Facebook has become an incredibly important tool for businesses of all sizes. In addition to helping you reach your current customers, Facebook also provides you with a multitude of ways to target new customers based on interests, demographics, and behaviors. One of the best ways to do this is by creating lookalike audiences. In this blog post, we will provide you with a variety of lookalike audiences to get you started. We will discuss how to create a custom audience and use that to create a lookalike audience on Facebook and provide tips for targeting new customers!
Why are lookalike audiences important for me?
Facebook lookalike audiences are important because they help you target new potential customers and website traffic that is similar to an existing audience. This could be a list of your best customers, email lookalike audiences, or pixel-based lookalikes.
By finding people who share similar traits with your existing audiences, you can more easily target your marketing messages and improve your chances of making a sale.
For example, if you sell women's clothing, you might create a lookalike audience of women who have purchased from you in the past. This way, you can show your ads to a group of people who are more likely to be interested in what you're selling.
Lookalike audiences can also be created based on interests, demographics, or even behavior. The more information you have about your existing customers, the easier it will be to find new potential customers who look like them.
So Which Lookalike Audiences Should I Create?
Great now that I know what Facebook lookalike audiences are, how can they help my business grow?
Here are some examples of lookalike audiences you should create:
Internal Lists (Email Provider Based)
Purchasers: Lookalike audiences based on your high-value customers.
Product Launch: List of people who indicated an interest in a previous product launch or a list of people who are past customers of a previous launch.
Email/SMS List: Create an email lookalike audience based on your existing email/SMS list.
Category Based: Do you offer multiple products. Create a lookalike audience of people who have purchased or signed up to indicate interest in that category of products.
Website Visitors (Conversion API & Facebook Pixel Based Audiences)
Category Based: If your list is relatively small. A broader way to target category-based audiences is by building lookalike audiences of website visitors who visited a collection page, product description page (PDP), or added to cart. This audience may not be as effective as a purchase-based audience, but there will be a larger seed audience to start with.
Retail Based: Do you have a physical location? Create lookalike audiences of people who live in the same city as your physical store.
Step Based: Website visitors in the last 180 days, pageview 180 days, add to cart last 90, purchasers in the last 90.
Engagement Based Audience
Facebook: Create a lookalike audience based on engagement with your Facebook page: This is a good option if you want to target people who are already familiar with your brand.
Instagram: Create a lookalike audience from your Instagram account: This is a good option if you want to target people who are interested in visual content.
Shopping: Create a lookalike audience from your store's website: This is a good option if you want to target people who are interested in purchasing products from your store.
Video Views: With video content becoming even more important today. Creating a lookalike based on the watch rate of your videos can help you generate more views at the top of the funnel.
Final Word Before Creating Lookalike Audience
There are many ways to create a lookalike audience. The lookalike audience will only be as good as your source audience. The goal for Facebook is to create a lookalike audience that can closely match your existing audiences. If that audience is not driving sales, visitors, sign-ups, etc. Then the lookalike you create will not work.
Finally, each audience listed above has its benefits and drawbacks depending on your funnel and objective. If you would like to learn how we incorporate Facebook lookalikes into our funnels to create a sustainable scaling plan for Facebook ads. You can do that with our guide above.
Tips for targeting new customers with a lookalike audience
Below are some additional notes on lookalikes that you might find helpful
180 days is currently the max window for creating custom audiences. If your website visitors do not revisit you within that time frame they will no longer be included in your custom audience. And this won't be considered a factor when creating your lookalike audience.
For audience size start with a small customer list: If you have a large customer list, you can create multiple lookalike audiences and target them with different ads. This will help you to fine-tune your targeting and find the right audience for your business.
How Do I Create A Lookalike Audience On Facebook?
If you are looking for how to create your lookalike audiences the below guide will walk you through how to do this.
Getting started with creating Facebook lookalike audiences.
1. Open business.facebook.com and go to your Audiences tab in Ads Manager. If this is your first time in audience manager you should see this screen.
2. Click Create a Lookalike Audience. You should see the below image.
3. For your source audience. If this is your first time creating a lookalike audience you will need to create a custom audience. You can do this by clicking the "Create new source" button above.
4. Add in your new source audience. In my case, I choose Website Visitors in the last 180 days. Select the country you want your audience to be in. If you already have existing custom audiences you can use these custom or Saved Audience, you can also use people who've interacted with your Page, app, or website as we've discussed above.
5. Choose your audience size (the default is 1%), then click Create Audience. If you have the budget it can be worth it to test 2%, 2-5%, and 5-10% as these will sometimes give you a different result.
6. Click Save. In the end, you should have something like the below.
7. Open your Facebook ads manager and select your target audience the lookalike you just created.
8. From here you can create multiple ad sets and test each of the lookalike audiences in different ad sets to see if performance defers.
Connecting Lookalike Audiences To The Bigger Picture.
In summary, lookalike audiences are an excellent way to drive new relevant website traffic to your site. However, if not connected to a larger marketing strategy the best targeting will leave you wasting your company's dollars with little to show for it.
If you would like an audit of your marketing funnel you can schedule a call with me.
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