What Is A Facebook Lookalike Audience?

Implementing a Lookalike Audience on Facebook  is now seen as the baby bears porridge for any Facebook advertising campaign. It is an extremely powerful technique that means you will now be able to target new customers based on the data and learnings from what has been successful over previous campaigns. It’s almost like an audience matchmaker for marketeers. For example, if you are selling a product through a paid advertisement, Facebook can now find similar user profiles to somebody who has purchased through one of your adverts in the past and target these profiles who match the successful criteria. It is your way to double down on what is working.

Now that you can reach profiles that are similar to your current customers, this not only will increase the amount of high-quality leads but will also increase your conversion rate. Lookalike Audiences are created and based on source audiences which is sometimes called a ‘seed’ audience too. These audiences can be created based on a vast amount of data, such as:

If you want to create an audience that is based around visitors to your website then you will need to have your Facebook pixel installed. The pixel will provide data of consumers that have been on your website, viewed your product and/or made a purchase etc.

Any customer information that you have gathered through subscriptions can be uploaded through .csv, .txt files or you can simply copy and paste the information that you have.

This form of audience collates information from people who have engaged with your content on Facebook or Instagram. These interactions can be anything from views and likes to completing a lead form.

If your company has its own app for users to download, the app admins can use the data collected from people that have downloaded the app and go into great details of how much interaction the user may have with the app.

Once you have as much data as possible, you can then use multiple Lookalike Audiences on the same campaign and can also pair them with other targeting options like age, gender and interests. Implementing your first Lookalike Audience can seem a daunting task to begin with so below are some tips to follow to give you some help along the way.

Custom audiences will differ depending on the goals of your advertisement. If you’re trying to grow your brand and create an advert based around brand awareness, then you may want to use a source surrounding your current fans of your page. Or, if you’re looking to increase sales then you may want to focus on profiles that have already been on your website and completed transactions.

If you’re uploading your own customer information for your facebook lookalike audience then it’s essential that you keep this information up to date and relevant. When adding an audience based on website visitors, you’re going to want to make sure that this is focused around the last few months of traffic as opposed to out-dated information from years ago. What may have worked then, may not work now.

The better the data you can provide then the better the results will be, it’s as simple as that. It is important to focus on the metrics that will determine your ideal customer. Try to avoid broad audiences like ‘all app installers’ or ‘all website traffic’, as much as this will give you numbers, it will also be a mixture of good customers and bounced customers. Facebook recommends an audience between 1000 and 50,000 but I would still rather have an audience of 500 high-quality customers than 50,000 broad profiles that will be a lottery of the good, the bad and the ugly.

In answer to the question ‘what is a Facebook Lookalike Audience? Well, it’s simple. The aim of the game is to make money and the improvement of Facebook marketing over the years is helping businesses be in the best position possible to constantly improve their ROI. The introduction of Custom and Lookalike Audiences is making it more and more convenient for online advertisers to target the perfect audience, putting your brand in front of consumers who want to see it, every penny of your budget can now be optimised. Semi successful advertising campaigns are now becoming massively profitable through the implementation of Facebook Lookalike Audiences.