# Audience & targeting

Choose who a campaign reaches — your whole audience, a segment, or a custom filter — exclude who shouldn't get it, and watch the live recipient count update as you go.

**Language:** en
**Audience:** platform
**TLDR:** The Audience step decides who receives the campaign: the default is All audience, or narrow it by picking a saved segment, a data source, a tag or a list, and optionally exclude another group. The recipient count recalculates live as you include and exclude. New segments are created and saved in the Audience section, not inside the campaign itself.
**Translation key:** platform.campaigns.audience-targeting
**Search keywords:** campaign audience, who receives, recipients, targeting, segment, all audience, include, exclude, exclusion, available audience, estimated reach, recipient count, deliverable contacts, data source, tag, list, custom segment, advanced targeting, consent policy, sms fallback
**Related pages:** /platform/es/campaigns/audience-targeting, /platform/en/campaigns, /platform/en/campaigns/creating-a-campaign, /platform/en/campaigns/compliance-policies, /platform/en/audience, /platform/en/channels/rcs/sms-fallback
**Docs index (every page):** https://docs.instasent.com/llms.txt
**This zone's index:** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/llms.txt
**This page:** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/campaigns/audience-targeting/ (HTML) · https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/campaigns/audience-targeting.md (Markdown)
**Other language (es):** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/es/campaigns/audience-targeting.md

The **Audience** step is where you decide who a campaign reaches. You choose what
to **include**, optionally **exclude** part of it, and a live count shows how many
contacts will actually be messaged — recalculated as you change your selection.

## Who receives the campaign

Under **Include**, the default is **All audience** — everyone in the project. To
narrow it down, open the selector and choose from:

- A saved **segment**.
- A **data source** (an import or integration).
- A **tag** or a **list**.

If you need a new segment, the **Add custom segment** link takes you to the
**Audience** section to create and save it there; the filter isn't built inside the
campaign itself. Once it's saved, you come back to this step and select it. Defining
and saving segments, and the attributes you filter on, are explained in
[Audience](/platform/en/audience).

## The recipient count

As soon as you define which contacts to include and exclude, the panel shows two numbers:

- **Available audience** — everyone you've included, with nothing subtracted yet.
- **Contacts** — how many will actually receive the campaign, and the figure that
  matters. It starts from the available audience and subtracts anyone who can't
  receive this send: those without a valid number for the channel, those the channel
  can't reach, those you've excluded, and those left out by the campaign's consent
  policy.

A per-country breakdown shows where those contacts are. The count is **recalculated
live** every time you change the include or the exclude, so the number you see is
always the real recipient count.

For an **RCS** campaign with SMS fallback, the count reflects everyone reachable
across **both** channels — RCS for contacts who support it, SMS for those who don't.
See [SMS fallback](/platform/en/channels/rcs/sms-fallback).

> **Note**: Who the campaign is *allowed* to reach — and what happens when someone opts out —
> is set by the **consent policy**. You choose it in the **Campaign details**, not in
> this step, even though the recipient count here already reflects it. How each policy
> works is explained in
> [Compliance policies](/platform/en/campaigns/compliance-policies).

## Excluding contacts

Use the **Exclude** section to leave a saved segment out — for example, to skip
customers who bought in the last week. The contacts you exclude are removed from the
ones you included, and the recipient count drops to match.

> **Note**: Excluding a segment is part of **advanced targeting**, available on higher plans.
> If it's not enabled on yours, you'll see an upgrade prompt next to the Exclude
> section.

![The Audience step: include and exclude selectors with the live recipient count and country breakdown](/platform/en/campaigns/images/audience-targeting--1-audience-step.png)
*The Audience step: include, exclude, and the live recipient count.*

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