Facebook Lookalike Audience: Everything You Need To Know!

Facebook Ads feature of lookalike audience has gained a ton of popularity over a past few years. Turns out, it is one of the most useful tools in the digital marketing industry.

If you are beginning with a new initiative, stepping into an account management role with a client, or even building a new Facebook ad account for the first time, it’s highly recommended to use Lookalike Audiences for discovering new audiences.

It has streamlined the process of identifying new and relevant audiences to target without losing much time. Lookalike audience has become an essential part of jump-starting, restarting or expanding any Facebook campaign.

This Facebook Ad feature has helped to produce strong results when the audience you are targeting is making your campaign slump.

What are Facebook Lookalike Audiences?

Lookalike audience is a feature which allows the advertisers to discover and reach more people who are interested in your business or products you have to offer. They are similar to your existing customers.

When an advertiser creates a Lookalike audience, he chooses a source audience and Facebook identifies the common qualities of the people in it.

The source audience can be a custom audience created with the help of Facebook Pixel, your mobile app data or fans of your Facebook Page. The commonalities that Facebook check in the audience provided are related to demographic information and interests.

Facebook then searches for the people who are similar to or ‘look-alike’ them.

This is a great way to find similar users and add them to your targeted audience on the basis of interests, click behavior and conversion habits.

The new users that Facebook finds out are not just defined by a targeting parameter. These new users share similar traits with a similar group of existing prospects.

For example, if you are selling watches, uploading a list of your customer email addresses will make Facebook find more users who act like past watch buyers.

Facebook allows advertisers to determine the size of a lookalike audience during the creation of the campaign.

The common misconception with a lookalike audience is that maximizing the size of lookalikes will bring in more users. When it comes to expanding the reach of the campaign using Lookalike audience, smaller audiences work way better.

This is because Facebook matches the sources you provide closely. Facebook itself recommends using a source audience of between 1,000 to 50,000 people while creating a lookalike audience.

This, for a small business, is a problem.

Fortunately, these small businesses can still create smaller lookalike audiences making sure that the sources they provide are high in quality.

Keep the following points in mind when you are about to create a lookalike audience:

• The lookalike audience will contain users/prospects from the countries you define while you create a Facebook Ad campaign.
• There should be at least 100 people in the source audience.
• You can use the Lookalike Audience feature on Facebook to create a lookalike from any other country. For example, if you have a source audience of India, you can create a lookalike for the US.
• You can create up to 500 lookalike audiences from a single source audience.
• Members of your source audience are not included in the lookalike audience.

Why is lookalike audience so important?

Facebook’s targeting capabilities have come a long way. It’s ability to find prospective users on the basis of demographic and interest markers have made lives of us advertisers very easy.

The surprising accuracy of the algorithms finds you the exact customers you are looking for. Although Facebook’s algorithms are like black boxes when it comes to understanding its intricacies, Lookalike audience should be a part of every Facebook Ad campaign for three main reasons.

Lookalike audience segmentation features of Facebook helps our audience expansion on the basis of interest, job title, or other demographic targetings. Top Facebook marketers recommend testing with lookalike audiences before getting on with a general targeting strategy. This helps in discovering the most effective and valuable demographics.

This strategy is one of the safest and effective ways of following a targeting strategy.

Marketers should not hesitate to start experimenting with a lookalike audience if they have a source audience of over 1000 unique users.

A robust source of lookalikes that contain the recommended 1000 unique users should not be left alone. It should be used as these will help develop new audiences that are beyond what human targeting can do.

Your source audience can be anything from site traffic, email lists, HubSpot or Salesforce data sources, previous ad activity or video views, etc.

Another super-exciting advantage of using Lookalike audience is that once set up and running, they are generally of low maintenance.

Well, then who’s doing the heavy lifting work?

Facebook Algorithm is doing that for you!

Once set up, Lookalike Audiences need very little to no adjustment during the initial testing period.

That does not mean you won’t have to trim the geographic, age group or other demographic further into the campaign.

All audiences require attention and revision from time to time. But lookalike audiences allow the marketers to ‘plug and play’ the list of source audience and enjoy the results.

How to create a Lookalike Audience?

Creating a lookalike audience is very easy. But before we head into creating one for you, we should talk about the source audience.

On Facebook Ads, you can choose your source audience from a wide variety of inputs.

If your website has enough web traffic, you can subdivide your visitors by product type.

Do you own a blog? Well, the blog audience is helpful too.

Facebook users watch more than 100 million hours of video on the platform daily! Video is the best performing content on Facebook.

Lookalike audience can help you find new people who based on the audience who’ve already watched your videos.

Email-based lookalike audience tends to perform the best. Why?

It’s because you can take the list of the people who already are your customers and use that as a source!

Eventually, cloning your customer base.

Another great way of creating a lookalike audience is by using a website custom audience of people who have completed a specific conversion event.

Lookalike audience can also be built using the Page likes of your Facebook Page as the source audience. If you have a large number of Facebook fans who actively engage with your content, using Page Likes as source audience is a great way to expand your customer base.

Since the source audiences are clear by now, we can go ahead and understand how to create a lookalike audience.

To create a customer audience, open Facebook Ads Manager, and move to the Audiences dashboard.

Click on the menu button and select All Tools

Under the assets menu, select the Audiences option.

Now click on Create Audience and select Custom Audience from the drop-down menu.

A pop-up box will appear having four different custom audience options for you. By this time, we know the four ways you can create your lookalike audience. You may select any that you desire.

Here, we are selecting Customer File option to create a lookalike audience from an Email list.

When creating a lookalike audience from email data, you have to upload your data as a file/copy and paste the data, or you can import the data from MailChimp.

If you are uploading an email list, select ‘Choose a file or copy and paste data’.

Now it’s time to upload the list. In the example, it is a CSV file.

Then head forward to map the identifiers. The more identifiers you use for your lookalike audience, the better match will be the lookalike audience.

The example uses First name, Last name, and the Email address, after all, it’s an Email Lookalike audience!

Click on upload and create.

Now under next steps, click Create a Lookalike Audience.

Now you are all set to build a lookalike audience from your email list.

In the Create a Lookalike Audience box that opens, you’ll notice that the custom email audience is in the source field.

Select the target country and choose the audience size.

We recommend you to start with a 1% lookalike audience and scaling from there.

Now click Create Audience.

Best practices and tips to follow

Learning how to create a lookalike audience is just not enough. We have to understand the best practices and tips which can be followed to create a SUCCESSFUL lookalike audience.

Here are the three best practices you can consider while creating your Facebook Ad Campaign using a lookalike audience.

Prioritize the lookalike audience you wish to test

We should understand that not all lookalike audiences are same.

Marketers often mistakenly choose a random source of an audience and an ambiguous audience size on their way to create a lookalike audience.

When deciding which source to choose while creating a lookalike audience, it’s better to prioritize lower funnel traffic first and work your way up.

We recommend you to choose a source audience which has already converted i.e. submitted a conversion form, downloaded a content from your website, made a purchase, etc.

To do that, go to the website traffic section of the custom audiences and change ‘All website visitors’ to ‘People who have visited specific pages’.

Page the confirmation URL into the ‘Contain’ box.

Now let’s talk about the audience size.

Once you are done with creating a source of lookalike audience, it’s time for you to decide the audience size.

Now audience size is dependent on factors like location and radius of the target.

To be precise, you want to allow more percentage to reach a larger audience when targeting a very small location. If the location you are targeting is broad, then the percentage you want to use should be small.

Correctly Structure your Lookalike Campaigns

Once you are done with identifying the source and audience size, you should focus on structuring the campaign in a way that allows Facebook to optimize your goals.

It is recommended not to use multiple lookalike audiences and group them together because this will create great confusion. You will not be able to identify which lookalike audience works and which doesn’t.

For example, if you are using multiple lookalike audience sources like converters, page likes, and website traffics in the same ad set, Facebook won’t allow you to segment the campaign performance based on each lookalike.

If the campaign fails to perform well, how would you know which lookalike audience worked well and which did not?

To prevent this from happening, it is recommended to use the following structure:

The structure allows you to group each campaign by your lookalike audience source and have ad sets of different audience sizes.

This way you’ll have a clear understanding of how each lookalike audience performs on an individual level.

You’ll have crystal clear data to make actionable decisions.

Another great reason why you should use this structure as it helps to break up ad-sets to smaller groups of people. When you do that, Facebook has less chances of showing your ads to irrelevant users.

Analyze, optimize, and keep testing

One of the great things with Facebook is that you don’t have to wait for months for your campaigns to get optimized. Facebook does that in a jiffy.

This helps you to make relevant changes to the campaign quickly.

Allowing the lookalike campaign to run for 2–3 weeks will give you enough data to start identifying the areas that need optimization and improvement.

One should use metrics and tools like frequency, breakdown tool, etc. to understand how the lookalike audience is performing and what can be done to further optimize it.

The Frequency metric on Facebook shows the average number of times each person saw the ad.

This metric is useful when it comes to understanding how far your budget reaches and how much further can it go.

Anything above 2.5 frequency means that you are serving the ad to the same person too often. To prevent that from happening, you should lower the budget. This avoids overselling to the same people.

Anything between the 1 to 1.9 range allows you to reach an optimum number of reach and gives a window to increase the budget in the future.

Another great way to decipher this metric is by looking at your most successful lookalike campaign. Look at its frequency and increase the budget if there’s a possibility.

The Breakdown tool helps to break down the campaigns by including age, gender, region, device, etc.

As we have already narrowed down the lookalike by using Audience size, Facebook will have no issues with optimizing and serving your ads to the most relevant audience.

If you find that the male demographic is performing well and converting more than females, it would be great if you test the segment by gender and create a more male-centric creative content.

This will result in a more improved performance of the campaign.

If you don’t find any actionable data on gender, then go ahead and look at age, device and so on.

Final Thoughts

Facebook Lookalike audience is a great way to boost your existing Facebook campaigns.

Creating effective Lookalike audience takes effort and patience, but it is not rocket science. Well, it is NOT a no-brainer too.

With continued practice, refinement, and measurement you can scale your campaigns to reach your targeting audiences.

If you haven’t started with this feature, we strongly recommend you to implement it today!

I hope the content brought great value to you.

And since you are here, it would mean the world to me if you clapped for my content!