One of the key components to a successful Facebook ad campaign is choosing the right audience. While your creative can be 100000% on point, and your campaign settings are all buttoned up and ready to go, with the wrong audience, you simply won’t achieve the results you are looking for. This is no surprise! Selling a car to people with no driver’s license is not going to get you anywhere, so how do you find just the right group of people, with driver’s licenses to buy your car?

Although Facebook has many different targeting options for you to choose from, today we will focus specifically on what is known as a Lookalike audience.

What is a Lookalike audience?

A lookalike audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your best existing customers. To use the car analogy from earlier, it would be asking Facebook to go out and find you a group of people that match those that have already purchased from you. If your purchasers have driver’s licenses, Facebook will recognize that and find others in that similar space.

How does a Lookalike Audience Work?

When creating a Lookalike Audience, you start by choosing a source audience. These audiences can be a Custom Audience created with information pulled from a pixel, mobile app, or fans of your Page. Facebook then identifies the commonalities between people within this source. An example of this is demographic information or interests. Then Facebook delivers ads to an audience of people who are similar to them; a Lookalike of them.

Lookalike Audience Size

You can choose the size of a Lookalike Audience during the creation process. Usually, smaller audiences match your source audience more closely. Creating a larger audience will increase your potential reach, but unfortunately reduces the level of similarity between the Lookalike Audience and source audience. Generally, an audience source between 1,000 to 50,000 values performs much more effectively. 

When creating a lookalike audience you can choose the percentage. For example, a 1% lookalike will be the 1% of Facebook users in your chosen location that most closely match the source audience. 

Fortunately, a lookalike will dynamically update every 3 to 7 days as long as the source audience it is derived from is also dynamically updating. Some examples of this are custom audiences based on pixel events. This saves a lot of time as you will not have to keep creating new audiences for every new campaign you create.

The overall quality of a source can have a significant impact too. For example, if a source audience is made up of high-quality customers rather than all of your entire customer base, a lookalike for this audience could result in better conversions.

Some Additional Information To Consider

It’s not that cut and dry. Since Facebook is doing the work for you with an automated algorithm, it is important to know some of the specific rules surrounding this process, in order to fully take advantage of this very handy feature.

• Lookalikes 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 Facebook 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 always manually exclude your base audience when creating your 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.

There you have it! Give Facebook a list of licensed car drivers and it’ll find you more people that are the same. It’s a powerful tool that creates a community that dynamically updates as your customers update. If your brand or product begins to transition into a new crowd, your Lookalike audience will follow suit! What are you waiting for? Go find your audience, they’re out there and waiting to buy!