How to Build an Audience

This section will guide you through creating different types of audiences step by step.

Adding Filters

Historical Targeting

While building your audience, you may see a Historical Targeting panel appear beside your filters. This feature uses your past campaign activity to surface targeting recommendations tailored to you.

Here’s how it works:

• Personalized Recommendations: If you’ve run two or more audiences in campaigns over the past six months, Primer will identify targeting patterns that have performed well before and suggest audiences with similar attributes.

• Always Up-to-Date: Recommendations update daily to reflect the latest results from your campaigns, ensuring they remain relevant as your targeting evolves.

Historical Targeting helps you quickly spot audience opportunities that align with your proven performance, without needing to manually search through past campaigns. You can apply these suggestions directly or use them as a starting point to refine with additional filters.

Editing Using Summary

Along with traditional filters, you can use our Summary feature to view and modify audience composition directly from the summary charts.

Here’s how it works:

• View Audience Breakdown: See detailed distributions like job titles, seniority, and departments.

• Edit Directly: Exclude or include criteria by clicking on the summary items (e.g., remove students by clicking the "X").

• Update Estimates: Easily adjust your audience and get updated estimates in real-time.

This feature allows you to confirm and fine-tune your audience with a more visual, interactive experience.

Checking Previews

Audience Preview lets you view the specific individuals in your audience and their attributes. Here’s what you can do:

• Browse the first 250 people in your audience to review who’s being included.

• Search by criteria (e.g., company, job title) to confirm that specific people or segments are present.

• Verify accuracy by looking up individuals to ensure Primer’s data reflects real people.

This transparency allows you to fine-tune your audience and ensure it aligns perfectly with your target segment.

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Audience Build Confirmation Modal

Before you confirm changes, you’ll see a summary of your audience size and filter criteria.

The summary also highlights what’s changed (filters added, removed, or modified) and any difference in audience size.

After you click Finish or Apply, an AI-generated summary of the changes is automatically created and saved to your History Log. You can edit it before confirming, or skip editing and confirm immediately.

Once confirmed, your audience will run automatically during the next daily refresh!

60-Second Build Delay with Cancel

After clicking Apply & Run, you have 60 seconds to cancel the build if you stay on the page. If you leave, the build starts automatically.

Apply Changes (Save Now, Run Later)

When you click Apply, your audience edits are saved immediately — but a new run doesn’t start right away. Instead, your updates will be automatically picked up during the next daily refresh.

Use Apply when you want to review or stage your changes without triggering a live run. This ensures your audience stays up to date without manual effort.

Undo, Redo & Reset

• Undo – Go back one step to undo your most recent change.

  • Mac: ⌘Z

  • Windows: Ctrl Z

• Redo – Redo a change you just undid.

  • Mac: ⌘⇧Z

  • Windows: Ctrl Y

Note: Undo and Redo let you move step-by-step through your recent edits. If you make a new change after using Undo, the Redo history will be cleared.

• Reset – Restore your audience to its original version, based on its current state:

  • Ready / Live / Matching: Returns to the version that was most recently run.

  • Draft: Resets to empty if you haven’t set an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), or back to your ICP if you have one.

  • Duplicate: Returns to the version the audience was copied from.

History & Restore

The History Log focuses on real impact and gives you quick actions:

• Before vs. After: open a side-by-side compare to see exactly which filters changed and how size moved.

• Restore previous versions: bring back any earlier confirmed setup with one click, or use Reset to return to the last confirmed setup used in your most recent run.

• Who & when: see who confirmed each update and the exact time.

• Match Rate Log: track quality over time; match rates for ad platforms update daily.

Why it matters: instant visibility, quick deep-links to your ad platforms, and easy rollbacks when you want to revert.

Match Rates

Primer offers audience match rates, providing both a projected estimate and the actual match rate after matching is complete. Here's how it works:

• Projected Match Rate: Narrow down your audience to fewer than 3 million people, and an estimated match rate will automatically appear based on our predictive model.

• Actual Match Rate: Once matching is complete, view the actual matched audience size by clicking the View Runs modal.

Timing for Match Rates:

• Google and LinkedIn may take up to 72 hours to fully display.

• Meta matches are typically available within 12 hours.

This feature helps you gauge audience size, which is key for campaign performance. For lead generation, aim for an audience size of 100,000+ to optimize results.

Data Sources

Primer offers a versatile approach to audience building by allowing you to mix and match filter criteria from three distinct data sources. Here’s how you can leverage these sources to create targeted audiences effectively:

Primer's Database:

• Powered by a combination of data providers that underpin other platforms

• Access over 268 million People records with verified job information from the last 270 days. Explore data on more than 16 million companies with at least one employee according to LinkedIn.

Salesforce Integration:

• Build audiences using any field from the Account, Contact, or Lead objects within your Salesforce instance.

• Easily recreate Salesforce reports inside of Primer.

CSV Imports:

• Import lists of companies or people from CSV files.

• Match these imported records against our database to create custom audiences.

Note: The maximum CSV file size allowed is 25 MB.

Combining Sources:

One of the key features of Primer is the ability to mix filter criteria from any of these three data sources simultaneously. For example, you can build an audience of target accounts stored in Salesforce and then identify specific individuals at those accounts using job title criteria from Primer’s database.

Combine your first-party data with our third-party data effortlessly, enabling more refined and effective audience targeting.

Need help? We're happy to work with you one on one to ensure you can create the audiences you need with Primer! Email us: [email protected]