Facebook’s Most Powerful Ad Tool
As Facebook continues to sit on the throne as the most popular place to advertise, one of its most useful tools for driving thousands of new customers to businesses every day is the Lookalike Audience feature.
What are lookalike audiences? Lookalike audiences are a way to reach new people who would likely be interested in your business because they are similar to your current customers. It works by using a source audience (i.e. sales data, website data, Facebook Pixel data, etc.) to find new customers who have never heard of your business.
How To Use A Lookalike Audience
While lookalikes audiences are useful for uncovering cold prospects, they can also uncover trends that you didn’t know existed.
Say, for example, you own a ecommerce store and you believe your audience is women ages 30-60. However, when employing a lookalike audience, you uncover data showing the top customers are actually men aged 30-44 (and might assume they are buying gifts).
While Facebook doesn’t provide the exact data points on how they build these audiences from your source data, it is believed they use metrics such as:
- Activity in groups
- Purchasing services
- Likes, comments, shares, video viewing, and general user behavior
- Profile data like age, gender, and location
- Page likes
- Ads they’ve interacted with in the past
- Additional Facebook Pixel data
Building your Source Audience
Building a source audience is the most necessary part in crafting your perfect Lookalike Audience. As stated before, a Source Audience is made up of existing fans, customers, or leads Facebook will use to find other likely customers.
The golden rule is that you need at least 1,000 and no more than 50,000 people to create a good audience. It’s important to note that these specific people will not be included in your Lookalike Audience. Below are some common ways to build a source audience.
#1 Using your CRM or Customer Database
Integrating your CRM or a set of customers can be one of the best ways to build your source audience, as these are people who have already purchased your product or shown some sort of interest in your product or service.
Facebook does this by matching a phone number or email address to an account linked with any of these. You can either do this manually or by integrating your CRM platform (ie.MailChimp). Having additional data points on those customers only helps the append rate. From there, you can tell Facebook to generate the Lookalike audience based on your CRM. It’s important to note that you must have consent from your customers before employing this.
#2 Conversion Audiences or Event-Based Lookalikes
If you have a healthy website, a Conversion Audience or “event-based” audience might be for you. Make sure you have installed the Facebook Pixel and are tracking conversions correctly. You can specify this to visits on a website, add to carts, views on a certain page or product, and website purchases.
A common trend is to run an ad with a discount code and when someone clicks on the discount code they are added to your Lookalike Audience.
#3 Video Audiences
Video ads are a very common ad to run on facebook that can be utilized to build your Lookalike Audience. When you run your ad campaign, you can build a source audience based on engagement criteria (for example watched 10 seconds or 75% of the video). This is great to build an audience for those who may be interested in a specific product or service.
#4 Facebook Page Engagement
This is the easiest to set up as it is taken from the fans of your Facebook page. If you have a large following and a good interaction on your organic posts, then Facebook Page Audiences make building your source audience a breeze.
In Conclusion
Lookalike Audiences are a powerful tool Facebook offers to find real people who would fit your ideal customer mold. Lookalike audiences can significantly increase your ROAS(Return on Ad Spend) to bring a real bang for your buck.
If you are looking to leverage Lookalike Audiences, reach out to Untitled. Our team will be happy to help you get started and drive real results from your ad campaigns.
