Lookalike audiences are a powerful feature in Facebook Ads that allow advertisers to target new potential customers who are similar to people who are already engaging with their business. The purpose of lookalike audiences is to help expand the reach of ads and find new customers who are likely to be interested in products or services.
How do lookalike audiences work?
Lookalike audiences use Facebook’s algorithm and machine learning to analyze the demographics, interests, behaviors, and more of a source audience. The source audience is a custom audience created by the advertiser, such as existing customers. Facebook’s technology then identifies common qualities among the source audience members and finds new people on Facebook who share those characteristics. The new people identified make up the lookalike audience.
For example, if an online clothing store creates a custom audience of existing customers who have made purchases in the past year, Facebook can analyze that group. It may find the source audience skews female, aged 25-34, interested in fashion and beauty, located in urban areas, etc. Facebook would then find new Facebook users who match those qualities to build a lookalike audience to target with ads.
Benefits of lookalike audiences
There are several key benefits of using lookalike audiences:
- Reach new customers: Lookalikes allow you to market to new people you don’t already have a connection with.
- Targeting expansion: Growing your target audience beyond a single custom audience.
- Improved conversion rates: Lookalikes convert better because they match people already engaging.
- Scalability: Lookalikes can be created in different sizes to meet campaign needs.
How do you create a lookalike audience?
Creating a lookalike audience involves these basic steps:
- Build a source audience – This is a key starting point. The source audience provides the data for creating your lookalike audience. Choose an existing quality custom audience, like an email list, engaged Facebook users, or your customer list. The larger the source audience, the better.
- Select the geography and languages – Determine which country or countries and languages you want to target with your lookalike audience.
- Choose the audience size – Facebook allows lookalikes at 1%, 2%, 5%, or 10% of the population. A 1% lookalike audience will be smaller and more closely matched to your source audience. A 10% lookalike will be broader.
- Name your audience – Give the lookalike audience a name that will be easy to recognize.
- Review the audience details – Facebook provides information on the demographics, interests, and behaviors it sees in your new audience.
- Save your audience – Saving it adds the lookalike audience to your Ad Accounts for targeting.
Once created, a lookalike audience can be targeted just like any other custom audience. They work particularly well for prospecting campaigns with the goal of acquiring new customers.
What makes a good lookalike source audience?
The quality of your lookalike audience depends heavily on the source audience used to generate it. Here are tips for choosing an effective source audience:
- Relevant – The source audience should be relevant to your goals, such as existing customers or engaged email subscribers.
- Sufficient size – Larger source audiences tend to produce better lookalikes. Aim for at least 1,000 people, but the more the better.
- Recent – Use a source audience from the last 6-12 months. More recent engagement signals produce better matches.
- High value – If possible, build your source audience from your highest value existing customers.
- Specific – Narrower and more specific source audiences based on behaviors can produce higher quality lookalikes.
What are the different lookalike audience sizes?
Facebook provides several options for lookalike audience sizes:
- 1% lookalike – This is the smallest size option and results in the most closely matched audience to the source. Use for targeted campaigns.
- 2% lookalike – Twice the size of a 1% lookalike audience, but still quite narrow. Provides scale while maintaining similarity to the source.
- 5% lookalike – 5 times larger than a 1% lookalike. Balances scale with quality matching.
- 10% lookalike – The broadest lookalike option. Reaches the most new people but is less optimized to the source.
Consider testing different percentages to see which performs best for your campaigns and goals.
Lookalike audience size examples
To understand the scale of different lookalike sizes, here are some examples of potential audience sizes based on a source audience.
| Source Audience | 1% Lookalike | 2% Lookalike | 5% Lookalike | 10% Lookalike |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | 100,000 | 200,000 | 500,000 | 1,000,000 |
| 50,000 | 500,000 | 1,000,000 | 2,500,000 | 5,000,000 |
| 100,000 | 1,000,000 | 2,000,000 | 5,000,000 | 10,000,000 |
As you can see, larger source audiences allow you to generate sizable lookalike audiences for increased reach and conversions.
How should you use lookalike audiences in ad campaigns?
Here are some best practices for using lookalike audiences in your ad campaigns:
- Test lookalikes against your existing best custom audiences to see which performs better.
- Try combining a lookalike with a custom audience for more conversions.
- Run ads to different lookalike audience sizes to determine the optimal balance of reach and precision.
- Refresh your lookalikes regularly by making new ones from updated source audiences.
- Monitor the ongoing performance of your lookalikes and tweak them as needed.
- Use lookalikes mainly for prospecting campaigns aimed at new customer acquisition.
What limits are there on lookalike audience sizes?
Facebook does place certain geographical limits on the maximum size of lookalike audiences you can create:
- United States – Maximum size of 10 million per lookalike audience
- Canada & Europe – Maximum of 5 million per lookalike audience
- Other supported countries – Maximum of 1 million per lookalike audience
This is to prevent the creation of extremely large, unmanageable audiences. However, these limits still allow substantial room for growing your marketing reach.
Can lookalike audiences be used across ad accounts?
Lookalike audiences can only be utilized within the ad account they are created in. However, there are two ways to use your lookalike audiences in other ad accounts:
- Share the audience – Use the “Audience Sharing” tool to share a lookalike audience with another ad account.
- Recreate the audience – Build a new lookalike audience in the other ad account using the same source custom audience.
Audience sharing is simpler, but recreating allows you to customize the lookalike parameters as needed per account.
How often should you refresh lookalike audiences?
It’s best practice to refresh your lookalike audiences about every 6-12 months. Creating new ones with updated source data improves performance in several ways:
- New customer data is added into the source audience
- Stale, inactive user data is removed from the source
- Interests and behaviors may change over time
- Facebook’s matching algorithm also evolves
Regularly refreshing your lookalikes ensures they target the most relevant potential customers.
What are common use cases for lookalike audiences?
Some of the most common and effective uses of lookalike audiences include:
- Customer prospecting – Finding new customers similar to current ones
- Lapsers & churn reduction – Win back disengaged users
- Email list growth – Grow your subscriber base for newsletters
- Remarketing – Target visitors to your website
- App install ads – Get your app in front of similar app users
The key is identifying valuable source audiences you want more of and using lookalikes to expand your reach.
What metrics should you track for lookalike audience performance?
It’s important to monitor metrics to optimize and improve your lookalike audiences. Key metrics to track include:
- Reach & impressions
- Frequency
- Clicks and clickthrough rate (CTR)
- Cost per click (CPC)
- Conversions and conversion rate
- Cost per acquisition (CPA)
- Lifetime value (LTV) of acquired customers
Compare lookalike audience performance to your baseline custom audiences. Test new source audiences and lookalike percentages to improve over time.
How can you optimize low performing lookalike audiences?
If a lookalike audience is underperforming, here are some troubleshooting tips:
- Ensure your source custom audience is sufficiently large and high quality.
- Try a different lookalike percentage for a tighter or broader match.
- Split test the lookalike against the source audience to isolate issues.
- Refine your targeting, placement, creative, and offer.
- Narrow your geography or languages.
- Increase your ad budget and run time.
- Refresh your lookalike more frequently, such as every 3-6 months.
Monitoring performance and regularly optimizing your targeting, creative, and offers will help improve the results from any lookalike audience.
Conclusion
In summary, lookalike audiences are an invaluable asset for marketers on Facebook. By finding new customers who mirror the qualities of your best existing audiences, lookalikes enable you to continually expand your reach and conversions. The key is testing and optimizing your lookalike parameters, source audiences, creative, and placements to maximize performance over time. Used strategically as part of a diversified customer acquisition strategy, lookalike audiences can take your Facebook advertising results to new heights.