What are Facebook lookalike audiences?

Facebook’s lookalike audiences feature allows you to show ads to people who are similar to your best customers. As the name implies, a lookalike audience is a group of people similar to those within an existing audience. By targeting lookalike audiences you can find new customers and scale your business in a low-risk and low-cost manner. It’s also an excellent way to improve the ROI and conversion rate on your Facebook ad spend.

Facebook uses data pertaining to people’s interests, demographics and their online behaviours to create lookalike audiences. These online behaviours may include the websites a person has visited, types of content they engage with and their online buying behaviours.

How can your business use lookalike audiences?

Using Facebook lookalike audiences can help you to successfully scale your business. Let’s say you run a business that achieves most of its sales in Australia and you’d like to expand and find more customers in New Zealand. By targeting a lookalike pool of people in New Zealand, you can find new customers that are almost identical to your best customers in Australia.

In order to find a highly targeted group of new customers that is most likely to convert, it’s important to keep your audience size small. If your objective is to gain reach and build brand awareness, you can increase your audience size to reach a broader pool of people.

How can you set up a lookalike audience?

In order to create a Facebook lookalike audience, firstly you must have a source audience to compare and source your new pool of people from. This source audience might be drawn from a list of customers you already have on file, people who are interacting with your website, people who are using your app or people who are engaging with your Facebook page. When setting up your lookalike audience on Facebook, you can select any of the following as your source audience:

Customer list

If you already have data on your existing customers, whether it be your email subscribers or members of your brand’s reward or loyalty scheme, you can upload a file directly to Facebook, in order to find more customers similar to those on your list. These contacts can either be uploaded directly from your computer onto Facebook or via Mailchimp.

App users

If your brand has a mobile app, you can use your app data to target people similar to those who have engaged with your brand through your app.

Website traffic

In order to find an audience similar to your website users, firstly you’ll need to install a Facebook pixel on your website. This will help Facebook to gain insights into who is visiting your website and what actions they are performing once they’re there. For instance, say you run an ecommerce site and you’d like to target people similar to those who are making purchases on your website. You can create a lookalike audience according to the data Facebook has on people who have reached your purchase confirmation page.

Page followers

Finally, you can target people similar to those who have shown interest in your brand by liking your Facebook page. This can be particularly useful for businesses trying to build brand awareness and reach a broader audience.
If you would like some advice on how to incorporate Facebook lookalike audiences into your advertising strategy, talk to an expert at Flight Digital today.