Overview
Vibe offers two types of audience targeting to help you reach the right viewers while maintaining strong campaign performance: Audience Controls and Audience Suggestions.
Understanding the difference between these two targeting types is key to building effective campaigns that balance precision with scale.
What Are Audience Controls?
Audience Controls are hard filters that strictly limit who can see your ads.
When you apply an Audience Control, you're telling Vibe's bidding system: "Only show my ads to viewers who meet these exact criteria." If a viewer doesn't match your Control settings, they will never see your ad—no exceptions.
Examples of Audience Controls:
Location targeting: Only show ads in California and New York
Age restrictions: Only target viewers 25-54 years old
Custom & Web Audiences: Only reach households on your uploaded CRM list or among your website visitors, or keep them out with an exclusion
Gender targeting: Only show ads to male viewers
When Controls Are Applied:
Controls create boundaries around your campaign. Think of them as drawing a fence—your ads can only be shown inside that fence.
What Are Audience Suggestions?
Audience Suggestions are soft signals that guide our bidding system toward certain audiences without excluding others.
When you apply an Audience Suggestion, you're telling Vibe's bidding system: "I prefer to reach these viewers, but you can optimize beyond them if it improves performance." Suggestions influence where your budget goes, but they don't create hard limits.
Examples of Audience Suggestions:
In-Market Audiences: Prefer viewers interested in automotive purchases
Interest categories: Favor households interested in fitness content
Custom & Web Audiences: Prioritize households similar to your CRM list or your website visitors
Availability by Campaign Goal
Not every campaign goal supports both targeting types:
Awareness, Traffic, Leads, and Sales campaigns support both Audience Controls and Audience Suggestions.
Retargeting, App Promotion, and ABM campaigns are Controls-only — Audience Suggestions are not available for these goals.
For dimensions that can be applied as either a Control or a Suggestion (e.g., Age or Interests), the dimension defaults to a Suggestion unless you explicitly switch it to a Control.
Custom & Web Audiences are the exception. On every goal, your custom audiences and web audiences sit in one block that shares one setting and defaults to a Control, so you can include or exclude audiences. If you switch the block to Suggestions, you can only include audiences. Existing campaigns moved to this block on October 20, 2026: on Awareness, Traffic and Leads, a strategy that only had suggested audiences kept Suggestions. In every other strategy, suggested audiences became Controls.