January 20, 2021
Once you’ve decided that you want to start social advertising on Facebook, you need to choose an audience.
Facebook makes it fairly easy by providing a business with the tools needed to find the exact segments of people that will respond to your ad. One technique is known as a “lookalike” audience.
This is a powerful tool that helps to better your Facebook ad retargeting. It uses machine learning to draw understanding about your most successful customers, then finds groups of new people that are likely to be good customers too. These groups “look like” the audience members you have generated authentically.
It’s a sophisticated matchmaker for business marketing. You tell Facebook what you like in a customer, and the platform delivers a new audience segment filled with prospects that meet your criteria.
This helps to increase the probability of generating high-quality leads and offers more value on ad spend. If you’re looking to use a Facebook lookalike audience to boost sales and drive revenue, here are a few tips to help you get started:
Different custom audiences will match different goals. If your goal is to drive awareness, choose a lookalike audience based on Page Fans.
If your goal is to drive online sales, then you may want to choose an audience based on website visitors.
Create a custom audience around a multitude of parameters. Drill down to options that best align with campaign goals. Custom audiences can include:
Consider different sizes for different campaign goals. A smaller audience is more focused and is more likely to match your custom audience.
A larger lookalike audience will increase potential reach but may decrease the level of familiarity and authenticity. If you’re optimizing for similarity, go with the smaller sample.
The better data you give, the more valuable the results. Facebook recommends between 1,000 to 50,000 people for a lookalike audience. That being said, an audience of 500 loyal customers will always perform better than an audience of 50,000 good or average customers.
Avoid broad audiences like “all app installers” or “all website visitors.” Although these lists will include great customers, it also lumps in those who will bounce after a short period of time. This kind of thing can mess up your metrics.
The data that best represents your true customers is typically farther down the conversion funnel. Use this information and never skimp. Your campaign will pay in the long run.
Always keep your audience list up-to-date with customer information. If you’re creating a custom audience in Facebook, make sure to add date range parameters. This way you can check back and refresh the data after certain periods of time.
For example, if you’re adding a custom audience based on website visitors, try to narrow it down to those who visited within a certain time frame, like the last 30 days or two weeks.
It’s important to note that Facebook lookalike audiences update every 3 to 7 days, so anyone new who visits will be added to your list.
In the next volume, we discuss more tips on how to optimize lookalike audience bids and use these segments in conjunction with other Facebook features. Stay tuned!
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