A 'Lookalike Audience' is an advertising targeting option that uses sophisticated algorithms to build a target audience that has similar characteristics to a brand's existing customers. While it is a feature available in a variety of media platforms, the below content focuses specifically on Facebook.
*You can learn more about Lookalike Segments here in Google Demand Gen campaigns
Skip To:
- About Lookalike Audiences
- Example Lookalike Audience
- Lookalike Audience Size
- How to Format Customer Lists
- Additional Information
About Lookalike Audiences
When you create a Lookalike Audience the first step is to choose a source audience, which in this case would be a Custom Audience created with data pulled from the Segments builder in the Engage Dashboard. Facebook will then identify the common qualities of the people in the audience such as their demographic information or interests. Then, they deliver your ad to this 'lookalike audience' of people who are similar to your Segment.
Example Lookalike Audience
Here’s an example: Say you create a Custom Audience of each person who has ordered a specific appetizer from your restaurant in the past year by pulling that data from the Engage Dashboard and importing it to Ads Manager. When you create a Lookalike Audience based on that list, Facebook finds people with similar demographics and interests to those of your existing customers and uses them as the target audience to display your Ads.
Lookalike Audience Size
You can choose the size of a Lookalike Audience during the creation process. Smaller audiences more closely match your source audience. Creating a larger audience increases your potential reach, but reduces the level of similarity between the Lookalike Audience and source audience. Facebook generally recommends a source audience with between 1,000 to 50,000 people. Source quality matters too. For example, if a source audience is made up of your best customers rather than all your customers, that could lead to better results.
How to Format Customer Lists
Before you add your list at the beginning of the audience creation process, you need to make sure the column formatting matches the identifier type that Facebook accepts. To make sure your list complies with the required format, please visit How to Format Customer Lists.
Source: Facebook for Business
Additional information:
- Your Lookalike Audience will only include people from the country/countries you select during creation.
- Your source audience must contain at least 100 people from a single country in order for Facebook to use it as the basis for a Lookalike Audience.
- You can create up to 500 Lookalike Audiences from a single source audience.
- People in your source audience will be excluded from your Lookalike Audience unless you use a pixel as your source audience.
- You can use multiple Lookalike Audiences at the same time for a single ad set. The ad set will target your ads to people who are in any of the selected Lookalike Audiences.
To learn how to create Segments in the Engage Dashboard, check out How to Build Segments.
To learn how to create Lookalike Audiences, check out Create a Lookalike Audience.