Understanding Facebook's Lookalike Audiences

Today we're going to be looking at Facebook Lookalike Audiences. In the past, advertisers could use a feature called partner categories to supplement the targeting they do on Facebook with data from brokers, such as recent purchases or household income - data that Facebook doesn't easily have access to on its own.

You can build out a customer avatar to help you set up successful Facebook Audiences. 3. Build your Lookalike Audiences. When you target list contacts, or people similar to your list contacts, your ad has a greater chance of success with a list or segment size of at least 500.

Show different ads to the same audience, or the same ad to different audiences. Small businesses can use a Lookalike Audience to sell to people who mirror their most active customers. Keep in mind you need to have at least 100 people in your source customer group to create a Lookalike Audience.

Also, if you happen to know your lifetime customer value , when you're uploading your list, you can include that number. Note: Going forward, you can keep your Facebook Custom Audience up to date by returning to the Lists page at any time and clicking the cloud icon again to push the latest users who match the smart list criteria.

Finally, you choose an Audience Size, which ranges from 1% to 10%. An ecommerce company who targeted their email list found a 43% conversion rate increase among sign-ups and a 30% decrease in cost-per-lead. I ask if lookalike audiences are certain to be cold audiences or if you need to exclude fans and website visitors to reach true cold audiences.

However, that's a great tactic for narrowing down large Lookalike audiences. When you're planning your targeting strategy, make sure you're segmenting your lookalike thresholds according to the value of the user, and excluding the targeted audiences from campaigns to avoid overlap.

Facebook leverages its massive trove of customer data to connect the dots between your target audience, helping you find highly-qualified users you previously wouldn't have been able to reach. By selecting the Purchase event as the conversion to optimize for, Facebook will crunch it's data to isolate the users in your audience who are most likely to purchase from an online store.

I'll dive into why it's awesome, how it works, and how you'll need to change your ads based on your new targeted audience. Both Netflix and Yousician would perform well when serving ads to users in the quality zones of the lookalike audience. After creating your Custom Audience, now use Facebook's Lookalike Audience to target people who are like Subscriber Sally, while skipping over those who aren't.

But there's no need to panic because that's where lookalike audiences come in. Now that you have a Custom Audience ready to roll, you're all set to create your Lookalike Audience. For a populous nation, the 1% size setting (i.e., the 1% of Facebook users in that country who most closely match the Source Audience) can be quite large.

The more people you provide Facebook with to create a Lookalike, the better. Larger percentage lookalikes afford a greater pool of users to target, but typically produce lower ROI than smaller percentage lookalikes. If you are only interested in targeting a smaller geographical area (such as a state as opposed to the entire country) you will need to create a country-wide lookalike and then geo-target the location more precisely in your Ad Set.

In the setup process, most of your time should be dedicated to setting a well-defined Source Audience for building your Lookalike Audience. These people are your loyal customers and are more likely to convert than other shoppers. Once it's available, you can choose to target this lookalike with your next ad campaign.