Facebook lookalike audiences can take past customer data and help find your new best customers all across the Facebook platform. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that draws website conversion data from your customers to identify others who are likely to take those same actions.
It’s an audience matchmaker for marketers on steroids. By giving Facebook a list of people, they use they’re algorithms to find more people just like them without you having to set interest or demographic based targeting criteria.
Check out our post on Facebook Retargeting to help you get the most out of your ad budget!
Steps to Create a Facebook Lookalike Audience
Step 1: From the Facebook Ads Manager, go to Audiences.
Step 2: Click Create Audience.
Blue button found in the top left of your screen.
Step 3: Click Lookalike Audience.
Step 4: Choose your Audience Source.
This will either be a custom audience, pixel data, app data or fans of your page. Your source must contain at least 100 people from the same country.
Step 5: Select the countries or regions you’d like to to pull customer data from to populate a lookalike audience.
Step 6: Choose your the number and size of your new audiences.
Audience size ranges from 1% to 10% of the combined population of your selected ad set locations. A 1% lookalike consists of the people most similar to your source. Increasing the percentage creates a bigger and broader audience.
Step 7: Click Create Audience
Step 8: Select your new lookalike audience to target for your new ad campaign.
Tips for Using Facebook Lookalike Audiences
Try out these tips when using Facebook lookalike audiences to increase their performance.
- Use the right source type for your goals – Depending on your overarching goal with your ad you’ll want to be using different lookalike audiences. For example, if your trying to increase website purchases consider sing past purchases or even add to carts as a lookalike source to find more people like your past customers. Whereas if you’re goal is to run brand campaigns and get more Facebook page likes, a lookalike source of current Facebook page fans would be better suited.
- Experiment with different custom audiences – There so man options for lookalike sources it would be foolish not to try out at least a few of them. Whether it be website visitors, newsletter subscribers, or if they watched your most recent Facebook video.
- Test different sizes – It’s impossible to tell which lookalike audience size is going to perform best. Will it be the 1% group, 4% group or 3% to 6% group? When making lookalike audiences make as many as your budget can allow and test them against each other. You might be surprised which one comes out on top.
- Use customer value option – Not all customers you have are equally beneficial. Some are big spenders. Some are repeat buyers. Use Facebook’s customer value option to create a lookalike not for all purchases, but rather the best purchases.
- Narrow your Facebook lookalike audiences further – Just because you used a lookalike source of male and females between 18 and 65 doesn’t mean you have to target all of them. Even after creating the lookalike audience you can still specify the gender, age and other factors for a more targeted approach.