The Scenario
You are a marketing ops manager at a DTC brand. You have a Google Sheet with 5,000 customer emails in column A. These are existing buyers you want to retarget on Reddit with a win-back campaign.
The campaign needs the custom audience live before Monday's paid review. It is Thursday afternoon and the paid team is waiting on you.
The bad version:
- You look up how to create a Reddit Ads custom audience via the UI
- You discover the UI requires you to upload a hashed email CSV in a specific format
- You write a script to SHA-256 hash 5,000 emails, generate the CSV, and upload it
- The upload fails because the CSV encoding is wrong
- You fix the encoding, re-upload, and wait for the audience to process
- The audience shows "Estimating size" for two hours and you are not sure if it worked.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the email column and creates the Reddit Ads custom audience directly from the sheet, so you never write a hashing script or format a CSV manually.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create a Reddit Ads custom audience named 'Customer Retargeting — Win-Back' and add all email addresses from column A of my sheet to it. Write the audience ID into cell B1 and the estimated audience size into cell B2 once processing completes.
SheetXAI hashes the emails, calls the Reddit Ads API to create the audience, adds the emails to it, and writes the audience ID and estimated size back into the sheet. The paid team has what they need before end of day.
What You Get
One live Reddit Ads custom audience built from the email column:
- Cell B1 — audience ID for use in campaign targeting
- Cell B2 — estimated audience size returned by the API
- The audience — populated with hashed emails from column A, ready for targeting
The ID in B1 is your reference. Pass it to the campaign manager. Use it in a follow-up prompt to attach the audience to a campaign. You do not navigate the Ads Manager UI at all.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Email lists are rarely clean enough to use directly. SheetXAI handles the cleanup and the upload in the same prompt.
When the email column has duplicates
Your CRM export had duplicate rows. Loading duplicates wastes audience size and can cause API errors.
Deduplicate the email addresses in column A, removing any exact duplicates. Then create a Reddit Ads custom audience named 'Customer Retargeting — Win-Back' from the deduplicated list. Write the audience ID into cell B1 and the final email count into cell B2.
When the list has a mix of subscriber and non-subscriber status
Column B has "Subscriber" or "Non-subscriber" and you only want to target non-subscribers for the win-back campaign.
Filter column A to rows where column B equals "Non-subscriber." Create a Reddit Ads custom audience named 'Non-Subscriber Win-Back' from the filtered email list. Write the audience ID into cell C1 and the email count used into cell C2.
When you need to create multiple audiences from different segments in one pass
You have three customer tiers in column C (Bronze, Silver, Gold) and want a separate retargeting audience per tier.
For each unique value in column C (Bronze, Silver, Gold), filter column A to that tier's emails and create a separate Reddit Ads custom audience named 'Retargeting — [Tier].' Write the audience ID and email count for each tier into a new row in a summary table starting at cell E1, with columns for tier name, audience ID, and email count.
When you need the audience created AND attached to an existing campaign in one shot
The campaign is already live and you want the retargeting audience applied immediately.
Create a Reddit Ads custom audience named 'Customer Retargeting — Win-Back' from the emails in column A. Write the audience ID into cell B1. Then update ad group ID in cell C1 to include this custom audience as a targeting layer.
The pattern: the email list is in the sheet. The audience creation and the campaign targeting update are API calls. You describe both in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet with a customer email list, then ask it to create a Reddit Ads custom audience from the column. The Reddit Ads integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to discover targetable communities from a keyword list or the Reddit Ads in Google Sheets overview.