Shopify Audiences Experts for Plus Advertisers

Shopify assembles the audiences. Whether they earn anything is decided inside the ad platforms, which is why most Audiences work is really paid-media work with a Shopify starting point.

Connecting the ad platforms. Audiences connects to six ad platforms, and each connection needs admin permissions on that ad account. Access, not Shopify, is where setup tends to stall, so a good expert sorts out who owns which account before opening the app.

Building audiences into campaigns. Custom and lookalike audiences for prospecting, retargeting audiences for people likely to buy, and cross-store audience pools. The expert decides which audience feeds which campaign and how budget splits between them.

Exclusions. Excluding existing customers from acquisition campaigns is one of the most practical uses of the app. Paying to win back someone who bought from you last month is money spent twice.

Benchmarks and reporting. Audiences includes advertising campaign benchmarks against similar stores. An expert with an analytics background reads those next to your own attribution rather than treating any single figure as the verdict. Two of the badge holders also list Technical Support & Maintenance, which helps when tracking needs fixing first.

Privacy review. Shopify sends audience data securely and deletes the raw data once the ad platform has matched its records. Shopify also publishes state privacy law guidance for Audiences, and an expert checks your settings and policy wording against how you plan to use it.

Six badge holders means a short list, and a call with each fits into one week. Use these checks to separate them.

Do they qualify you first? A good expert asks about your plan, payment provider and location before anything else. If you're on Advanced, use another payment provider or are based outside the US and Canada, the right answer is that this app isn't for you yet.

What do they run on the ad side? Audiences only builds the lists. Ask which ad platforms they manage day to day, and how they structure prospecting, retargeting and exclusion campaigns around an audience.

How will they measure it? You want a test with a control: the same campaign with and without an Audiences list, over a fixed period. The improvement figures on Shopify's app listing are vendor claims, not a forecast for your store.

Red flags. Guaranteed cuts in acquisition cost, a pitch to stores that aren't on Plus, or a request for your owner login when the job only needs ad-account access and app permissions.

A sensible paid first task. Setup plus one exclusion audience on one ad platform, with a review after a set period. It shows how they work before you hand over the wider budget.

Four eligibility checks. The store must be on Shopify Plus, use Shopify Payments, be based in the United States or Canada, and operate in and sell to those markets. Miss one and no amount of expert help changes the answer.

Shopify Network Intelligence has to be on. Using Audiences requires Network Intelligence to be enabled in your store's privacy settings. Check it before blaming the app for empty audiences.

Ad-account access sets the timeline. Every platform connection needs admin permissions on the ad account. Meta also requires two-factor authentication on the account and full control of the business and ad accounts. If your agency holds only partial access, the account owner has to grant more before Audiences can connect.

Where the store is based matters, not the team. Eligibility follows the store's location and markets, not your agency's. Three of the six badge holders are in Canada, two are in North Macedonia and one is in Romania, and any of them can set up a qualifying US or Canadian store.

Data handling, in plain terms. The raw data transmitted to an ad platform is used to match that platform's records and then deleted. That's the answer to give a cautious finance or legal colleague, alongside Shopify's state privacy law compliance guidance for the app.

On these six profiles, design, development and store setup each appear four times, and two add technical support. Applied to Audiences, the work looks like this: