Custom audience
An audience built from your own data: a customer list, site visitors, video viewers, or people who engaged with your page.
Four common sources: a list you upload, people who visited your website, people who watched your videos, and people who interacted with your Facebook or Instagram presence. Each can be sliced by recency and by depth of engagement.
Why it matters for HVAC
The maintenance and replacement cycle makes this unusually valuable. A customer who had a system installed eleven years ago is the best prospect you will ever have for a replacement, and they are sitting in your CRM rather than in the auction.
The same applies seasonally. Someone who watched two minutes of a video about system age in May is a different prospect in July than a stranger, and considerably cheaper to reach.
How it is measured
Match rate on uploaded lists, audience size against your service area, and cost per result against cold targeting. Warm audiences should cost less per result; if they do not, the audience is probably too small or too stale.
A worked example
A contractor builds an audience of customers whose installs are between nine and fourteen years old, 1,900 people, and runs a replacement offer at a modest budget through the shoulder season. Cost per enquiry runs well under the cold campaign because the message is arriving at people for whom it is nearly true.
These figures are invented to show the arithmetic. They describe no real business.
On consent
An uploaded customer list carries obligations about what those people agreed to when you collected their details. That is a question for your own records rather than for your agency.
Where this is demonstrated
The Advantage+ against manual pillar scores every listed agency on what they document here, and gives you the questions that tell you which one you are being sold.