For marketers, there’s nothing as good as easy optimization. Facebook is one of the social platforms that provide marketers with a near infinite number of ways for reaching their prospects. One of these is Facebook Lookalike audience, which is the perfect way for supercharging your online marketing strategy without breaking the bank.
What is a Lookalike Audience?
For those familiar with Google AdWords Similar Audiences, Lookalikes is a very similar feature, albeit much better. Lookalikes is ideally a way to reach a brand new audience on Facebook, with arguably the best feature of all; the new audience isn’t simply defined by a set or targeting parameters, rather, it actually shares certain traits with your chosen set/group of existing prospects. As such, the degrees of similarity that they represent your choice of source audience, and the possibilities of working with lookalike audiences, are endless.
For instance, if you’re selling plugins, uploading a list of your customer’s email addresses can help you to find users on Facebook who acts as previous plugin buyers. If you want to generate leads, creating a lookalike audience from form submissions can help you reach Facebook users that are more inclined to give up their information.
How Facebook Lookalike Audience Works
If you are already familiar with Facebook advertising, you might have noticed that Lookalike Audiences are currently being promoted as an option on new advertisement of campaigns sets. Ideally, a lookalike audience lets you find users that share common traits with the different optimizations that have previously worked for you.
As such, you can reach users on Facebooks with similar ages, locations, interests, and genders as your current customers with the click of a button. Using such specific behaviors of customers and/or visitors as a target, your new audience list will show similar interests (algorithmically) as deemed important to the success of your business.
You can choose your lookalike audiences based on the visitors who come to your site or the people who like your page. To determine your prospects and their demographics, Facebook uses pixels that you have previously set up on your site. Nonetheless, you have the option of creating lookalike audiences for visitors to your blog, visitors of your site, or a customer lead list that you’ve directly uploaded to Facebook.
What You Need to Know About Lookalike Audiences
The size of your lookalike audience will be determined during the creation process. However, while you might be inclined to maximize the size of your lookalike audience, you should know that smaller audiences tend to perform better. After all, they are more likely to better match your source list more.
It’s recommended that you use a source audience ranging from 1,000 to 50,000 users when building lookalike audiences, which can be quite a challenge for small businesses. Fortunately, it’s possible to create much smaller lookalike audiences; just pay close attention to the quality of your sources.
For the purposes of funneling your prospects, creating a large lookalike audience can amplify the reach of your business. In case you exhaust your options for lookalike audiences, a greater degree of difference and a broader source, along with some of the targeting options offered by Facebook can make for an incredible brand building option through content boosting.
Some pointers to keep in mind:
- The lookalike audience will only consists of people from the countries you explicitly include in your audience creation process
- In general, it’s not necessary to have a geographical relationship between your lookalike audience and your source audience. If, for instance, you choose a source audience of about 500 users from the U.S., you can ideally use your source to build another lookalike audience for potential customers in the U.K.
- Your source audience must contain at least 100 people in order to be eligible to create lookalike audiences
- The people in your source audience will be automatically excluded from your lookalike audience
- A single source audience can actually be used to create up to 500 lookalike audiences
- If you layer your lookalike audiences in a single ad set, your ads will ideally target the users who are members of any of your selected lookalike audiences.
With this in mind, here’s is the process of creating lookalike audience on Facebook ads.
How to Create a Facebook Lookalike Audience
Step one: Create a Facebook custom audience
To create a custom audience, go to your Ads Manager dashboard and select Audiences from the dropdown on the main menu. Click on the ‘Create Audiences” option and then select “Custom Audience”. You will be prompted to choose a source for creating your custom audience.
Your source could be a list of your current client’s phone numbers or email addresses, or mail list imported from either an Excel Spreadsheet or your email management account (MailChimp, Drip, Constant Contact, etc.), or even people that you’ve previously engaged with on Facebook. You can also choose visitors to your site by installing a Facebook Pixel.
For those who already have a ton of custom audiences in their accounts, you should see a vast blue audience names populating the page.
Step Two: Create the Lookalike Audience
With a Custom Audience ready to roll, you can now create your lookalike audience. Click on the “Actions” button and from the drop down menu; select the “Create Lookalike”. This should present you with a few choices.
The first option is selecting the Custom Audience that you’d like to base your Lookalike audience on, if you have more than one custom audience. The next step is choosing the specific country you want to target. The last, which is arguably the most important, is choosing your audience size.
Here, you’ll find a slider that lets you choose between 0 to 10% of the country’s total population as selected above. In general, the lower the percentage you choose, the closer the match should be for your custom audience.
Once you’ve made these selections, click on the “Create Audience” button and admire your work. It could take between 6 to 24 hours for your Lookalike audience to be created, so don’t fret if it doesn’t appear automatically.
Ready To Get Started?
Setting up lookalike audiences on Facebook is that simple. If you’re using Facebook Ads, you have no reason not to use lookalike audiences. It’s one of the most effective ways of deriving real value from Facebook, and can give you an instant leg up on your competition.