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How to Create and Use Facebook Lookalike Audience?

Identifying and reaching potential customers while meeting CPL (Cost Per Lead) or CPA (Cost Per Action) targets has always been a significant challenge for marketers.

You aim to reach your target market without wasting your paid ad platform budgets. Isn't it?

To address the same, most of the platforms have demographic and interest-based targeting features.

Facebook Lookalike Audience

You can create different audiences that you think will engage with your ads. Besides, you can analyze the available data from ad platforms and create lookalike audiences.

In this blog, we will cover all about Facebook Lookalike Audience.

What Is a Facebook Lookalike Audience?

A lookalike audience is an approach to finding the new best audience. It is one of the powerful tools for improved Facebook ad targeting.

It analyses your best existing customers to reach new customers who are most likely interested in your business. You can say it is an audience matchmaker for your ads.

How Does a Facebook Lookalike Audience Work?

When you tell Facebook about the type of customer you want to target, it delivers a new audience segment based on your selected criteria.

Here your ad will be delivered to the people who are similar to (or "look like") your existing consumers.

While creating your Lookalike Audience, you can choose a percentage range of how closely you want your new audience to match the existing or source audience.

These are very easy to create and implement. A lookalike audience is a powerful tool to find high-converting customers efficiently.

Read the complete article and learn how to create and use a Lookalike Audience for your Facebook ads.

So, are you ready to find the best match audience?

How to Create a Facebook Lookalike Audience?


Before you begin to create a lookalike audience, ensure that you have installed the Facebook pixel. This is a must if you plan to use your website data. Additionally, you can build lookalike audiences based on your uploaded customer data.

Follow the below-mentioned steps to create your lookalike audiences.

1. Visit your Business Manager, click on All tools and then on Audiences

How to create FB lookalike audience

2. Select the Create Audience option and in the drop-down choose Lookalike Audience

Lookalike Audience

3. Select your source

You can choose from the existing source or create a new source.

Note: A source can be a Custom Audience such as an email list, website visitors (based on your pixel data), a customer list, filled out forms, viewers of your videos, page followers, and more.

Custom Audience

It is advisable to use a group of 1,000 to 50,000 of your best customers based on engagement, transaction value, lifetime value,or total order size.

You must select the source depending on your goals. For instance, for getting new email subscribers, choose an email list. For getting more sales you can go with website traffic.

Facebook offers some excellent options for the same, as you can build custom audiences based on engagement. If you are building a new custom audience on Facebook, select one of the sources listed below.

Custom Audience Source

4. Select the country or countries from where you want to find a similar audience

Once you have selected your source audience, input the location you want to target.

Lookalike Audience Target Location

Note: This doesn’t mean the location/country of your source audience. It will be the location you want to target for your ads.

Things to remember:

  • For Facebook to use your selected source, there must be at least 100 people from a single country.
  • You can target a different country even if your source audience does not belong to the same. For example, if you have a source audience of 20,000 people from Germany, you can use that for creating a Lookalike Audience of similar people in the United Kingdom.
  • If you are unsure about targeting location, create a worldwide, regional, or multi-country lookalike.

5. Select your desired audience size

Now, you will have to select your audience size. It is worth noting here that the smaller the percentage you choose, the closer it will resemble your source audience. This means your ad will be delivered to fewer people, but they'll be more aligned to the characteristics similar to your existing audience.

Lookalike Audience Size

The larger the audience size, the less precise it matches with your source audience. This could be helpful when you want to increase your reach and are less concerned about the similarities with your current consumers.

6. Select Create Audience

Finally, you will have to click on the blue button that says "Create Audience."

It might take up to 6- 24 hours for the audience to be created. Further, your lookalike audience will refresh every 3-7 days whiletargeting ads to it.

Best Practices for Using Facebook Lookalike Audience

  • Always ensure that you are using the right source audience based on the goals you want to achieve. Different custom audiences have different goals. For instance, if you are looking to enhance your brand awareness, select your page fans as the source audience.
  • Segment your audience on the most similar, second-most similar, and least similar lookalikes, and accordingly bid on each one of them. By doing this, you will optimize bids with a set of Lookalike Audiences.

To perform this, you will have to click on Advanced Options while selecting your audience size.

Note: From one source audience you can build up to 500 Lookalike Audiences.

Set of Lookalike Audiences

Source: Facebook


  • Use each of the Lookalike Audiences with initial bids to target the same ads. So, based on revenue per conversion or the lifetime value of the people in each audience, you need to understand how well the ads are performing. As per your findings do the necessary modification to your bids. For instance, bidding more for valuable audiences while less for less valuable audiences.
  • Create custom audiences based on different parameters. You should keep a practice of aligning your campaign goals with the audiences you are creating. For instance, email audience to get more subscribers, recent website visitors for increasing conversions, and video audience for your video campaigns.

Conclusion

Lookalike Audiences are one of the best approaches to target a cold audience who are more likely to interact with your ads.

These highly targeted cold audiences have higher chances to convert as they're similar to your warm audiences.

This results in maximizing your reach and improving your cost per acquisition for new leads.

Are you taking the maximum advantage of lookalike audiences?

At Mediaqart, our Facebook Ad Experts can help you create the right audience as per your business goals.Let’s connect and discuss your growth possibilities.

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