What is a Facebook Lookalike Audience?
October 7, 2018
What is a Facebook Lookalike Audience? Well, a Facebook Lookalike Audience is an audience that Facebook can create for you with people who have similar traits to those who are in a custom audience of yours. Read on to learn more about Lookalike Audiences and when to use them.
(Pssst! You might also like this blog post with the best Facebook Ads templates).
What is a Facebook Lookalike audience?
You can create a Lookalike Audience of people in your email list, people who’ve visited your website, or people who are in any of the retargeting audiences we talked about in my post about Facebook retargeting audiences.
When you create a Facebook Lookalike Audience, you select a country you’d like Facebook to find these people from and you select a percentage. How it works is, for example, if you chose Australia and 1%, Facebook would build an audience for you with the 1% of all Australians on Facebook who are most similar to the custom audience that you uploaded.
All you need in order to create a lookalike audience is 100 people in the custom audience that are based in the same country. But, the thing here is that it doesn’t need to be the same country as the audience that you’re building. So, for example, I could upload a list of over 100 New Zealanders and ask it to build a lookalike audience of Australians.
When should you use a Facebook Lookalike Audience?
Maybe you have a customer database, and you’d like to upload this to create an audience of people who are just like those customers.
Maybe you have a list of leads and you’d like to find more people who are just like your leads so that you can keep growing your email list with the same sort of people.
Are all Facebook Lookalike Audiences equal?
No, they’re not. A Lookalike Audience from your customer database is likely going to be a much higher quality audience than a lookalike of people who like your Facebook Page or who have interacted with your Instagram profile.
As with most Facebook Ads-related things, the best way to learn which Lookalike Audiences are the best for your business is to just simply test them. Test, test, test, and the measure and repeat.
When should you avoid using Lookalike Audiences?
One common mistake is that people often treat Lookalike Audiences as warm or hot audiences, because they were created from a warm or hot source audience. But, Lookalike Audiences actually are still cold audiences.
Most of the people in your Lookalike Audience won’t have ever heard of your brand before, so make sure you treat them as such.
Layering your lookalike audiences for better results
A trick that I often use is to layer my Lookalike Audiences. So, for example, I might create a broad Lookalike Audience of around 2 or 3%. Then, when I go to set up my Ad Set, I might narrow down the targeting by adding a few interests or a few demographics that the person must match.
This will decrease the audience size, but it will usually improve your targeting and your cost per result.
Don't forget to download my Free Facebook Ads Cheat Sheet for more Facebook Ads tips and tricks.
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