Facebook Lookalike Audiences: the one and only guide you'll ever need

Introduction

Do you like your current customers and want to find more like them? Facebook Lookalike audiences are the solution for you. In this guide, we'll tell you everything you need to know about them.

What is Facebook Lookalike Audience?

A Facebook Lookalike Audience is an audience of Facebook users who act similarly to an existing custom audience. You can use this audience in your Facebook campaigns as the target audience. To create a lookalike audience, Facebook uses its machine learning capabilities to find users of similar demographics, common interests or those that tend to behave in a specific way, which makes them similar to a custom audience.

Advantages of using Facebook Lookalike Audiences:

In digital marketing, similar audiences are a perfect choice for ad campaigns to increase website traffic, brand awareness, and in general, improve the marketing funnel.

Facebook Lookalike Audience opens many opportunities for marketers to engage with a highly interested audience that is most likely to make a purchase, submit a lead form, or subscribe to a newsletter. Here are the main advantages of using Facebook lookalike audiences:

1. A quick way to expand your targeting:

A Facebook Lookalike Audience is the easiest way to expand your ad set targeting by creating an audience that is most likely to be your potential customers and who should be interested in your brand. You need only a few minutes to easily create audiences that will let you target fresh audiences with high intent in your ad sets.

2. Easy way to find new customers

To create lookalike audiences, you need only a few steps to create an audience of users who should have high intent in your brand, compared to spending a lot of time and money on searching your potential customers by using interests for targeting.

3. Lower cost

In Facebook, advertising to lookalike audiences has lower CPM than interest targeting or customers based audiences.

How to create a Custom Audience

To create lookalike audiences, you need to prepare a custom audience that will be a seed audience for a lookalike audience.

Step 1: Go to "audiences" in Facebook Ads Manager

Step 2: IN the left corner, click on "Create Audience">"Custom Audience"

Step 3: Choose a custom audience source

Sources of existing prospects include

1. Existing customers (using Customer List)

2. Website visitors(for this you need to launch Facebook Pixel on the website)

3. App activity

4. People who engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page

5. People who interacted with a lead form, video, or catalog

6. Had offline activity with your store

Step 4: Set up your audience source

Step 5: Type the name and description of your audience

Step 6: Click "Create audience"

How to create a Lookalike Audience

Step 1: Go to "audiences" in the Facebook ads manager

Step 2: IN the left corner, click on "Create Audience">"Lookalike Audience"

Step 3: Choose your lookalike source

Here you should choose any of your custom audiences.

Step 4: Select the audience location

The selected audience location should have the same country as your ad set targeting.

Step 5: Select Audience size

Step 6: Click "Create Audience"

Important points about creating lookalike audiences

1. Facebook recommends for the selected source audience to have between 1000 and 50000 users

2. Creation process of a new audience may take 6-24 hours.

3. In Facebook ads account, you can create up to 500 lookalike audiences from a single source audience.

Best practices for Lookalike Audiences

1. For e-commerce business: Lookalike audience based on best customers by lifetime value performs the best in most cases. For example, you have a lot of customers, but you want to find a similar audience to people who have spent more than a certain amount of money.

2. For lead gen business: Lookalike audience of current customers.

3. Lookalike audience based on purchases, initiated checkouts or adds to cart.

4. Use 0-1%, 1-5%, and 5-10 audience sizes

5. Lookalike audience of website visitors by time spent

Summary

Facebook Lookalike Audiences can be a huge improvement for your Facebook marketing. By making good use of them, you can vastly expand your client base and bring more conversions, sales, and profits to your business.

And if you really want to squeeze the most out of your Meta marketing, consider some professional assistance.