A lookalike audience is probably the single biggest reason why Facebook has such a dominant market presence when it comes to advertising. The reason why Facebook has cut into Google’s initial lead in online marketing is because of the power of the lookalike audience and because Facebook has SO much data on all of us.
A lookalike audience utilises Facebook’s almost unimaginable store of data on pretty much everyone on Earth to create a new larger audience of people who are similar to a seed audience. In other words, a lookalike audience is all about finding people who LOOK-A-LIKE to the seed audience.
For example, let’s say you have a Facebook page where you’re advertising your product or service. If you get 100 people from the UK to all visit your webpage, you can create a lookalike audience of all the people in the UK who share the most commonalities and data attributes as possible to those people who have already visited your website. Facebook would look at data including the age, education and purchase history of these people to form a much larger audience of people who are similar (or lookalike!) the people who have already shown interest in your product or service by visiting your website!
So, lookalike audiences can be created from a seed audience (such as a custom audience of people who visited your website, as we just discussed). A common example of this is perhaps you have 1000 people who visit your website selling gym tops. You could make a custom audience of those people, but that doesn’t give you too many people to target, hence where the lookalike audiences come in. You could create a lookalike audience from that custom audience of 1000 people, to create a substantially larger audience with over 2 million plus people from just a couple of clicks. These 2 million or so people will then share very similar commonalities as the people who are already interacting with your website.
To create a lookalike audience, go to the audiences page in the business manager and select ‘create audience’ and then ‘lookalike audience’.
You then want to select your lookalike source. The source you select will be used to find people who share similar traits.
For example, let’s say we wanted to use people who have liked my Osito Media page. We simply click on the box and find the correct page in the drop down.
Then what we can do is choose a location. This allows us to create a lookalike audience in the UK or USA for example. But let’s say we wanted to create a lookalike audience for the UK, we just need to type that into the box here.
One thing I should note here is that if you do use your Facebook page as a source audience, the more people that like your page the more accurate Facebook will be at finding people who lookalike. For instance, it is far easier to spot commonalities between 100,000 people compared to just 100 people.
Next, the audience size ranges from 1% to 10% of the combined population of your selected locations. A 1% lookalike consists of the people most similar to your lookalike source. Increasing the percentage creates a bigger, broader audience. W
One of the things I like to do with my audience is to create multiple lookalikes with different levels of similarity to my source. You may be wondering why you would make more audiences than just the most accurate lookalike audience, and that would be a good question. The answer to that is because Facebook will give you the best data they can possibly give you, but I’ve had times where I’ve split test with 6 different audiences, and the audience size between 5 and 6 has performed the best. So, you always want to keep testing your ads until you find what works!
Finally, you just need to click ‘create audience’ for the data to start populating, which can take quite a while depending on how big your lookalike audience is.
Before we finish, although we have used a Facebook page as our source audience, we could have used a specific custom audience or an email list to build the lookalike audience. So, there is so much power in the lookalike audience, because Facebook can find thousands of other similar people based on a load of different interactions with your business.
If you like this content you’re going to love everything else I do. I want to provide you with unbelievable value so you, too, can achieve all your business goals. Let me know what you think of this post and I'd be happy to help any of you guys who may be struggling with your own lookalike audiences. Also check me out on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. 😁