Lookalike Audiences on Facebook: A detailed guide

Want to find even more customers who are right for you? Facebook Lookalike Audiences is the solution you need. In this guide, we'll tell you everything you need to know about lookalike audiences.

What are Facebook Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike is a Facebook audience composed of users who behave similarly to the existing customer audience. You can apply these similar users in your targeting as a target audience. To create lookalike audiences, Facebook uses machine learning capabilities to find people with similar demographic characteristics, common interests, or those who tend to behave in a certain way, making them similar to your customer audience.

Advantages of using Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences help improve the marketing funnel and offer numerous opportunities to engage with a highly interested audience. This audience is more likely to make a purchase, submit a lead form, or subscribe to a newsletter. Here are the main advantages of using Facebook lookalike audiences:

1. A quick way to expand targeting. Lookalike audiences are the simplest way to expand the targeting of your ad set by creating an audience that is likely your potential customers and should be interested.
2. A simple way to find new customers. Creating lookalike audiences requires just a few steps to create an audience of users who are likely to have high intent towards your offer, compared to spending a lot of time and money searching for your potential customers.
3. Lower cost. Advertising to lookalike audiences on Facebook typically has a lower CPM than interest-based targeting or customer-based audiences.

How to create a custom audience

To create lookalike audiences, you need to prepare a custom audience that will serve as the seed audience for the lookalike audience.

1. Go to the “Audiences” tab in Ads Manager. In the left corner, select “Create Audience”, and then choose “Custom Audience”.

2. Specify the source of the custom audience. Existing potential sources include:

1. Existing customers (using a customer list).
2. Website visitors (with Facebook Pixel running on the website).
3. App activity.
4. Users who’ve shown interest in your Facebook or Instagram pages, posts, and ads.
5. Users who’ve interacted with lead forms, videos, or catalogs.
6. Users who’ve engaged in offline activity at your store.

3. Configure the audience source, enter the name and description of your audience. Finally, click on “Create Audience”.

How to create a lookalike audience

1. Go to the “Audiences” tab and in the left corner, select “Create Audience”, then “Lookalike Audience”.
2. Specify the source of the lookalike audience. At this stage, you can choose any custom audiences you’ve created.
3. Select the location of the audience. The selected location of the audience should match the country targeted by your ad set.
4. Choose the audience size and click on the “Create Audience” button.

Important points when creating lookalike audiences

• Facebook recommends that the selected source audience should contain between 1000 and 50000 users.
• The process of creating a new audience can take 6-24 hours.
• In one Facebook ad account, you can create up to 500 lookalike audiences based on one source audience.

Best practices for creating lookalike audiences

• A lookalike audience based on top customers by lifetime value tends to perform most effectively in most cases. For example, if you have many customers but want to find a similar audience based on people who’ve spent more than a certain amount of money.
• For lead generation businesses, create lookalike audiences from current customers.
• Create lookalike audiences based on purchases, initiated orders, or items added to the cart.
• Create a lookalike audience from website visitors, considering sorting by time spent.
• Use different audience size combinations: 0-1%, 1-5%, and 5-10%.

Facebook lookalike audiences can be a tremendous addition to your marketing efforts on Facebook. When used correctly, they can significantly expand your customer base and drive more conversions, sales, and profits.