Traffic, Leads, and Sales campaigns — web audiences are used to exclude. For example, exclude recent purchasers so you don't spend budget re-advertising to people who just bought.
• Retargeting campaigns — web audiences are used to include. Your strategy targets people who took the selected actions, like visitors who added to cart but didn't purchase.

Either way, it works the same: click a segment's chip to select it, click again to deselect.

Custom audiences

Custom audiences are built from your own customer lists — for example, past purchasers from your CRM, newsletter subscribers, or lapsed customers. A lookalike reaches new people who resemble one of those lists.

Creating a custom audience

1. In the Custom audiences section, click New Audience, then Upload a customer list.
2. Give it a name (for example, "Cart abandoners (30d)").
3. Upload your customer list as a CSV file, up to 500,000 rows.

The file needs a header row with an email column, a phone column, or both. Any other columns are ignored, so you can upload an export from another tool as it is. Click Download in the upload panel for a template.

Each row needs at least one of:

• An email address, or
• A US phone number: 10 digits, or 11 starting with 1. Spaces, dashes and parentheses are fine.

Names and postal addresses aren't used for matching.

A row with neither a usable email address nor a US phone number is skipped, and the rest of your list is still added. When the upload finishes, Bronco shows how many people were added and how many rows were skipped, with the line numbers of the first ones so you can fix them and upload again. A file is only turned down when none of its rows can be used, or when the advertiser's audiences already hold 50,000,000 emails and phone numbers between them. Archived audiences don't count toward that total.

Bronco doesn't keep your file. Each email address and phone number is turned into a hash as the file is read, and only the hashes are stored.

Audience statuses

After upload, Bronco matches your list against real households. Search results show each audience's status:

• Pending or Processing — matching is underway.
• Ready — matched and available for targeting.
• Not enough matches — too few rows matched to be usable. Try a larger or cleaner list.
• Failed — Bronco couldn't get the audience ready for matching. It keeps trying on its own, so there is nothing for you to retry. Contact support if it stays this way.

Matching may take several hours. A campaign that includes a custom audience doesn't go live until the audience has finished matching. A campaign that only excludes one isn't held up: the exclusion takes effect on its own once the audience is Ready.

Archiving an uploaded audience deletes the list from Bronco and can't be undone. Campaigns that already use the audience keep reaching the people who were in it.

Seeing all your audiences

Settings → Audiences lists every custom audience in your account, with its Advertiser, its Source, its Status, and Users: how many people the audience holds. Bronco doesn't show how many of them were matched. An audience either has enough matches to be used (Ready) or it doesn't (Not enough matches).

Using custom audiences in a strategy

The Custom audiences section has Included and Excluded search fields, which work like the geography fields: type to search, click Add to attach a segment, and remove it via its chip. A segment can be included or excluded, but not both.

An uploaded list, a Klaviyo import or a lookalike you create with a strategy's New Audience button is attached to that strategy as Included. An audience you create under Settings → Audiences isn't attached to anything: search for it in the Included or Excluded field once it's created.

Audiences kept up to date through the API

A custom audience doesn't have to be a file. Your CRM, your customer data platform, or a no-code tool can keep one current through the Bronco API, adding people as they become customers and removing them when they leave. A "current customers" list that changes every day is the usual example.

To create one:

1. In the Custom audiences section, click New Audience, then Sync through the API. You can also start from Settings → Audiences by clicking Create Audience.
2. Give it a name and click Create Audience.
3. Bronco shows the Connection details: the Audience ID and the two addresses your tool sends people to, Add people and Remove people. Copy them into your tool.

Your tool also needs an API key with the Audiences permission. An Admin creates one under Settings → API Keys. The Syncing Audiences guide explains what your tool has to send.

To see the connection details again, go to Settings → Audiences and click the audience, or choose Connection details from its Actions menu. Its Source there is API, and Last Synced is when your tool last sent an update.

These audiences differ from an uploaded list in a few ways:

• A new one is empty, and its status is Waiting for data until your tool adds its first people. It is then Processing while they are matched, and Ready once at least 1,000 of them match. It stays Ready as people are added and removed.
• New people are passed on to ad delivery every five minutes. You don't publish the campaign again.
• An audience you create from a strategy isn't attached to it. Search for it in the Included or Excluded field.
• A campaign can't be published while one of its strategies includes an audience no one has been added to. Add people to the audience first, or remove it from the strategy.
• You can exclude one of these audiences before it is Ready, even while it is empty. The campaign isn't held up, and the exclusion takes effect on its own once the audience is Ready.
• When your tool removes a person, the audience's count changes straight away. It can take a little over a day for them to stop being reached: removals are passed on once an hour and can take up to 24 hours more to apply. If someone has to stop seeing ads sooner, add them to an audience the strategy has under Excluded. Additions are passed on every five minutes.

Archiving one of these audiences stops updates from your tool and deletes the list from Bronco. It can't be undone. Campaigns that already use the audience keep reaching the people who were in it.

Lookalike audiences

A lookalike reaches new people who resemble one of your audiences, such as people like your best customers. Bronco models it on an audience you already have and leaves out everyone who is in that audience.

To create one:

1. Go to Settings → Audiences, click Create Audience, choose the Advertiser, then click Build a lookalike audience. You can also choose Create lookalike from a ready audience's Actions menu, or click New Audience in a strategy's Custom audiences section.
2. Choose the Source audience: the audience the lookalike is modeled on.
3. Choose a Similarity, from 90% to 50%. A higher percentage is more similar to your source and reaches fewer people. A lower one reaches more.
4. Check the Audience name. Bronco suggests one from the source and the similarity, such as "Current customers Lookalike 90%".
5. Click Create Lookalike.

The source has to be one of the advertiser's own audiences: an uploaded list, a Klaviyo import, or an audience kept up to date through the API. Its status has to be Ready. The lookalike is modeled on the source's email addresses, so an audience with only phone numbers can't be a source. A source with more than 1,000,000 email addresses is modeled on a sample of 1,000,000 of them. A lookalike can't be the source of another lookalike.

Building takes a while, and you can keep working in the meantime. Its status is Building until it finishes, then Ready, and it becomes targetable on its own. Its Users count is how many people it was built with, and appears once it's built. Click it in Settings → Audiences to see its source, its similarity and how the build is going.

A campaign that includes or excludes a lookalike starts delivering once the lookalike is built.

A lookalike is built once. Later changes to the source, such as people added or removed, a Klaviyo sync, or archiving the source, don't change it. To reflect a changed source, create a new lookalike.

If the build fails, the status shows Failed. Click Retry next to it, or in the lookalike's Actions menu. The build picks up where it stopped, so you don't set anything up again.