To filter a CEWP by audience, don’t use the audience mechanism as intended, but use the filter.

When the audience mechanism is used, data will first be queried, next the returned items get filtered by audience. By this, the amount of items, will possibly be not the amount of items expected.

To use the filter to filter audiences, select Audience to filter upon and supply the GUID of the audience. Instead of using the operator ‘Is’, use ‘Contains’. This is because items can be mapped to multiple audiences. This mapping is done in the same field in the database. The Guids are seperated by semicolon.

Hope this helps someone.