Upload a customer list to Snapchat and use it as an audience

A customer list lets you target, or exclude, people you already know. For a small business it is often the cheapest high-quality audience, and exclusion alone can save budget. The work is in preparing the list correctly and in respecting privacy rules.

How a customer list works in Snapchat

Snapchat accepts three kinds of identifier in a customer list: email, phone and mobile advertising ID. Each is normalized and then hashed with SHA-256 before upload, and a single upload request uses one identifier type. Normalization matters: emails are trimmed and lowercased, phone numbers include the country code with a leading zero or 00 removed and non-digit characters stripped, and advertising IDs are lowercased with hyphens kept. A badly normalized value hashes to something that never matches.

Documentation describes limits of up to 100,000 identifiers per request and up to 1,000 customer list segments per account. The upload is processed after it is received, and the audience size may keep changing until processing finishes. A segment with too few users is marked as too small and cannot be used for targeting, so a very short list will not work.

Use the audience in two ways. Include it to reach existing customers with a new offer, or exclude it from a prospecting ad squad so you stop paying to show acquisition ads to people who already bought or applied. For a hiring business, excluding people who already applied is a simple way to avoid wasted impressions.

Privacy comes first. Upload only people who have given a lawful basis for this use, keep the list in your own records, and update or remove people when they ask. Hashing is a technical safeguard, not permission.

What you gain from a list

You can stop spending on people who already converted.
Existing customers can be reached with offers that suit them.
The list becomes a seed for lookalike audiences.

Prepare and use it in five steps

Export emails or phone numbers from your own system for the group you have the right to use.
Normalize every value as the documentation requires and hash it with SHA-256 in lowercase hex.
Upload one identifier type per request and wait until the audience finishes processing.
Check the final size and that it is large enough to be usable.
Add the audience as an include or exclude in the relevant ad squad.

Good to know

Keep a record of where each list came from and when it was uploaded. Refresh lists on a schedule, because old lists drift away from reality.
AdAce Ads can read the audiences of the account with their size and readiness and attach them to an ad squad's targeting as a proposal. It does not create or upload customer lists. Early access.

Sources and further reading

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