Hello, Advertisers!!! Nice to see you again. What if I told you there is a function on Facebook that can study the interests, behaviours & demographics of your audiences and make use of the data to find audiences that have the same trait as your customers?
The Hidden Secrets of Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike Audiences, just as their name goes. Lookalike Audience are audiences that have similar interests and traits with your source audiences or existing customer base. During Lookalike Audience creation, you will be able to select a source audience from your available custom audiences which are created based on your Facebook Pixel, Video Views, Facebook Page Fans, Customer Lists etc. What happens next is that the Facebook algorithm will identify the key characteristics inside the source audience and create another audience pool that is similar to your source audience.Why Lookalike Audiences is so Powerful?
A past research done by McKinsey & Company has shown that organizations that apply customer behavioural insights into the marketing strategy usually outperform their peers by 85% in terms of sales growth and up to 25% in gross margin.With this feature, it would have helped you to save more time and budget on split testing whereas the system will analyze your source audience and find similarities of the audiences to target and expand your audience pool. A highly valued customer source audience will help to find lookalike audiences that are closer to your target audience to achieve optimal campaign performance.With the application of lookalike audiences, it will help to improve the campaign performance further by allowing you to explore a new audience segment that you might have missed out on due to targeting limitations on Facebook. This makes it easier to scale the campaign further to acquire new potential audiences and get more conversions and sales for your business.Types of source audience that can be used to create Lookalike Audiences are:
- Customer Email & Phone Number Lists – By uploading the information in .txt or .csv file, or copy and paste your information.
- Website Visitors – With Facebook Pixel installed on the website. You are able to create custom audiences based on the user’s activities on your website such as visitors, viewed product audiences or audience who have taken specific action on the website.
- App Activity – Similar to website custom audiences that can only work with the Facebook pixel, for Apps, it is required to have an active Facebook SDK event tracking within the app. App administrators then can collect data on users activities in the app.
- Page & Post Engagement – A custom audience that is based on the engagement on Facebook or Instagram. People who messaged, comments or clicked on a Call-to-Action button can be all created as different custom audiences.
With so many custom audiences that can be used to create a Lookalike Audience, which one would be the best and able to bring the most relevant audiences to you?
Advanced Strategy to make use of Lookalike Audience further to optimize your campaign performance better:
1. Segment High Quality Custom Audiences for Lookalikes
How to create high quality custom audiences? Create & segment the custom audiences by categories accordingly.
For instance, segment and upload the customer list by different categories such as.
1. Customer Lifetime Value
2. Action Taken on Website thru Facebook Pixel
3. Customer Behaviors such as Website Visits, Add to Carts, Checkouts & Purchases.
2. Using Different Lookalike Audience Size
Always cater your lookalike audiences according to different campaign objectives.
Smaller lookalike audience at 1-5 scale will have the most similarities to your custom audience whereas as the scale goes higher (6-10), the potential reach will also increase but leading to lower similarity with your custom audiences.
If the main objective is to optimize to get as many conversions possible, always aim for a smaller audience with more similarities. However, if the campaign objective is to increase awareness and reach, a large lookalike audience size would be the most suitable strategy.
There will be different estimation of potential reach based on the similarities with the source audience.
Just for reference the size of the lookalike audience based on similarities are as below.
* 1% will have a potential reach of 273.6k Audience Size
* 2% will have a potential reach of 547.1k Audience Size
* 3% will have a potential reach of 820.7k Audience Size
* 4% will have a potential reach of 1.1m Audience Size
* 5% will have a potential reach of 1.4m Audience Size
* 6% will have a potential reach of 1.6m Audience Size
* 7% will have a potential reach of 1.9m Audience Size
* 8% will have a potential reach of 2.2m Audience Size
* 9% will have a potential reach of 2.5m Audience Size
* 10% will have a potential reach of 2.7m Audience Size
3. Improve Your Targeting with Different Combination of Lookalike Audiences Applications
Include lookalike audiences with combination targeting such as interests, demographics and behaviours. By doing so, you will help to narrow down your audience targetings further and reach audience groups that are more specific.
Excluding Lookalike Audiences on your ad sets targeting to exclude people who are not relevant and help avoid audience overlapping that can cause internal competition between ad sets.
The Conclusion
In conclusion, as you run ads on Facebook and collect more and more data and learnings from the past campaigns, you will eventually start to do better. All of the data and split testing done in the past will give you further insights and understanding on your target audience interests & demographic behaviours. As the data gets more saturated and matured, making use of them accordingly can help to create a highly valued lookalike audience that is going to give your business a further boost.
Lookalike audiences are like the fruits of your past efforts after countless trials and errors that help you to give your business a further boost faster through algorithm matching within the Facebook system.
With the application of lookalikes audience, it will eventually help to save the effort & time with more effective scaling strategies and gives advertisers more time to optimize on creative aspects to optimize the performance further.
Here are the features and the advanced strategies of Facebook Lookalike Audience that advertisers need to know.
Had you tried using a lookalike audience before? What are the results? Share with us in the comment section below!
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