# Audiences & Targeting

How to define who sees your Meta ads in Adsap, using saved audiences, detailed targeting and custom audiences.

Canonical: https://adsap.ai/docs/guides/launch/audiences
Updated: 2026-09-13

The **Targeting** section of the [ad set form](/guides/launch/ad-sets) decides who sees your ads. Its heading on the form is *Define your audience reach*.

Two ways to fill it in, and you use one or the other.

## Option one: a saved audience

**Saved Audience (Optional)** lists the saved audiences that already exist in your Meta ad account. Adsap reads them from the account; it does not create them. To build a new one, do it in Meta and it appears here after the next sync.

**Picking a saved audience switches off every manual field below it.** Locations, age, gender, detailed targeting and the custom audience fields gray out, and Adsap does not send them to Meta. That is deliberate: a saved audience already contains everything, and merging the two would silently produce targeting that matches neither.

If you want to adjust a saved audience, either edit it in Meta or leave this dropdown on **None (use manual targeting)** and build the targeting here instead.

## Option two: manual targeting

Leave the dropdown on **None (use manual targeting)** and the fields below become editable.

### Locations

Search and add countries, regions and cities. A city can take a **Radius** in **Miles** or **Kilometers**.

### Age Min and Age Max

Defaults are 18 and 65.

### Genders

**Male**, **Female**, or both.

### Detailed targeting

One field, searching Meta's interests and behaviors together, the way Ads Manager does. Type what you are looking for and pick from the results.

Adding more than one is an **or**, not an **and**: someone matching any one of them qualifies. Detailed targeting narrows less than people expect. That is fine in most cases, because Meta's delivery finds buyers inside a broad audience better than inside a hand-built narrow one.

### Include Custom Audiences and Exclude Custom Audiences

Your account's custom audiences, including lookalikes, on both sides.

**Exclusions are the underused half.** Exclude recent purchasers from a prospecting campaign, or your retargeting audience from your cold campaign, and you stop paying twice for the same people. That is the cheapest efficiency gain on this page.

## Special ad categories override this

If the campaign declared Housing, Employment or Financial products and services, Meta restricts targeting whatever you enter. Age locks to 18 to 65, gender to all, and cities or ZIPs need at least a 15 mile radius. Social issues and Online gambling and gaming keep normal targeting. In every declared category, locations stay inside the countries declared on the campaign (one or more). See [Creating a campaign](/guides/launch/campaign-settings).

## There is no audience template

Adsap has no saved targeting objects of its own. Reusable targeting lives in Meta as a **saved audience**, and Adsap reads it from there.

That is on purpose. A targeting definition that lived only in Adsap would drift from what Meta enforces, and nobody looking at the account in Ads Manager would see it.

## Checking the audience before you launch

Ask the [AI Copilot](/guides/ai-copilot) for a delivery estimate on a proposed audience and it returns an estimated monthly audience range with a size assessment from too narrow to very broad.

Do this before launching. A badly sized audience is the most common reason a well-built campaign fails to deliver, and you cannot see it until the ads have run for a few days.

## Through the AI Copilot

You can search interests, behaviors and locations by chat, which is often faster than the pickers. The assistant can also list the account's custom audiences, and check which ads use one before you delete it.