Do you want to get the most out of your Facebook advertising campaigns? Use Lookalike Audience!
What is a Lookalike Audience in Facebook Advertising?
Have you ever considered what could be the common behavior, demographics, or interests of your existing customers? It may be difficult stuff to think about as a human being. But what about technology?
Yes, with Facebook’s Lookalike Audience creation tool, you can reach people who share similarities with your audience: such as location, hobbies, and what kinds of pages & posts they follow.
By creating a lookalike audience, you get an opportunity to reach thousands and even millions of people who share a similar profile as your ideal audience.
How do you create a Lookalike audience?
As I’ve shared in one of my previous blog posts how you can create a Facebook Custom Audience based on the contacts list that you have or the traffic that your website receives. The next step to expand your custom audience is to create a lookalike audience.
You can create a Lookalike Audience in Ads Manager or Power Editor.
To create a Lookalike audience in Manager or Power Editor:
(1) go to your Audiences,
(2) click Create Audiences and select Create a Lookalike Audience,
(3) choose your source,
(4) choose the country where you’d like to find a similar set of people,
(5) choose your desired audience size with the slider, and
(6) click Create Audience.
Primarily, there are 3 ways to build your Lookalike Audience. Here’s the list of where you can build them from:
a. Fans from your Facebook page: You can reach people who are similar to those who have liked your page.
b. Custom Audiences: You can create Lookalike Audiences based on your Custom Audiences. These are audiences that were created (by importing information to Facebook) from your customer contact list, website traffic, or mobile app.
c. Facebook pixel: This is a piece of JavaScript code for your website that lets you measure, optimize and build audiences for your ad campaigns. You can use the actions people take on your website across devices to inform who is part of your Lookalike Audience.
What are the benefits of using a Lookalike audience in your Facebook ads?
#1 Get more out of your existing traffic
Creating a lookalike audience allows you to grow your audience density to whom you can advertise your services & products. Not only this, but you also have control over selecting a specific audience type (through the custom audience) which you want to multiply & grow your targeted users.
For eg. when you create separate custom audiences for different events like add to cart, purchase, page views, etc., you can expand the reach to your desired set of audiences like people who are similar to the users who added the products to their cart (shown interest in your products) or who did purchase your products (who actually own your products).
#2 Audience size expandability
Do you know that if you have a custom audience of let’s say 500 users, you can easily multiply them and increase them to even millions by creating a lookalike audience?
Although it must be noted here that the higher the percentage of creating a look-alike audience (1% to 10%), the lesser will be the accuracy.
An ideal % to choose should be between 1% to 4% which will still enable you to multiply your basic set of audience (custom audience) manifold.
#3 Helps to improve the conversion rate
Since now we already know that a lookalike audience is similar to your Facebook likes, website traffic, or custom audience (the audience that you accumulated through your website traffic or existing customers’ emails), the chances of getting sales & leads from the lookalike audience is much more likely.
Therefore, a lookalike audience helps you to get not only a wide span of the audience to advertise, but also helps you to get more conversions for your business. In other words, you can get more conversions at the same cost as Facebook advertising.
#4 Improve the overall ROI of your advertising campaign
When most of your Facebook advertising cost will be spent on the well-targeted audience (lookalike audience), you get more conversions within your same budget than you would have spent otherwise on the broad set of audience. Therefore, a lookalike audience also helps you to get higher returns on your investment.
