Below is a polished public help document you can use for Walled Garden.

Custom Audiences let you reach people on Facebook and Instagram who already have a connection to your business, brand, database, website, or past marketing activity.

Instead of relying only on broad targeting, Custom Audiences help you advertise to people who may already know you, have interacted with you, or exist in a list you are legally allowed to use for marketing.

In Walled Garden, Custom Audiences can be especially helpful for real estate agents, mortgage professionals, title companies, brokerages, and marketing teams that want to stay visible to their sphere of influence, past clients, leads, geographic farm lists, website visitors, or event attendees.

A Custom Audience is a CSV file of people you can use when running ads.

Depending on your setup, a Custom Audience may be created from:

For example, a real estate agent might upload a list of past clients, sphere contacts, or homeowners in a geographic farm. A mortgage lender might create an audience of past borrowers, referral partners, or leads who downloaded a guide. A brokerage might create an audience of agents who attended a webinar or visited a recruiting page.

Custom Audiences are best used when you want to reach warmer, more relevant people rather than starting from scratch with a cold audience.

Use a Custom Audience when you want to:

Your sphere already knows you. Running consistent brand, listing, market update, or educational ads to this group can help keep you top of mind.

Good examples:

If you have a list of local contacts, past buyers, or prospects, you can use a Custom Audience to increase visibility for new listings, open houses, just sold campaigns, or market updates.

For housing-related ads, be sure your campaign follows Meta’s Special Ad Category requirements. Housing ads have additional audience restrictions designed to prevent discriminatory targeting. (Facebook)

If you have a homeowner list for a farm area, a Custom Audience can help you stay visible to people in that community.

Best uses include:

For real estate, avoid using Custom Audiences in a way that could be discriminatory or designed to bypass housing ad restrictions.

Sometimes the best use of an audience is simply to make sure the right people repeatedly see your name, face, listings, testimonials, and local expertise.

Custom Audiences are powerful, but they are not always the right fit.

You may not want to use a Custom Audience when:

Only upload lists you have the right to use.

Good list sources may include:

Avoid purchased lists, scraped lists, or lists where people would not reasonably expect to hear from you.

Old lists often perform poorly.

Before uploading, remove:

A clean list helps Meta match more people and helps your campaigns perform better.

Not every contact should receive the same ad. Instead of creating one large list for everyone, consider segmenting by relationship or intent.

Examples:

The more relevant the ad is to the audience, the better the user experience.

A warm audience should not always receive the same message as a cold audience.

For example:

Custom Audiences work best when the ad feels relevant to why that person knows you, or is learning about you for the first time.

Many advertisers only use Custom Audiences when they want an immediate lead.

That is a mistake.

Some of the best Custom Audience campaigns are simple visibility campaigns that keep your brand present over time.

Examples:

This is especially useful for real estate, mortgage, and title businesses where trust and timing matter.

Your audience should not be a one-time upload that sits untouched forever.

A good rhythm:

For larger teams or brokerages, it may be helpful to establish a standard process for who owns list updates and how often they happen.

Very small audiences may limit delivery.

If an audience is too small, Meta may struggle to spend the budget or find enough people to deliver efficiently.

When possible, use Custom Audiences as part of a broader strategy:

Do not create or upload audiences based on sensitive personal attributes.

Avoid lists that are built around:

For housing, employment, and financial services, extra care is required because these fall under Meta’s Special Ad Category rules. Meta’s Advertising Standards prohibit discriminatory practices and require advertisers to comply with applicable laws.

Most real estate-related ads are considered housing ads.

This may include ads for:

Walled Garden is designed to help simplify the real estate ad process, but the advertiser is still responsible for making sure the data, message, offer, and campaign are appropriate for their business and market.

Audience: Past clients and sphere contacts
Goal: Stay top of mind
Ad ideas:

Audience: Local sphere, farm list, or retargeting audience
Goal: Increase exposure for a listing
Ad ideas:

Audience: Homeowner list, seller leads, website visitors
Goal: Generate seller conversations
Ad ideas:

Audience: Realtor partners or referral agents
Goal: Strengthen partner relationships
Ad ideas:

Audience: Agent prospects, event attendees, website visitors
Goal: Attract agents to a team or brokerage
Ad ideas:

Avoid these mistakes when using Custom Audiences:

A Custom Audience is not just a targeting tool.

It is a relationship tool.

The best campaigns use Custom Audiences to continue conversations with people who already have some connection to you. That could mean educating them, reminding them, inviting them, informing them, or giving them a useful reason to take the next step.

For real estate, mortgage, title, and brokerage marketing, Custom Audiences are most effective when they are used consistently over time.

The goal is not always to get an immediate lead today.

The goal is to become the person, brand, or company they remember when the timing is right.

For most Walled Garden users, Custom Audiences are best used for:

Use clean data. Keep your lists updated. Match your message to the audience. Follow Meta’s rules. And remember that Custom Audiences work best when they support a larger marketing strategy, not when they are treated as a one-time campaign shortcut.

Custom Audiences help you advertise with more relevance, more familiarity, and more intention. For many businesses, that is where the best long-term results begin.

When preparing a Custom Audience list for upload, we recommend using a clean spreadsheet with one contact per row and clearly labeled columns.

At minimum, your list should include as much identifying information as possible so Meta can match your contacts to Facebook and Instagram users.

Recommended columns:

You may also include an email address when available. If you have both an email address and phone number, that is great and may help improve match quality. However, having both is no longer required.

A strong Custom Audience list may include:

Before uploading your list, make sure the data is accurate, permission-based, and formatted consistently. Remove duplicates, outdated contacts, invalid phone numbers, and anyone who has opted out of marketing communications.

The cleaner your list is, the better chance Meta has of matching your contacts and delivering your ads to the right audience.

Targeting > Custom Audiences > Upload A New Audience

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Pages > Social Media > Custom Audiences