Audience Expiration Policy
Expiration Policies for Audiences
To ensure that the data you collect and deliver represents highest relevancy to actual users, TikTok Ads Manager has rules that govern when your audience expires. We determine when data expires based on factors such as activity and timeframe.
What are the Expiration Policies for Audiences?
When an audience meets ALL of the following criteria, the status of the audience is defined as expired.
The audience was not applied to any active ad group in the last 12 months
There was no modification of the audience in the last 12 months. Modification can be further defined as any of the following actions for each audience type respectively.
Audience Type | Modification Actions |
Customer File Audience | 1) Modify the file - Add, Replace or Remove records. 2) Modify the ad group - Rename or Apply the audience to an ad group 3) Modify an associated Lookalike Audience - Use as a seed for Lookalike Audiences, Share or Stop Sharing. |
Engagement Audience | Rename, Apply to ad group, Create Lookalike Audience, Share or Stop Sharing, Use as seed audience for Lookalike Audience |
App Activity Audience | |
Website Traffic Audience | |
Lead Generation Audience | |
Lookalike Audience | Rename, Refresh, Apply to ad group, Share or Stop Sharing |
What happens when an audience becomes expired?
The availability status becomes unavailable.
Audience size is 0.
Advertisers can no longer click the audience to check details.
Advertisers can no longer perform actions such as Edit/Create Lookalike/Apply/Share to the expired audience. The only action available is Delete.
To locate all expired audiences, advertisers can use the filter function and click through Filter by > Audience Status > Expired.
We recommend advertisers to delete expired audiences from their Audience Library.
How do I know which audiences are "About to expire"?
The status for the audience will change to "About to Expire" when the time window between now and the expiration date for that audience is less than or equal to 60 days.
To locate all about to expire audiences, advertisers can use the filter function and click through Filter by > Audience Status > About to expire.
What will happen if an expired audience is associated with an inactive ad group which is planned to go live later?
If the expired audience was applied to an ad group that is planned to go live later, when the ad group goes live, the audience targeting logic will ignore the expired audience. The delivery logic will function as if you did not apply any audience to this ad group.
Best practices for about to expire audiences
In order to avoid the situation where an audience becomes expired and impact future campaign planning, we encourage advertisers to proactively audit their audiences for relevancy and recency.
To locate all about to expire audiences, advertisers can use the filter function and click through Filter by > Audience Status > About to expire.
Advertisers should go through the list of about to expire audiences and delete the ones that they don't need any more. For audiences that are still needed but are about to expire, we recommend advertisers to create new audiences based on the same logic which will include the most up-to-date users.
For special audiences that were captured from annual events which you would like to use for anniversary campaigns later, you can simply update the audience name to avoid such audiences from becoming expired.
Please note that there can be up to a 24 hour lag between a modification action being taken on an audience and the label reflecting this change being updated. For example, if you rename an audience that was "About to expire", it might take 24 hours before this label is then removed.