What Is A Facebook Lookalike Audience & How Do I Make One?

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Transcript:

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your best customers had “twins” that had the same spending habits and desires?

That’s more business, and that’s a win… right?

Well, Facebook’s lookalike audience enables you to find and target these “twins” with some clever processes. 

Get ready to double your audience, because Wednesdays are about to get GIANT.

 

Hello, my name is Yumna and welcome to Giant Wednesday, the only place to be to discover the wonderful world of digital marketing. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and post your comments below.

Today I’m here to tell you a little bit more about what Facebook’s lookalike audiences are.

So, let’s get straight to it.

A lookalike audience is an audience type on Facebook which you can use when setting up ads through Business Manager.

It’s a great way to reach out to new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to existing customers. 

See, twinsies!

The best thing about Lookalike audiences is you can model them on anyone who has interacted with your business before.

You can create a lookalike audience based on previous engagement, video views, or perhaps, more importantly, anyone who has visited your website or completed conversions on it.

These lookalikes are created by choosing a source audience which is one that’s custom made using data from your Facebook pixel or fans of your page.

All you need to do to set one up is to build your custom audience on Facebook and then ask Facebook to build a lookalike audience to find similar people.

To put it simply, your custom audience, in this case, should be your model customer.

Once you’ve chosen your model customer, this is where you let Facebook do its magic as it identifies common qualities in people like their demographics, interests or spending habits.

You can choose how similar you want your audience to be by adjusting the slider at the bottom of the setup page.

Lower percentages will be smaller but have more in common, top percentages will be larger but less accurate.

 As usual with marketing, it is all about finding that balance. 

Then, hey presto, it finds people similar!

This is because of the nature of this audience type and the way you have data to back up your idea of a model customer. By setting up Pixel tracking, and smart conversion goals, you can set up lookalike audiences for specific parts of your business.

Depending on your business and product, this can be a really easy way to attract new customers.

For example, if you sell movie merchandise, then you could build a lookalike audience of people who have previously bought products from a specific movie franchise and then use that to find people who have similar interests in films, as well as collecting merch or similar items.

For us, if we wanted more people to sign up to attend our next digital marketing event then we could use the data we’ve collected from previous attendees to generate our lookalikes.

Obviously, using customers data comes with its own issues which need to be considered, but if you have data on your customers, such as email addresses and phone numbers, you can upload this to Facebook to get super accurate targeting from your lookalike audience. 

To help Facebook pick the right profile from the 2.41 billion out there, it’s best you provide as much information as possible. 

So the more information you have; name, up to three email addresses and phone numbers, address, post code, date of birth, year of birth and their gender. The more accurate your lookalike audience will be!

That should be enough for Facebook to get its detective hat on and find you some similarly minded people that you can try and turn into customers.

Once it’s produced your lookalikes, it’s up to you the way you choose to target them from the vast array of ad types on Facebook. 

And, if that wasn’t enough to tempt you, another benefit of lookalike audiences, other than the fact they help you reach new people, is that they tend to be less expensive than other audience types. 

However, you will have to test this one for yourself, comparing different audience types as you make your way through Business Manager. 

 

So, that’s a quick explanation of what a lookalike audience is, what it does, how you can use it and the information you’ll need to make one.

Quite easy right? Totally worth it for the potential return.

I’ll leave a link in the description on how to set up your audience through Ad Manager but comment below if you have any more questions on the topic. 

That’s it for today, go forth and comment your views on this and give us a like and subscribe to see more great digital and marketing content every week.

Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next week for another GIANT Wednesday.

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