What's a Facebook Lookalike Audience And How To Use It?

Lookalike Audiences – Facebook Ads Strategy (2019)

What Are Lookalike Audiences?

For those unaware of this nifty little Facebook advertising strategy, lookalike audiences are people who are likely to be interested in your product, service or business, because they already closely match your best existing customers.

Essentially, lookalike audiences go far beyond the usual targeting options, such as demographic and geographic.

In fact, lookalike audiences are currently the most powerful targeting tool for finding your ideal customer.

All Targeting Options Promise That…

9 times out of 10, lookalike audiences will get you a higher click-through-rate (CTR) for your ads.

Facebook’s algorithm and AI have come such a long way, they can now hone in on your ideal customer and start getting you results almost immediately…

… With barely any effort on your part.

So, if you’re not using lookalike audiences to scale your campaigns, I’ve got one question to ask you.

Why???

True- there are so many targeting options out there, it can get difficult to see the wood for the trees.

But when it comes to using lookalike audiences, there’s no excuse.

Lookalikes are the mighty oaks in a forest full of shrubs, and the proper use of lookalike audiences could boost your business up to the high-5 or 6-figure a month mark.

And – I repeat – the process is really straightforward as Facebook does most of the planting, pruning and tending for you.

Lookalike audience oak tree — The Lookalike Audience Tree

Ok… Can You Tell Me The Benefits?

So, you’ve got your ads up, and they’ve gathered a pretty big audience (about 300 or so).

In fact, your ads are doing pretty well, and you’re getting a good ROI. You keep these ads in mind, and now know that this type of ad appeals to a certain kind of user.

Now that you’ve got this kind of info, you can make Facebook work a bit harder for you, and request it creates a new target audience… an audience with similar interests, demographics, buying history and chance that they could convert into prime-quality leads.

Once Facebook has enough data to do this for you, it isn’t going to be long until you see the new leads come pouring in – all from an audience that required little assembly on your part.

Why gather the wheat by hand when you’ve got a combine harvester with a full tank of petrol in the garage?

Anything More?

Even better, you can control the size of the audience you want. This advertising strategy gives you the opportunity to scale your lookalike audience from your custom audience from a rate of 1-10%.

So, for example, if you want your audience to match 90% of the characteristics in your current audience (the top 1%), then you’re going to get a marketing pool that’s almost identical to the one you have. In this case, the audience isn’t going to be massive – but there’s a high chance that a lot will convert to leads.

If you fancy a bit more wiggle room, then you can increase the lookalike audience to 10% – aka 10% of the total population in the countries you choose, displaying the characteristics most likely to be interested in your product/service.

This strategy is more likely to give you “wildcard” leads – people who wouldn’t usually be interested but were attracted to your ad, or users who wouldn’t usually see the ad, but did because you opened up your targeting options.

These leads can be a little more expensive than those from a narrow audience – but on my recommended CPL model, every lead you give the client should be priced to give you a profit.

Can I Monitor My Lookalike Audiences?

Of course! As with most of Facebook’s targeting options, you can monitor who’s seeing the ads, and the audience response.

Therefore, if you’re seeing any problems with the people reached, your ad spend, or your ROI, you can cut them short before they become gigantic issues.

Facebook can take up to 24 hours to create lookalike audiences, and it can take 24 hours to a couple of days to see the results. Monitor your process carefully, however, and it’s unlikely you’re going to wake up to any nasty surprises.

How Can I Scale?

Once you’ve started making lookalikes, it can be tempting to triple your ad budget and target as many similar groups as possible.

Seriously, don’t do this.

Messing too much with your ad budget means you’ll be showing the same ads to the same audiences over and over again. As Facebook values “good and relevant content”, its algorithm will soon mark your ads as spam and stop showing them.

money arrow sad face ad budget — You Should NEVER Mess With Your Ad Budget

Instead, test your audiences and see which ones give you the best response rate.

These lookalike audiences could be developed from your email lists, purchase history, or anything else you can think of. Like anything, lookalikes will take some fine tuning to get the bang-on results you want.

It’s also essential your budget matches the audience. If you’ve got quite a big budget and you’re targeting at 1%, then you’re going to waste money finding the few-and-far-between exact matches.

Do not decrease your budget – just open up your audience to 4, 5, or 6%.

Once you find the right audience, stick to it. At the end of the day, it’s your audience – not you!- who decide what good ads are and what aren’t. Test your new ad copy on your custom and lookalike audiences – if they do well, they’re good. If not, you may want to have a rethink about your copy.

There are tonnes of ways to scale a great Facebook campaign with lookalike audiences. This video contains quite a few of them. Check it out and tell us what you think!