5 Ways to Leverage Facebook Look-a-like Audiences 10.05.18

Advertising on Facebook can be difficult. With so many methods of advertising, you’re never really sure what type of return on investment you’ll see.

That’s where Facebook Lookalike Audiences come in. This remarkable feature is effective, intuitive, and takes little time to set up.

What is a Lookalike Audience?

Facebook creates a completely new audience that most resembles your custom audience. So if you have a custom audience usually targeting people who are upper middle-class, between the ages of 25 and 45, and invest in eating out a lot for example, Facebook can introduce you to a similar cohort based on its algorithms and data.

Audiences that look like your own regular customers are more likely to be interested in your product and service. And it works 9 times better than other channels, giving you a much better click through rate.

Lookalike audiences require a custom audience to imprint. So you first have to set up a custom audience – with a file containing customer emails, using website or app traffic (with the help of Facebook Pixel), offline data such a list of phone numbers or customers who visited you.

Once you’re set up with a custom audience, you can create one that is a lookalike of it.

1. Tips to Utilize the Lookalike Audience Function

• Use the 1% option

You have the option to choose the audience size as between 1 to 10% of the total population in the country that you choose. While 10% allows for a larger number targeting, the response rate isn’t the same.

The quality of the target audience with 1% is the most accurate, Experiments suggest that bigger is in fact not better, and picking 1% generates more leads and gives you a better click through rate.

• Use Facebook Pixel

Facebook Pixel can be embedded into each webpage of your website and used to give you information about your customer, such as when they viewed their cart, searched for something, added to their cart or ‘wishlist’, made a purchase or clicked on a coupon.

You can set up Pixel by going to your Ad Manager. Learn more about how to use Facebook Pixel.

Once you’ve set the Pixel up, you can create custom audiences based on multiple variables, such as customers who used discount coupons, checked out or displayed certain behaviors.

2. Experiment with your custom audiences                                                                       

Target a video audience. Video is big, with over 100 million hours of video being watched every day. If you already have a video campaign, the lookalike feature allows you to find an audience like the one that’s already watching you.

While creating a custom audience, choose the ‘Engagement on Facebook’ option and then select Video. Facebook also allows you to pick people who watched the entire video, or who watched a few minutes.

Tip: Select the audience that’s watched at least 75% of your video, as these are most likely to convert into leads.

3. Target people who spend the most. When you’re preparing your customer file to import to Facebook, add a column with the total amount the customer has spent. Arrange the list so the highest spender appears on top and upload a version of the file with only the top names.

It makes sense that the Lookalike audiences you create using this method will generate more revenue for your business.

Tip: Make sure your column headings fit Facebook’s standard.

You can also create an email-list lookalike audience, one that spends most time on your webpages, and so on.

4. Test new updates to Lookalike audiences

Facebook is always rolling out updates to its Lookalike audiences. Test the latest ones early and make sure to keep yourself updated.

5. Try multiple Lookalike audiences together

Using many Lookalike audiences can cause some overlap, but you can use that to your advantage.

Make sure the audiences you’re putting together share some common interests and are a good match together, so that the common pool isn’t too diverse. Remember, it may take up to 24 hours for your Lookalike audience to be created. You can also see when your audience was last updated by accessing Facebook’s Ad Manager.

The more you experiment with custom and lookalike audiences, the more savvy you will get with what works for your business. If you’re looking to grow your target audience on Facebook, this brilliant feature will help you do so. Use the tips we’ve shared to start off on the right foot.