Facebook Lookalike Audience: A detailed guide

What is a Facebook Lookalike audience?

A Lookalike audience on Facebook is a group of users whose behavior and characteristics are similar to those of your existing audience. This tool allows advertisers to target their ads to new users who are highly likely to be interested in their products or services.

How the Lookalike Audience works

Existing Audience Analysis: Facebook uses your current user audience as a benchmark.
Applying Machine Learning: Using machine learning algorithms, Facebook analyzes data from your reference audience to identify key characteristics.
Search for similar users: Based on the analysis, algorithms find people with similar demographic data, such as age, gender and location.
Identifying common Interests: Algorithms identify users with similar interests and hobbies.
Behavior Analysis: Algorithms take into account behavioral patterns such as interaction with content and purchases to find users whose behavior is similar to that of your reference audience.

Advantages of using Lookalike Audiences

Similar audiences on Facebook can significantly improve the marketing funnel, providing many opportunities to interact with a highly interested audience. These audiences are highly likely to make a purchase, submit a lead form, or subscribe to a newsletter. Here are the main advantages of using similar audiences on Facebook:

Rapid targeting expansion

Similar audiences provide the easiest way to expand ad targeting:

Automatic audience creation: Facebook uses your original audience (for example, lists of customers or site visitors) and finds users with similar characteristics.
High interest potential: Algorithms select people who are most likely to be interested in your offer, so that your advertising campaigns reach exactly those who will potentially become your client.
Time saving: Instead of conducting complex research and tests, the system automatically creates a new audience, which speeds up the process of launching advertising campaigns.

Ease of finding new customers

Creating similar audiences requires only a few steps:

Ease of setup: You simply select the initial audience (for example, a list of customers, subscribers, or site visitors) and set similarity parameters (for example, 1% of the country's population).
High intentions: Users in similar audiences tend to have high intentions towards your offer, which increases the likelihood of conversions compared to traditional targeting methods.
Effort optimization: Reduces the need for long-term research and manual adjustment of targeting parameters, as the system automatically finds the most suitable audience.

Lower cost of advertising

Ads for similar audiences on Facebook often have a lower CPM (cost per thousand impressions):

Cost-effectiveness: Due to the high level of relevance, your ads are shown to users who are more likely to commit targeted actions, which reduces overall advertising costs.

Lead Cost Reduction: Because users in similar audiences better match your target profile, the cost per lead (CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA) may also be lower.
Increased ROI: Lower CPM and high conversion rate mean you get more results for less money, increasing the return on investment in advertising.

Using similar audiences on Facebook provides an effective and cost-effective way to expand targeting, find new customers and reduce advertising costs. Thanks to machine learning and data analysis, Facebook automatically finds users who are highly likely to be interested in your offer, which makes your marketing efforts more successful and profitable.

How to create a custom audience

To create similar audiences on Facebook, you must first prepare a user audience that will become the basis for your new similar audience. Start by logging into Ads Manager and going to the "Audiences" tab. In the upper-left corner, select "Create an audience", then "Custom Audience". Next, specify the source of your user audience. Instagram Facebook Facebook Possible sources include: existing customers (using the customer list), site visitors (if Facebook Pixel is installed on the site), users active in your applications, those who have shown interest in your pages, posts and ads on Facebook or Instagram, interacted with lead forms, videos or catalog, as well as those who performed offline activity in your store. After that, set up the audience source, enter a name and description, then click "Create an audience".

After creating a custom audience, you can start creating a similar audience. Select a newly created user audience from the Audiences menu, then click Create Audience and select Similar Audience. Specify the initial user audience, configure the parameters of a similar audience by selecting the country and the level of similarity (for example, 1% of the country's population). This will create an audience that best matches your target profile, which will effectively expand the reach of advertising campaigns and attract new users who are highly likely to be interested in your products or services.

How to create a similar audience

To create similar audiences on Facebook, follow these steps: Go to the "Audiences" tab in Ads Manager, select "Create Audience" in the upper left corner, then "Similar Audience". Identify the source of a similar audience by selecting any of the custom audiences you have created. Then select the location of the audience, which should match the country your ad set is targeting. Finally, select the size of the audience and click the "Create Audience" button.

Important points when creating similar audiences

Facebook recommends that the selected initial audience should be between 1,000 and 50,000 users.
The process of creating a new audience can take 6-24 hours.
You can create up to 500 similar audiences based on a single source audience in one Facebook advertising account.

Best practices for creating similar audiences

A Lookalike audience based on the best customers for lifetime value is usually an effective tool to attract new customers with similar characteristics. Here's how to use this method in various cases:

Best Customers by Lifetime Value:

Create an audience based on customers who have spent more than a certain amount of money or have a high Lifetime Value (LTV). This will help you find people with similar characteristics who are also likely to be active and valuable customers.

Lead-gen business:

For companies whose goal is to generate leads, use current customers to create a similar audience. This will help you attract new potential customers with similar characteristics.

Based on purchases, initiated checkout, or cart additions:

Create similar audiences based on users who have expressed interest in your product or service, who have made purchases, initiated checkout, or added items to the cart. This will help you attract customers who are inclined to complete purchases.

Site Visitors:

Create a similar audience based on your site visitors, taking into account the sorting by time spent on the site. This will help you attract an audience with similar behaviors and interests.

Use different audience sizes:

Experiment with different audience sizes (0-1%, 1-5% and 5-10%) to achieve optimal results depending on your targeting goals and audience size.