Mastering Facebook Lookalike Audiences

Mack Grenfell
The Startup
Published in
6 min readNov 3, 2019

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It’s easy to spend hours deciding which interest audiences you should be targeting. After all, you know your brand’s customers best right?

We can guess some attributes of our customers. If we’re marketing a new app for example, then chances are that it’ll appeal to younger demographics, interested in technology. There are plenty of things we can’t guess about our most likely customers; perhaps it turns out that they enjoy ultimate frisbee, or that they’re likely to keep birds as pets.

It’s hard to manually pull all these insights ourselves. Facebook’s lookalike audiences provide a handy way of automating this process though.

Lookalike audiences take some 1st party data, that’s data that you have, and it goes and finds the people on Facebook who most closely match those users. Because Facebook knows so much about your customers, and about everyone else on the platform, it can be an extremely effective way of finding people that are likely to engage with your brand.

Creating The Source Audience

To create lookalike audiences, you’ll first need an audience that you want to create a lookalike of. This is referred to as your source audience. There are two types of source audience that you can create, dynamic and static source audiences.

Dynamic Source Audiences

A dynamic audience is one which updates automatically. Good examples of dynamic source audiences which you can create are:

  • People who’ve converted on your site.
  • People who’ve visited your site.
  • People who like your page.

The first of these is the best source audience if you’re looking to drive conversions. Bear in mind though, that the more people in your source audience, the better Facebook will be able to find people that look like those in your source audience. A larger source audience means a higher quality lookalike audience. For this reason, you should only use people who’ve converted on your site as a source audience if you’ve got enough of them for Facebook to be able to learn from.

But how many people is enough? 100 is the minimum, but you should aim to have at least 1,000 people in…

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