Intent Audience Builder

Intent Audience Builder

Pearl Diver’s Intent Builder gives marketers a smarter way to connect with the right audience at the right time. Instead of broad categories or generic lookalikes, it pinpoints prospects actively exploring solutions like yours—driving more relevant engagement and stronger results.

By selecting specific topics and applying tailored filters, teams can quickly build and activate custom audiences across ad platforms and marketing channels.

The result: higher campaign performance, improved efficiency, and a stronger ROI.


Key Features & Capabilities

  1. Extensive Intent Library – Access over 42,000+ topics covering consumer and business interests, from broad industries to niche areas, ensuring relevance for any market.
  2. Custom Audience Creation – Build precise audiences by combining intent signals with demographic or firmographic filters like role, industry, company size, or income.
  3. Real-time High-Intent data – Build audiences with fresh, daily-updated intent signals from billions of behavioral data points, so your audiences always reflect who’s actively researching now.
  4. Seamless Ad Platform Integration – Instantly activate your audiences across Google Ads & Meta. Integration with TikTok, Microsoft and LinkedIn is coming soon.

How to build an Intent audience

  1. Log in to Pearl Diver 
  2. Navigate to Audience
  3. In the Create Audience panel, click “ Create Intent audience
    ”

Step 1: Find – Choose your intent focus

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On the Find page, use the search bar to enter keywords related to your product, service, or target market.
  1. The Find tab is where your intent audience journey begins. Here, you define the type of audience you are targeting by choosing between Consumer topics and Business topics. This ensures your intent strategy aligns with your core market—B2C or B2B.
  2. What are you building intent audiences for?
    1. B2C? → Use Consumer topics
    2. B2B? → Use Business topics
    3. i.e. Type in keywords related to your product category, brand, or niche interests (e.g. "apparel," "organic skincare," "home gym").
      You will get a list of matching topics that reflect what consumers are actively engaging with online.
    4. Select topics by ticking the checkbox at the end of each topic.
  3. Review the list:
    1. Check the topic name, category, and description.
    2. Choose the ones most relevant to your target customer.
    3. Add as many as needed to define your audience.
    4. As you add topics, your audience size updates in real time in the side tray.
  4. Select relevant intent topics:
    From the results, choose one or more topics that best represent your target intent. You can select multiple related topics to broaden the capture of intent signals.
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    Pro Tip: Think like your buyer. What would they be researching when they’re in-market?

 Step 2: Filter – Refine Your Audience

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In the Filter tab, refine the audience by adding filters to align with your ICP or campaign focus.
Combining filters with intent topics is key to aligning the audience with your go-to-market strategy. This step ensures the list isn’t just a random collection of intent signals, but rather your ideal prospects who have intent.

Step 3: Action – Activate Your Intent Audience

Sync it directly to Google ads & Meta.
Integration with LinkedIn, TikTok, Microsoft, LinkedIn is coming soon.

Step 4: Save the audience

Once your selections are complete:
  1. Enter an Audience Name
  2. Add a Description (optional)
  3. Click save

FAQ

How do I know which mode to choose—Consumer or Business?

Ask yourself:
  1. Are you targeting on selling to individual consumers? → Consumer Topics (Business to consumer or B2C)
  2. Are you targeting on selling to other businesses? → Business Topics (Business to Business or B2B)

Can I combine Consumer and Business topics in one Intent Audience?

No. Consumer and Business topics should be kept separate. If you’d like to target both, we recommend creating two separate audiences — one for Consumer topics and one for Business topics.

Why not mix them?

  1. Different data signals: Consumer intent is based on individual behaviors and demographics, while Business intent is based on company-level signals such as industry, revenue, or department.
  2. Cleaner targeting: Keeping them separate ensures your campaigns are tailored and relevant. Mixing the two can result in diluted targeting, making the audience less precise.
  3. Performance impact: Blending Consumer and Business topics often leads to lower performance because the ad platforms can’t optimize properly across two very different data sets.

Why do I only see Locked Intent Audiences in Retool after the release of the Intent Audience Builder? 

Intent audiences created prior to the release of the new tool are locked, contact us at support@blackpearl.com to update these or simply create new ones!


 Why is the total size of topics different from the actual audience size?

The total size of topics is not the same as the final audience size you see after the audience loads.

Why?
  1. Each topic shows its own audience size.
  2. When you add multiple topics, the same people may appear in more than one topic.
  3. The Universal Pearl removes duplicates across topics to give you the true unique audience size. The final Universal Pearl audience size is always the number to trust for campaigns.


What is the difference between Basic Search and Advanced Search in the Intent Audience Builder?

  1. Basic Search lets you keyword search across topics, categories, or descriptions.
  2. Advanced Search allows you to combine categories with keyword search, so you can pick a category (e.g., Health & Wellness) and then search for a keyword (e.g., Vegan) inside that category.
If no categories are selected, Advanced Search works the same as Basic Search — it searches your keywords across all topics and descriptions.

Why don’t Business topics have an Advanced Search option?

Business topics don’t use categories, so Advanced Search isn’t needed. You can search them directly by keywords (topics or descriptions).

Can I connect my intent audience in ad platforms?

Yes! Once you've built your intent audience, you can connect it directly into platforms like Meta (Facebook/Instagram) or Google Ads, streamlining your campaign execution.



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