The Power Of Facebook Lookalike Audiences

Today we're going to be looking at Facebook Lookalike Audiences. We built our lookalikes based on those visitors who had been to pages of the site that were of similar interest as what our ads were offering, making use of specific remarketing lists filtered by words in the destination URL (blog posts and page topics.) This tossed all job targeting out the window, but instead based our audiences on the confidence that we had smart professionals visiting the client's website.

As previously discussed, there are a few ways to do this: you can upload a Customer List of email addresses or phone numbers, build a website custom audience (WCA) based on a Facebook pixel that tracks a user's behavior on your website, or build an audience using events in your mobile app.

Even though they fire at the same place the Lookalike Audiences they create are very different (if you don't trust me, use the audience overlap tool to check). In Facebook Ads Manager , open the Audiences tool and click the Create Audience button. If you're using Facebook standard events so the Facebook pixel tracks events such as a registration or purchase, you can create a lookalike audience out of those actions as well.

We find this audience have a much much higher propensity to like and share content than ‘normal' facebook users and they tend to have bigger and more active networks, so their reactions to your posts are going to spread further organically. A lookalike audience is the term given to a group of users that Facebook has determined look like,” or have some set of characteristics in common with a custom or seed” audience.

If you followed these steps, you will have successfully created a lookalike audience from Amazon customer data. You don't have to keep uploading customer or subscriber CSV files to keep this audience current. Lookalike audiences are referred to by different monikers, such as actalikes' in Pinterest, or ‘audience hints” in Google UAC.

Uploaded custom audiences do have a downside: they are historical, not forward. You've been serving ads to a list of your company's current e-newsletter subscribers, but you want to reach similar people who haven't engaged with your business yet. Rather than creating a new audience, the Lifetime Value Custom Audience simply adds another column of data to one of your existing audiences.

Combine the potential of interest targeting with the virtually infinite scalability of Facebook and tapping into interests correctly is the best way to reach the largest possible Facebook audiences and grow your business exponentially. We have typically observed a seed audience set of 1000 to 25000 performs very well to create a Lookalike of between 1-10 million Lookalike users.

However, to confirm that the cost for lookalikes will be lower for you, you have to test and compare the different audiences. This can happen when you create multiple Lookalikes from similar seed audiences. You can create a custom audience by applying your data such as page likes, email addresses and phone numbers.

If the feature is available to you, you will then have the option to select Customer file with lifetime value (LTV)”. We can help you with pulling the vital information from your customer list, get it setup properly in Facebook, and launch effective campaigns.

This is the set of people you want the audience for your campaign to resemble. To start off, you should be creating most of your audiences with 1% audience size, these will be the people that most closely match those you've submitted in your source lists to create the Lookalike audience.

To do this, create a YouTube campaign with one or both of the In-Stream and In-Display ads set up. It's advisable to make separate ad groups for each format. One of my ad sets wasn't serving (targeting the Pacific Northwest segment of a layered lookalike), so I asked Facebook.