Want to expand your brand’s presence and attract more customers to your website using Facebook ads?
However, if you notice that Facebook ads are not working as you expected and don’t know what to do in order to receive successful results, then you came to the right place.
Actually, one of the crucial things that you need to include into your Facebook advertising campaign is a lookalike audience.
Using Facebook lookalike audiences you can easily find a wider audience who is interested in your brand’s products or services and turn them into your new customers.
Ready to find the best audience for your brand?
Keep reading and find out what advantages of using Facebook lookalike audience are, how to create a lookalike audience for your Facebook ads & also will receive some tips how to get the most out of them.
Let’s get started!
What are Facebook lookalike audiences?
Facebook lookalike audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your products or services because they are similar to your current customers. By using a lookalike audience you boost a chance to generate high quality leads and get more value on ad spend.
Lookalike audience is formed based on a custom audience. For instance, a custom audience can be people on your email list, your website visitors or users who engaged with your content on Facebook.
When you create a lookalike audience using a custom audience, it means that you tell Facebook what audience you want to reach and, consequently, Facebook shows your ad to a new audience segment consisting of potential customers who meet your criteria.
So, lookalike audience is like a tempted audience matchmaker for advertisers.
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Why you should use Facebook lookalike audiences?
First of all, a lookalike audience provides you with an opportunity to reach a cold audience who is similar to your existing audience, however, much wider.
Although a lookalike audience is considered as a cold audience, but it is not so cold because Facebook algorithm uses the provided information about your warm audience in order to find users who have an alike behavioral pattern.
So, if a lookalike audience is formed correctly, then your Facebook ad will be accepted positively as it matches users’ interests and, consequently, you will receive a big amount of loyal customers.
Secondly, as you don’t show your ad to random people and you only target users who are really interested in your brand’s products or services, you can drastically increase your ad’s conversion rates.
Finally, a lookalike audience allows you to manage your advertising budget more effectively because you concentrate your promotional efforts on an audience similar to your brand’s current buyers.
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How to create Facebook lookalike audience?
Actually, a lookalike audience building process is easy and quick. Let’s review the main steps.
Step 1.
In order to start creating your lookalike audience, go to your Facebook page and from the drop-down menu in the top-right corner of your page select the “Advertising on Facebook” option. Then click on the “Create an Ad” button and you will be automatically moved to an Ads Manager’s page.
Press on a grid of nine little dots in the top-left corner and select the “Audiences” option from the “Advertise” section. After that you need to tap on the “Create a Lookalike Audience” button.
Step 2.
Once you have chosen the option to create a lookalike audience, a pop-up window will appear on your screen where you will start building your Facebook lookalike audience.
Step 3.
While creating your lookalike audience, the first task what you need to do is to select the source. This is either the Pixel data from your brand‘s webpage or one of your custom audiences.
So, click on the text box and Facebook will provide you with two available categories:
- Value-based sources. This is data form your app or website pixel.
- Other sources. This is a custom audience.
Step 4.
The following step is to choose the countries or regions you want to target. The location that you select will identify where users in your lookalike audience are placed, including a geo-filter into it.
Actually, you don‘t need to have someone from the countries or regions you want to target in your source.
Step 5.
Once the locations are selected, your task is to decide on a desired audience‘s size. In other words, it is the % similarity that you want your lookalike audience to match your custom audience.
The lookalike audience‘s size is expressed on a slider scale from 1% to 10%, where 1% means only those users who are the most similar to your custom audience. If you move toward 10%, the audience size will increase and you will reach more people, however, the matching will become more generic.
Moreover, you have an opportunity to create up to six different percentage audiences at once.
As the size of an audience makes impact on your advertising budget, so, what you can do here is to test out a variety of audience’s sizes.
That’s it! Now just press the blue “Create Audience” button and you will build your lookalike audience.
Although it may take around 6-24 hours for your Facebook lookalike audience to be created, but you can start your ad’s making process just after you have selected a source, location and size of your lookalike audience.
So, the process of a Facebook lookalike audience’s creation seems not difficult at all, isn’t it?
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3 main tips for using Facebook lookalike audiences
As you already know how to create Facebook lookalike audience, now let’s see several tips which you should use in order to reach new people on Facebook more effectively.
1. Keep your audience’s list up-to-date
The first rule, which you need to follow while creating your lookalike audience, is that if you provide information about your brand’s customers from website, you need to ensure it is the latest one. However, if you use a custom audience based on Facebook data, it is advised just to add date range parameters.
What is more, keep in mind that a created lookalike audience refreshes every 3-7 days, in this case, someone new who visits your brand’s webpage will be added to your Facebook lookalike audience.
2. Use the right custom audience to successfully achieve your goals
Different custom audiences help to reach different goals.
For instance, if you want to boost your brand awareness, then it is recommended to build a lookalike audience based on your Facebook page’s followers.
If your aim is to drive more conversions, in this case, creating a lookalike audience based on the visitors of your brand’s website or people who have put something in their cart will be a great decision.
So, before you start making your lookalike audience, you need to clearly define what goal you want to achieve.
3. Select high-quality data
The higher quality data of your audience you provide, the more efficient results you receive.
Facebook allows to upload lists with an information about your customers that contain between 1000 and 50000 people. However, a custom audience which includes 500 loyal customers will give you more profitable results compared to an audience of 50000 various consumers.
It means that you should avoid choosing audiences, like all app’s installers or all webpage’s visitors.
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Wrapping everything up, although building a lookalike audience on Facebook is incredibly simple and takes just a few minutes, but applying this type of audience in your ads can give you very effective outcomes.
By including lookalike audiences into your Facebook ads, you boost your chances to reach a wider audience who will be actually interested in your brand, turn them into your customers and devote more time on work with creative aspects of your ad campaigns.
What is your opinion about lookalike audiences? Do you include them into your Facebook ads campaigns? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!
