Facebook Lookalike Audiences is an effective audience targeting type which allows you to zone in on a potential audience that is similar to the one you are targeting.
To create a Lookalike Audience you need to first choose a source audience. A source audience maybe a remarketing list, a custom demographic audience or even an audience that is created with your website pixel data.
Once you have set your source audience, Facebook will then go out and identify similar qualities and demographic interests to people in that source audience. After you have set your source audience, you will have the ability to set the audience through a percentage range. Creating a larger audience will increase the reach of your lookalike audience but also broaden its similarity with your source audience. We generally recommend setting up multiple lookalike audiences and split testing the performance. A setup with a 2%, 3% and 5% targeting range is often a good start.
To activate a look alike audience, your source audience must contain at least 100 people from a single country.
To get started in creating a Facebook Lookalike Audience browse to the audiences tab in your ads manager, then click on the create audience drop and choose Lookalike Audience.
After you have chosen Lookalike Audience, select the source for your Lookalike audience as mentioned above, as a general rule you should try to zone in on 1,000 -50,000 of your best performing customers or audiences. If you have lifetime value data, transaction data or even engagement data, this will prove to be quite advantageous at this step to help you zone in on the right audience. Once the source audience has been chosen you are almost ready to use the audience, simply set the country where you like to target and set your audience size – as mentioned above try and run with 2%, 3% and 5% to start.
Remember you’ll need to wait for your Lookalike Audience to update before using it. This may be take anywhere between 6 & 24 hours.
It’s as simple as that and very effective when setting up new Facebook campaigns. If you would like to know more or have any questions, feel free to leave us a comment below.