# Use audiences, preferences, and connected sources

Understand audience tabs, WhatsApp-synced people and recipients, and paid-ad lead routing without confusing a saved list with platform targeting.

Canonical: https://docs.lead-knight.com/en/audiences/use-audiences/


## Three meanings to keep separate

| Term | What it controls |
|---|---|
| A saved audience in **Audiences** | Membership of a named group of people, its preferences, notes, and recorded activity. |
| **Audiences** in a WhatsApp recipient picker | Which saved groups contribute people to that send's recipients. Selecting a group is not sending to a WhatsApp group chat. |
| **Audience** in the paid-ad editor | The advertising platform's targeting: who may see an ad. It is not selection of a saved CRM audience. |

A fourth, separate control, **Where leads go**, chooses the saved audience that receives an ad's submitted leads. It controls inbound organization, not who sees the ad.

## Navigate an audience's detail page

Open **Audiences**, then click a name. The detail route is `/audiences/<id>`. **People**, **History**, **Preferences**, **Notes**, and **Insights** are tabs on that page, not separate routes. The header shows the owner, access badge, people count, and source/sync information when available.

Use [Add and manage people](https://docs.lead-knight.com/en/audiences/add-people/) for **People**, including filters, selection, promotion, and removal. Use [Create and manage an audience](https://docs.lead-knight.com/en/audiences/create-audience/) for naming, sharing, merging, and deletion.

## Preferences describe the audience

A non-viewer with management access can edit the main **Preferences** form. Review the settings and click its **Save** button; audience fields and sharing have their own save controls.

| Setting | Available choices and rules |
|---|---|
| **Language** | **Not set**, **Hebrew**, or **English**. This is the audience's language preference, not a command to translate all existing information. |
| **Preferred channel** | **Not set**, **Email**, **WhatsApp**, or **Both**. Choosing a preference does not connect an account or launch a send. |
| **Only send during these hours** | Enable it to enter **From** and **Until**. The start and end must be different valid times; the audience's stored time window uses the workspace timezone. |
| **Sending days** | Choose at least one day. All seven days represents no weekday restriction. |
| **How the assistant should write to them** | Free-text writing guidance, up to 2,000 characters. |
| **Topics they care about** | Enter a topic and use **Add topic**, or press Enter. Up to 20 distinct topics, each up to 60 characters; remove an unwanted topic with its remove control. |
| **Promote to contact when they click an email** | Stores the audience's automatic-promotion preference for email clicks. It does not promote the entire audience when you save it. |

These are audience settings, not a replacement for the final campaign's recipient, consent, scheduling, and approval checks. Saving this form does not send anything, and a preferred channel does not make every person eligible for that channel.

### Audience-specific fields

In **Preferences** → **Fields**, use **Add field** to create a field for information specific to this audience. Supply **Field label**, **Field key**, and **Field type**:

- **Text**, **Number**, **Date**, or **Choice**.
- A key contains 1–40 lowercase letters, digits, or underscores; a saved key is not editable in this form.
- A label contains up to 100 characters. There can be at most 40 fields in an audience.
- For **Choice**, enter **Choices** and use **Add · Choices** for more, up to 50 choices. Individual choices are limited to 100 characters.
- Use **Move up**, **Move down**, or **Remove** to adjust the definition list, then **Save** in the fields section.

Fields created by file import also count toward the same 40-field total. Audience fields are not interchangeable with CRM custom fields: an audience-specific value belongs to that audience membership.

### Sharing

The **Shared with** section is shown only with the required administrative audience rights. Shares are explicit and do not expire automatically. Removing one does not cancel separate access through ownership or workspace-paid visibility. See [Create and manage an audience](https://docs.lead-knight.com/en/audiences/create-audience/) for the steps.

## History, notes, and insights

### History

**History** records supported membership and activity events, such as a person joining or leaving, becoming a contact, moving from Contacts, audience merges/splits, and recorded email activity. Each event shows its actor and time when available. **Load more** loads older events.

The **Growth over the last 12 weeks** table groups joined, left, and unsubscribed totals by week. **No activity yet.** is the event-list empty state; it does not mean a message failed.

### Notes

Use **Notes** for context about the audience as a whole:

1. With management access, enter text in **Add a note**, up to 4,000 characters.
2. Click **Add**. The note appears with its author and time, and the input clears after success.
3. Use **Delete note** beside an existing note if it should be removed and you have permission.

**No notes yet.** is normal for a new audience. These are not the notes attached to an individual contact's CRM record.

### Insights

**Insights** lists recorded sends with their subject or message excerpt, channel, date, and recipient, accepted, clicked, and unsubscribed counts. For email sends with recorded link data, **Top clicked links** shows URLs and click counts. The screen uses the workspace timezone for send dates.

When no sends are returned, the tab displays **Insights appear after the first email send.** This empty-state text is not a promise that every channel or historical send has complete tracking. Selecting an audience in a draft is not itself a send or an insight record.

## WhatsApp sources: sync is not CRM promotion

A connected WhatsApp account's audience-selection dialog is titled **What to keep as audiences?** It can retain people from **Groups**, **The phone's contacts**, and available **Labels**.

- Select the WhatsApp groups to retain as audiences. **Search groups** and **Select all groups** help with the displayed list.
- Enable **The phone's contacts** to retain people saved in that phone's address book.
- For available labels, choose **Audience** or **Contacts** deliberately. The **Contacts** label option is an explicit choice to use CRM contacts, not the default meaning of keeping an audience.
- Click **Save**. The confirmation says **Saved. Audiences fill in as WhatsApp syncs.** This is not an immediate guarantee that all source members have arrived.

New people retained as audience members do not automatically become CRM contacts. A person already in Contacts can also be a member; the existence of that membership does not mean the sync created a new contact. **Promote to contact** is the separate member action when promotion is intended.

A synced audience's header identifies the source and last sync. If the source list is empty, the dialog advises keeping WhatsApp Web open and trying again; a source that has not synced yet can show **not yet**. Do not assume that an empty retained audience contains no people in the original WhatsApp source.

For connection setup, see [Connections and destinations](https://docs.lead-knight.com/en/channels/overview/). Do not assume that simply connecting WhatsApp has automatically turned every group participant or phone contact into a CRM contact.

## Use a saved audience for WhatsApp recipients

When composing a WhatsApp campaign using selected recipients:

1. Open the recipient picker's **Audiences** tab. This tab is available in selected-recipient mode, not the all-consented selection mode.
2. Review each audience name and people count, then select the required audiences. Up to 50 audiences can be selected for a send.
3. Review the selected audience chips. Use a chip's remove control to remove that audience from this send's selection; this does not delete the audience or change its members.
4. Continue through the campaign's recipient review and sending requirements. Choosing an audience alone neither sends the message nor bypasses permission, consent, or suppression checks.

Audience recipients are resolved from live memberships and usable, permitted phone identities. The audience's total member count is therefore not a guarantee of the final number of sendable recipients. An audience source representing a WhatsApp group does not make this the same as posting into that group's chat.

**No audiences yet.** in this picker means no saved audiences are available in the current view. Create or populate an audience first. If the list fails to load, use **Try again** rather than making duplicate audiences.

## Route paid-ad leads into an audience

When the live ad editor exposes **Where leads go**:

1. Open that control for the ad and review the currently selected destination.
2. Choose **Automatic: {name}**, a listed existing audience, or **New audience…**. Creating a new audience opens the audience-name/language dialog.
3. After choosing, the routing setting saves immediately and copies that ad's existing leads into the chosen audience. It does not send email or change lead ownership.
4. Use **Add existing leads to this audience** to apply the current choice again to the ad's existing leads. Review the added, already-present, and unresolved counts shown afterward.

The ad creator must be able to manage the destination audience. If that access is unavailable, choose another audience or use the automatic option. If a previously chosen audience becomes unavailable, new leads fall back to the automatic audience when it is available.

This control is hidden when the API does not support it. If the paid-ads area itself is not shown in your menu, it is not enabled for your workspace; do not treat this guide as an availability promise.

### This does not change ad targeting

The paid-ad editor's **Audience** step, headed **Who should see it?**, configures platform targeting such as locations and supported audience criteria. It does not select the people in a saved audience as ad viewers. Conversely, choosing **Where leads go** does not alter locations, age, interests, or platform targeting. See [Paid ads](https://docs.lead-knight.com/en/paid-ads/overview/) for that workflow.

## If something goes wrong

- Preferences report **Choose different start and end times and at least one sending day.**: check the time window and reselect at least one day, then **Save**.
- A tab shows **Something went wrong. Please try again.**: use **Try again** in that section; an error is not the same as an empty history, notes, or insights result.
- **Private contact** appears: the audience is visible but the person's CRM information is not fully shared. Audience sharing does not override that boundary.
- WhatsApp audience counts differ from the eventual recipient count: check phone availability, current membership, permissions, consent, and suppression in the sending workflow.
- **Audience unavailable** appears in ad routing: choose a manageable destination or the automatic option, and check the fallback warning.
- A WhatsApp source does not fill immediately: check the last-sync information and the connected account rather than re-importing it as contacts.

## Related pages

- [Audiences overview](https://docs.lead-knight.com/en/audiences/overview/)
- [Create and manage an audience](https://docs.lead-knight.com/en/audiences/create-audience/)
- [Add and manage people](https://docs.lead-knight.com/en/audiences/add-people/)
- [Campaigns](https://docs.lead-knight.com/en/campaigns/overview/)
- [Connections and destinations](https://docs.lead-knight.com/en/channels/overview/)
- [Paid ads](https://docs.lead-knight.com/en/paid-ads/overview/)
- [Contacts and CRM](https://docs.lead-knight.com/en/contacts/overview/)