
Table of Contents
How Audience Sharing Works Across Major Platforms
Advanced Strategies for Audience Sharing
Privacy, Compliance Considerations, and Data Clean Rooms
Measuring the Success of Shared Audiences
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Future Trends in Audience Sharing
One year ago, we coined the term “shared audience optimization” (SAO), as follows:
The marketing practice of partnering with platforms, brands, publishers or individuals by understanding what each party’s audience has in common and how these similarities can be leveraged to maximize growth and return on investment.
Since then, the relevance of audience sharing in any company’s marketing strategy has only grown. We hope this comprehensive guide gives marketers a launching point for how to view their marketing plans through the lens of audience sharing, and increase their results by an order of magnitude. Enjoy!
What Is Audience Sharing?
At its core, audience sharing refers to the ability to take audience segments—whether custom-built or derived from first-party data—and distribute or share them across multiple ad accounts, platforms, or marketing tools. Think of it as sharing your best customer lists, but instead of sending an email, you’re distributing them across different digital platforms to run targeted campaigns.
Common Types of Audience Sharing:
- Internal Sharing Across Accounts: Sharing a custom audience between different ad accounts or campaigns within the same organization.
- Cross-Platform Audience Sharing: Taking an audience built on one platform (e.g., Facebook) and replicating or syncing it across another (e.g., Google Ads, Snapchat).
- Collaborative Audience Sharing: Partnering with another company to share audience segments (with proper consent) for joint campaigns.
- Lookalike Audience Sharing: Sharing a base audience to create lookalike audiences on other platforms, allowing for broader reach with similar characteristics.
Why Does Audience Sharing Matter?
Audience sharing streamlines marketing efforts by reducing redundancy and improving targeting precision. It ensures that your customer data doesn’t exist in silos but is utilized fully across all channels, maximizing its value.
How Audience Sharing Works Across Major Platforms
Each platform has its own methods and limitations when it comes to audience sharing. Here’s a breakdown of the most popular ad platforms and their audience sharing features:
1. Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram)
Meta allows for Custom Audiences—groups of users created from your customer data (e.g., email lists, phone numbers)—to be shared across multiple ad accounts. This is especially useful for agencies managing several clients or brands. Audiences can be shared by granting access to specific ad accounts or business partners.
Meta’s explanation on their help article entitled “About Shared Audiences” says:
Shared audiences are a way to allow other people access to the audiences you’ve created for your ads. You can individually or bulk share custom and lookalike audiences between ad accounts and/or media agencies.
2. Google Ads
Google’s Customer Match allows you to upload first-party data (emails, phone numbers, addresses) to create custom audiences. These audiences can be shared across various Google platforms, including YouTube, Search, and Display Network. However, Google does not allow direct audience sharing across accounts like Meta, but you can replicate audience creation using the same data source.
Google’s help article entitled “Share audience segments that include your website visitors and app users”, says:
Google ads manager accounts can share tags, segments created from your data (including your website visitors and app users), and combined segments with some, or all, of its Google Ads accounts or sub-manager accounts (other manager accounts).
3. Snapchat Ads
Snapchat offers Custom Audiences and allows for Audience Sharing across accounts. This is particularly useful for agencies that run campaigns for multiple clients but want to reuse a proven audience segment.
Snapchat help article entitled, “Share an Audience”, says:
Organization Admins can share SAM, Lookalike, Website Custom, Ad Engagement, and Third-Party (Nielsen and Oracle) Audiences with other ad accounts within the same organization.
4. TikTok Ads
TikTok’s Custom Audiences feature allows advertisers to upload customer data (emails, phone numbers) to create target segments. Shared Audience is a feature where you can share audiences across different ad accounts.
TikTok’s help article entitled, About sharing audiences in TikTok Ads Manager, says:
Audience sharing allows you to leverage audience data across different ad accounts for targeting in campaigns. You can share a Custom Audience (created from Engagement, App Activity, Website Traffic, Customer File, or Partner Audiences) and a Lookalike Audience to specified ad accounts within the same TikTok Business Center.
5. LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences allows advertisers to create audiences from email lists, website visitors, and engagement data. These audiences can be shared across LinkedIn accounts, making it easier for B2B marketers to run consistent campaigns across departments or regions.
TikTok’s help article entitled, Share Matched Audiences in Business Manager, says:
By sharing a Matched Audience through Business Manager, you can create an audience once in Campaign Manager and share it with your partners and across your ad accounts. Updates to your shared Matched Audiences are automatically reflected across all ad accounts or Business Managers the audience has been shared to.
6. Pinterest Ads
Pinterest allows advertisers to create and share Custom Audiences across ad accounts. You can build audiences using customer data or website activity and then share these audiences with other accounts.
Pinterest’s help article entitled, “Shared audiences across ad accounts”, says:
Business Manager allows you to share existing audiences between ad accounts to save time and repeat successful tactics without having to recreate the same audiences for each account.
Advanced Strategies for Audience Sharing
Now that you know how audience sharing works, let’s talk about some advanced strategies to get the most out of it:
1. Segmentation and Personalization
Instead of sharing entire customer lists, segment your audiences by behavior, purchase history, or engagement level. For example, create one audience for high-value customers and another for inactive users, then share those across platforms for personalized messaging.
2. Cross-Platform Lookalike Audiences
Build a successful audience on one platform (e.g., Facebook) and then use it to create lookalike audiences on another (e.g., Google Ads). This allows you to expand your reach while maintaining targeting precision.
3. Retargeting with Shared Audiences
Combine audience sharing with retargeting campaigns to follow users across platforms. For instance, if someone clicks on a Google ad but doesn’t convert, retarget them with a Facebook or LinkedIn ad using a shared audience.
4. Partnership Marketing
Partner with another brand for joint campaigns. Share audiences with your partner to reach a broader but still highly relevant group of potential customers. This is especially effective for co-branded product launches or cross-promotions. By leveraging each other’s strengths, brands can deliver unique value propositions that resonate deeply with their customers. Three notable examples showcase how brands can creatively collaborate to unlock new growth: Airbnb and Tesla, Spotify and Uber, and GoPro with Red Bull.
Airbnb and Tesla’s partnership targets eco-conscious travelers by promoting sustainable tourism. With Tesla’s electric vehicle chargers at select Airbnb properties, both brands appeal to environmentally minded consumers, building a seamless travel experience while supporting eco-friendly practices. Meanwhile, Spotify and Uber provide a complementary experience that enhances each brand’s core service. By allowing Uber riders to enjoy their Spotify playlists during rides, they add a personalized touch, making the journey more enjoyable and memorable. Lastly, GoPro and Red Bull’s partnership highlights how brands with shared adventurous, thrill-seeking audiences can amplify each other’s messaging. Through co-branded events and media, like the iconic Stratos space jump, they have created high-energy, immersive content that resonates with their followers and keeps them engaged.
These partnerships exemplify how brands can align their values, target complementary audiences, and co-create experiences that drive mutual benefits. From supporting shared sustainability goals to elevating customer experiences, partnership marketing offers a powerful path for brands to grow together while amplifying their influence.
Privacy, Compliance Considerations, and Clean Data Rooms
Audience sharing is powerful, but with great power comes great responsibility. Data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA require marketers to handle personal data carefully, ensuring that user consent is obtained before sharing data with third-party platforms or partners.
Best Practices for Privacy-Compliant Audience Sharing:
- Get Consent: Always ensure you have consent from users before sharing their data across platforms.
- Hashing and Encryption: Most platforms (Meta, Google, etc.) use hashed data (emails, phone numbers) to protect users’ identities.
- Privacy Policies: Be transparent with customers about how their data will be used and shared. Update privacy policies to reflect audience-sharing practices.
- Data Anonymization: Where possible, anonymize data before sharing it with third parties to minimize privacy risks.
What are Clean Data Rooms?
Clean data rooms are secure, controlled environments where brands, retailers, and publishers can collaborate by combining their first-party data to gain deeper insights without exposing sensitive information. They’re like sterile labs for data, letting companies safely match customer data to build better audience profiles, understand cross-channel behavior, and measure campaign effectiveness. With third-party cookies vanishing and privacy laws expanding, clean rooms offer a privacy-safe way to share data and fuel more accurate marketing strategies.
In practice, clean data rooms allow marketers to make their ad spending go further by creating richer audience insights, refining campaign targeting, and analyzing ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) across channels. With tools like LiveRamp, marketers can verify campaign reach, retarget key buyers, and connect online and offline interactions, even with limited technical resources. As data collaboration grows, clean rooms help marketers overcome data silos and signal loss, turning data partnerships into a competitive edge for more personalized, effective digital advertising.
Top Data Clean Room Providers
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) Clean Rooms: Offers scalable, secure data collaboration for analysis without revealing raw data.
- Google Ads Data Hub: Allows advertisers to analyze Google ad campaign performance in a privacy-safe environment.
- Snowflake Data Cloud: Provides multi-cloud data sharing with advanced security for easy collaboration and analytics.
- Crossbeam: Specializes in partnership data sharing to help companies find overlapping customers and opportunities.
- AppsFlyer: Focuses on mobile attribution, helping advertisers securely measure and optimize app performance.
- LiveRamp: LiveRamp specializes in data onboarding and audience sharing across platforms. It anonymizes user data (via hashing) and enables the distribution of that data to platforms like Facebook, Google, and others for use in targeted advertising.
- TransUnion TruAudience: Enhances audience targeting and insights through privacy-compliant data matching.
- InfoSum: Supports safe data collaboration without moving or sharing raw data, using a “non-movement” model.
- Decentriq: A privacy-first platform using encryption to enable secure, compliant data collaboration.
- Optable: Designed for media and advertising, it offers clean room solutions for secure data collaboration and audience insights.
Measuring the Success of Shared Audiences
Understanding the effectiveness of shared audiences requires tracking several performance metrics across platforms. Here’s how to measure each effectively:
- Engagement Rate: Track interactions like clicks, shares, and comments on shared audience ads. Use platform analytics or an aggregated dashboard to compare shared audience engagement with your standard audiences. Set benchmarks for each campaign type to quickly spot variations.
- Conversion Rate: Measure conversions specific to shared audiences by setting up unique tracking links or segmenting conversion events for campaigns targeting shared audiences. This helps identify if these audiences convert more effectively than other segments, providing insight into high-performing partnerships.
- Cost per Acquisition (CPA): Calculate CPA for shared audiences by dividing the campaign cost by the number of conversions from shared audiences. Comparing this to CPA from standard campaigns helps identify the most cost-efficient audiences and channels.
- Cross-Platform Attribution: Attribution tools like Google Analytics or third-party platforms (e.g., Adjust, AppsFlyer) are essential for crediting each platform’s role in the customer journey. Set up UTM parameters and multi-touch attribution models to capture each platform’s contribution, allowing you to see which channels are driving results and tailor future budget allocation.
- ROI and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Consider the ROI and long-term impact of shared audiences by measuring CLV from these audiences versus others. Analyzing ROI and CLV can indicate whether shared audience strategies not only drive immediate results but also foster valuable, long-term customer relationships.
Regularly tracking and comparing these metrics with other audience segments helps refine strategies, optimize spending, and maximize the effectiveness of shared audience campaigns.
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
While audience sharing and segmentation strategies can yield powerful results, marketers often encounter pitfalls that can diminish their campaigns. Here are some examples and ways to avoid these challenges:
- Over-Segmentation: Dividing audiences into too many hyper-targeted segments can mean fewer impressions and lower reach. For instance, if a fashion retailer segments by age, gender, income, and geographic region, they may end up with very small, fragmented groups that are hard to target at scale. Instead, find a balance between precision and audience size by focusing on broader, high-impact traits like shopping behavior or seasonal trends.
- Data Staleness: Using old data can lead to missed opportunities. For example, targeting users who showed interest in summer travel during the previous year may be ineffective if they’re now focused on fall or winter activities. Avoid stale data by setting regular refresh cycles—updating seasonal and event-based audiences frequently helps maintain relevance. Real-time data integration, where possible, is another solution that keeps campaigns aligned with current consumer interests.
- Audience Overlap: Overlapping segments can waste budget by repeatedly targeting the same users, leading to ad fatigue. This often happens when brands use both loyalty segments and interest-based segments that attract the same audience. For example, a sports brand targeting both “frequent buyers” and “outdoor enthusiasts” may find a large overlap. Clean rooms can help identify and limit overlap, ensuring that each ad placement reaches a unique audience, thus reducing redundancy and increasing efficiency.
- Neglecting Privacy Protocols: In industries like finance or healthcare, failing to manage data responsibly can lead to major compliance issues. For example, when healthcare brands collaborate on wellness campaigns, privacy breaches or unintentional data exposure can harm both brand reputation and consumer trust. To avoid this, marketers should anonymize data in clean rooms and follow strict privacy regulations, ensuring data shared is non-identifiable and that collaboration aligns with GDPR or CCPA guidelines.
- Unclear Success Metrics: Without clear KPIs, it’s challenging to measure the true effectiveness of shared audience campaigns. For example, a luxury brand collaborating with travel partners may lack clarity on whether they aim to boost brand awareness, conversions, or loyalty. Set specific, shared KPIs with your partners early on to ensure campaigns align with measurable goals. This keeps efforts focused and ensures that performance can be clearly evaluated and optimized.
By understanding and addressing these common issues, marketers can strengthen their audience-sharing strategies and make their campaigns more efficient, impactful, and compliant.
Future Trends in Audience Sharing
Audience sharing is evolving, and here’s what we can expect in the near future:
- AI and Machine Learning: AI will increasingly automate audience segmentation and sharing, creating dynamic, real-time audiences based on user behavior.
- Privacy-First Sharing Models: With privacy regulations tightening, expect more privacy-safe methods for sharing audiences, such as federated learning and differential privacy.
- Cross-Device Audience Sharing: As consumers switch between devices, marketers will need solutions to share audiences across devices for a more seamless experience.
Data Clean Rooms at the Core
As data privacy laws strengthen and third-party cookies phase out, data clean rooms are emerging as the backbone of modern marketing. These secure environments allow brands to combine and analyze data collaboratively without exposing personally identifiable information (PII), making them ideal for privacy-compliant, targeted marketing.
Marketers adopting data clean rooms will focus on three key practices:
- Enhanced Audience Profiling: Clean rooms enable brands to match their first-party data with partner data (like retailer purchase histories) to build richer, privacy-safe audience profiles. This allows marketers to tailor messaging more effectively, creating highly personalized campaigns based on actual behavior and interests.
- Cross-Platform Campaign Optimization: With insights gained from combined datasets, clean rooms help marketers refine campaign strategies across channels, enabling better ad targeting and frequency control without relying on third-party cookies. This approach improves ROI by reaching the right audiences at the optimal frequency.
- Transparent, Measurable ROI: Marketers can use data clean rooms to track customer journeys across online and offline channels, supporting accurate attribution and return on ad spend (ROAS) measurement. Clean rooms provide a unified view of performance, making it easier to assess campaign impact and adjust strategies in real-time.
By integrating data clean rooms into the core of their strategies, marketers can drive data-informed growth in a privacy-compliant way. Brands can focus on creating relevant, impactful campaigns, all while respecting user privacy—a critical factor as digital advertising evolves.
The Power of Audience Sharing
Audience sharing today is not only about targeting but about building meaningful partnerships and utilizing privacy-first tools like data clean rooms to amplify results. By collaborating with trusted brands that share your values and goals, you can reach wider, high-value audiences while ensuring data is securely managed. Platforms like Meta, Google, and others enable advanced sharing, but data clean rooms take it further by allowing brands to merge and analyze data in a compliant way, gaining unique insights without compromising privacy.
Partnerships in audience sharing also allow brands to pool resources and deliver enhanced, unified experiences across platforms, creating campaigns that resonate deeply with customers and keep them engaged. The fusion of data insights and collaborative audience strategies can help you extend reach, optimize ad spend, and drive long-term brand loyalty. Now, equipped with this guide, it’s time to embrace responsible, data-backed audience sharing to unlock unprecedented growth in a secure, privacy-focused manner.