What is a Lookalike Audience? | Your Charisma

Lookalike audiences are one of the most profitable audience groups on Facebook. The platform utilizes data mining in order to target specific users with your Facebook Ads. No one is shocked when they hear Facebook is collecting data on them. Data mining has been a key feature for attracting more businesses & marketers to the platform. The reason being, incredibly targeted audiences can be built using all the audience analytics Facebook has to offer. Audience analytics gives incredible insight into purchasing behavior, interests, device usage and so much more! While this may seem “creepy” to many, this data is a marketing gold mine. Just below we are going to be covering one of the most powerful audience analytics, Lookalike Audiences.

Should You be Using Lookalike Audiences?

Do you want to sell more while spending less? Of course, the answer is yes! Lookalike audiences are Facebook generated audiences that have incredibly high conversion rates. If you want to drastically increase ROI on all your Facebook ad campaigns, then utilizing lookalike audiences is going to be a huge game changer.

What are Lookalike Audiences?

Using audience data that you provide, Facebook will create an audience that closely matches yours, to target with Facebook Ads. The audiences that are generated by Facebook are called lookalike audiences. Lookalike audiences consist of Facebook users that are similar or “look like” your audience. Facebook is able to draw connections using their vast amount of user data.

The purpose of a lookalike audience is to reach users that have never been exposed to your brand/business, in order to build brand awareness and authority. Thus, spending on Facebook ads is done more efficiently with a higher ROI. Instead of wasting money trying to figure out which custom audience works best, your lookalike audience will prove to be drastically more receptive to your ads.

The reason conversion rates for lookalike audiences are so high is that the data used to generate them was pulled from your Facebook Pixel. Which means Facebook is constructing audiences based on successful website views or events. Bringing higher conversion rates for your Facebook ads.

How to Build a Lookalike Audience?

If you have just started using Ads Manager or the Facebook Pixel, then there will not be enough website data to draw similarities. When it comes to building your lookalike audience it is imperative to send quality traffic to your website. Generally, Facebook recommends a source audience with between 1,000 to 50,000 people, where source quality matters. Facebook uses pixel data to create audiences. Thus, initial high-quality traffic will lead to higher quality lookalike audiences.

Here are some additional bits of information from Facebook to consider when creating Lookalike Audiences.

• Your Lookalike Audience will only include people from the country/countries you select during creation.
• Your source audience must contain at least 100 people from a single country in order for us to use it as the basis for a Lookalike Audience.
• You can create up to 500 Lookalike Audiences from a single source audience.
• People in your source audience will be excluded from your Lookalike Audience unless you use a pixel as your source audience.
• You can use multiple Lookalike Audiences at the same time for a single ad set. The ad set will target your ads to people who are in any of the selected Lookalike Audiences.

How To Start Creating Your Lookalike Audience

1. Go to your audiences page here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager/audiences/
2. Click Create a Lookalike Audience
3. Choose your source (based on an app, conversion pixel, or Facebook page)
4. Select the country where you’d like to find a similar set of people
5. Choose your desired audience size with the slider
6. Click Create Audience

These steps were pulled directly from Facebook Help.

Conclusion

Lookalike audiences serve as one of the most profitable audience sets on Facebook. The real value of lookalike audiences stems from the initial source of audience data. In order to have highly targeted lookalike audiences that have extremely high conversions, the initial pixel data comprised of high-quality traffic data. Use lookalike audiences in your next Facebook Ad set and see the difference in results!