Define your audience

Define Your Audience is the wizard step that decides who a campaign actually reaches, and it offers three sources: Segments for a saved, reusable group, Manual Selection for hand-picking rows out of your contact list, and Import Contacts for pulling a fresh list in from a CSV. Segments and Manual Selection are mutually exclusive by design — a campaign sends either to a segment or to an explicit list of contacts, never to both — so choosing a segment clears your manual picks, and ticking a contact clears the segment. Importing counts as picking contacts: imported rows land in your manual selection, which also clears any segment you had chosen. Nothing here is destructive on its own — the audience you build is just the recipient list the rest of the wizard sends against.

A segment is a group of contacts you define once in Contacts and reuse across campaigns, so you never rebuild the same audience twice. The Segments dropdown lists All contacts (no segment) first, then every segment with its contact count and an Active or Static badge — an Active segment re-evaluates its rules and keeps itself current, a Static one is a frozen snapshot, and that difference is what decides who a send actually lands on. Once you pick one, a Targeting bar names it alongside a Clear button, and the search box, filters and row checkboxes switch off — the segment is the audience now, so there is nothing left to hand-pick. Create your own segment builds one without leaving the wizard. What are segments?

Manual Selection is for the one-off audience that doesn't deserve a saved segment — search your contact list and tick the rows you want. Add a filter builds a rule out of an Attribute (Name, Phone, Source or Allow Campaign), an Operation and a Value; stack several rows to keep narrowing, and the trash icon drops one. Filters only change what the table shows — they never select anyone for you. That job belongs to the header checkbox, Select all contacts, and it is worth understanding: it spans every page of the current result, not just the rows on screen, so check the count and your filters before you use it.

Import Contacts pulls a list straight in from a spreadsheet without leaving the campaign. Start with Sample CSV — it downloads a file carrying the columns the importer expects (Name, Phone, AllowCampaign) — then use Import Contacts to pick your filled-in file. Only CSV files are accepted here. There is no mapping step and no preview: the file imports as soon as you choose it, recognised headers map themselves to name, phone and the opt-in fields, and any column WPAUTOAI doesn't recognise is kept as a contact attribute. Import details then reports how many contacts were new, how many existing ones were updated and how many were invalid, while Include imported contacts controls whether the batch joins this campaign's selection — untick it and the contacts still live in Contacts, they just don't get messaged. Import contacts

Two separate things decide how far a campaign can actually go. The meter above the table reads Selected: with your count against your cap, then Contacts remaining, with Daily limit on the right — that cap is your WhatsApp messaging tier from Meta, the maximum unique contacts you can message in a day, and once your picks reach it WPAUTOAI refuses further ones rather than let you build a list that cannot send; on an unlimited or not-yet-loaded tier the limit reads ∞ and nothing is blocked. See What are limits?. Below the table, Exclude invalid contacts handles numbers Meta has marked as invalid for WhatsApp delivery: Exclude invalid contacts from this campaign is ticked for you and skips them on this send — while it is on, those rows cannot be ticked in the table at all — and Always exclude invalid contacts from campaigns states the same exclusion as a standing preference rather than a one-off choice. A third checkbox appears only when invalid contacts actually exist, and it is a different animal entirely — ticking Also delete these invalid contacts from my contacts list is not a campaign setting: the moment you tick it, every one of those contacts is permanently deleted from your contacts list account-wide, with no confirmation prompt, and there is no undo.