How to Use Facebook Lookalike Audience?
What is a Lookalike Audience?
Facebook Lookalike Audience represents an ad-targeting option for a totally new target audience that shares characteristics with your existing ones, based on previous engagements with your business account or ads.
The concept here is simple. Instead of researching a new audience manually, Facebook figures out who’d be most likely to click through your campaigns on your behalf. This is determined by factors such as interests, interactions (think: “likes,” comments, shares) and previous ad clicks.
What makes Lookalike Audiences so special?
- They save you a ton of time. If you’ve already gone through the legwork of fine-tuning a Custom Audience, you’ve done the hard part. Lookalike Audiences allow you to squeeze more out of what you’ve already established.
- In theory, Lookalike Audiences are “proven” versus creating something cold. That’s because they’re based on parameters that show user interest.
- Lookalike Audiences can easily supplement your existing ads. For the sake of stretching your digital social media budget, Lookalike Audiences allow you to experiment and target multiple audiences at once without running totally different campaigns.
How to use Facebook Lookalike Audiences
- Step 1: From the Facebook Ads Manager, go to Audiences.
- Step 2: Click Create audience and choose Lookalike Audience.
- Step 3: Choose your source audience. Remember, this will be a custom audience you’ve created from customer information, Pixel or app data, or fans of your page.
Note: Your source audiences needs to contain at least 100 people from the same country. - Step 4: You had to Select the countries or regions you would like to target. The countries you choose will determine where people in your Lookalike Audience are based, adding a geo-filter onto your Lookalike Audience, but Facebook recently changed this. There is no need to select country anymore.
- Step 5: Choose your desired audience size. Size is expressed on a scale of 1-10. Smaller numbers have high similarity and larger numbers have high reach. Facebook will provide you with an estimated reach for the size you choose.
Note: It can take between six and 24 hours for your Lookalike Audience to be finished, but you can still proceed to ad creation. - Step 6: Create your ad. Go to the Adverts Manager and click Tools, then Audiences, to see if your Lookalike Audience is ready. If it is, select it and click Create Advert.
Tips for using Facebook Lookalike Audiences:
Use the right source audience for your goals
Different custom audiences match different goals.
For example, if your goal is to drive awareness of your marketing business, the audience based on your Page Fans may be a good idea.
If your goal is to increase revene and ROAS, then audience based on spenders will be a better choice.
Test your Audience size
Consider different audience sizes for different campaign goals.
Smaller audiences (1-5 on the scale) will most closely match your custom marketing audience, whereas large audiences (6-10 on the scale) will increase your potential reach, but decrease the level of similarity with your custom audience. If you’re optimizing for similarity, aim for a smaller audience. For reach, go large.
Keep your audience list up-to-date
If you’re providing your own customer information, make sure it’s as current as possible. If you’re creating a custom audience with Facebook data, add date range parameters.
For example, if you’re adding a custom audience based on digital purchases, you may only want to target those who have made a purchase in the last 30 to 90 days.