Expanding your audience based on your current customer demographics is the best way to amplify sales. Creating a Facebook Lookalike audiences campaign is “a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your best existing customers” (Facebook,2020). A Lookalike audiences campaign boosts sales and increases customers by targeting ads. Here’s how to can create your very own Facebook lookalike campaign in 8 easy steps !
What is a Facebook Lookalike audience?
A Facebook lookalike audience is a modern and up-to-the minute ads targeting option. At its core Facebook uses your source audience. That is, your pre-existing customers and builds a lookalike audience to target. Using data points from your current audience and a set percentage example it increases the probability of generating high quality and specific leads. A Lookalike audiences campaign instantly amplifies sales and expands customers by targeting ads. Creating a Facebook lookalike campaign takes less than 10 minutes with the right tools !
How to create Facebook lookalike audience ads campaign and increase customers ?
Step 1 : Head on to Facebook Ads Manager and select Audiences.
Step 2 : Then click on Create Audience and select Lookalike Audience.
Step 3 : Choose your source audience.
- You can create a source audience (also known as a seed audience) using data from:
- Customer Information : This is a subscription list subscription list or a customer file list. For instance upload a .txt or .csv file, or copy and paste your information.
- Website Visitors : You can create a custom audience based on the people who visit your website. Just install Facebook pixel. With pixel, you create a list with the audience of people who have visited your website, looked at your product page, completed a purchase, etc.
- App activity : If you have an app, using an active Facebook SDK event tracking. App administrators can collect data on the people who have installed your app. There are 14 pre-defined events that can be tracked. These include levels achieved for a gaming app or lifestyle apps and for retails apps, items that are “added to the basket/cart” .
- Engagement : This is an audience which consists of people who have engaged with your content. This includes people who have seen your videos, your collection, your Instagram business profile, your Facebook page, or have attended any event organized by you.
- Offline activity : This is a list and details of people who have contacted or interacted with your or your business by phone, in person, or by any other offline channel.
Step 4 : Go to Create Audience and choose Lookalike Audience.
Step 5 : Select your source audience and remember this is the custom audience that you created from either customer information, website visitors, app activity, Facebook Pixels,etc.
For instance, please note that your audience needs to have at least 100 people of the same country.
Step 6 : Carefully choose the countries or regions you want to target. Your lookalike audience will be based on the selected countries by adding a geo- filter onto your lookalike audience.
Step 7 : Select your desired audience size. The range is expressed on a scale of 1-10. Smaller the number, higher the similarity and larger the numbers, higher the reach. Facebook supplies you with an approximate reach for the size of audience you choose.
Above all, please note that it can take between 6-24 hours before your Lookalike audience is completed. But however, you can still go ahead with ad creation.
Step 8 : Create your ad, or select one from your device. After that go to Adverts Manager and click on Tools. There select audiences and check if your Lookalike audience is ready. If it is ready then select the audience and click on Create Advert.
Tips on how to master Facebook Lookalike audiences and gain new customers through ads
- A lookalike audience will automatically update every 3-7 days, if your source audience also keeps updating based on Pixel events. This is a time saver as you won’t have to keep creating new audiences for every new ad campaign. In other words, the lookalike audiences will present new customers ads and thus boost sales.
- For an e-commerce business use of the new Value based lookalikes whenever possible is recommended because the data generated is based on the Purchase pixel event. Using value based purchase lookalikes will give you 3 significant advantages :
- These will sort out your best and worst customers by their value. For instance, it will help you create an audience of people who are more likely to make a purchase of $20,000 instead of $500.
- The recency of the data is analyzed. To clarify, data from the last 60 days is taken into account with more importance given to recent transactions.
- The frequency of the data is another very important factor. That is to say, the audience created will be targeted towards people who purchase items online often.
- Always value quality over quantity. Go for an audience that more closely matches your end goal. Moreover, you can customize your audiences around a variety of parameters. There are various options for you to choose from like :
In E- Commerce
- Value audience based on the purchase pixel.
- Customer lifetime value file.
- Offline event set.
- A product set from a product catalog.
- Purchase pixel event.
- Purchases over $xx.
- Purchases with a customer frequency over x times.
- Initiate checkout pixel event.
- Add to cart pixel event.
- View content pixel event.
For a website
- Website visitors.
- Lead pixel event.
- Top 5%, 10% or 25% of website visitors based on time spent on site.
Other Parameters may include
- Email data file.
- Facebook fans.
- Video views.
- App activity.
- Facebook page engagement.
- Instagram page engagement.
- Event responses.
- Lead form responses.
- Instant experiences.
- And more…
- For more information on how marketers can maximize their lead generation through Social Media ads check out our article
- If you are just starting out with a new ad account, there is a high chance that your source audience doesn’t have the minimum 100 purchases necessary. Do not worry, as you can start lower down the ladder and climb your way up. Slowly lookalike audiences will generate customers and improve your ads.
- On the other hand, if you do have an established brand but are new to Facebook ad campaigns your source audience can be just your Facebook followers or leads.
- However if your business is entirely new then a good place to start is by running video ad campaigns to a broad audience. Subsequently building a custom audience based on video viewers. From here you could create a lookalike audience and the traffic customers to your ads. Source audiences as you move up the ladder can be :
- 10-second video views.
- Website visitors.
- View content.
- Add to cart.
- Initiate checkout.
- Purchase.
- For a beginner’s guide on Facebook marketing our article on it is the best place to start !
- While creating Facebook lookalike audiences for different countries and regions base the source data from the existing country you have data for. This is a great starting point as you don’t know exactly which audiences to target yet. Over time as leads and purchases build up you can switch to a more accurate audience. You can even create a lookalike audience for a region, or even an economic area like the EEA or SAARC.
- Always keep your source audience list up to date.
- Moreover to optimize your ad campaigns lookalike audiences use it in combination with other features like adding more targeting parameters such as age, gender, or interests.
- You can optimize bids with a set of Lookalike Audiences into non-overlapping tiers.
- To create this, click on Advanced options while selecting your audience size and you can create. Upto 500 lookalike audiences from just one source audience.
For generating leads through digital marketing in real estate, look through our Ultimate guide !
