No matter how good your ad copy and visuals are, if your paid advertising campaign doesn’t reach the right people, you are doomed to fail.
Targeting, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the key fundamentals of the game we call Digital Marketing. All the creative process that you undertake to create a meaningful and scroll-stopping ad reaches new heights of performance when coupled with relevancy.
Trust us when we say you don’t want to sell hair styling products to a bald person.
All major advertising platforms in the world, especially Facebook, understand how crucial it is to get right on targeting. This had led them to create a wide variety of targeting options. Today, we are going to discuss one such important targeting option provided by Facebook – Facebook Lookalike Audience.
So, without wasting any more time, let’s get into the content!
What is Facebook Lookalike Audience?
A segmentation tool in Facebook Ads, Facebook Lookalike Audiences helps advertisers find new potential customers using the demographics, interests, and behavior of their existing set of audience.
This kind of audience is very much easy to create and highly powerful. Implementation of lookalike audiences on Facebook requires minimum efforts that make it a very important marketing tool to engage new potential customers.
Now that we know what we are looking into, let’s understand the benefits of thing kind of audience targeting.
What are the Benefits of Facebook Lookalike Audience?
Facebook’s wide range of targeting options can confuse any Facebook advertising beginner. It might seem like Lookalike targeting options adds to the confusion. But, as you will realize how beneficial a lookalike audience is for your Facebook ads, you will know that the case is the opposite.
1.Can Be Easily Set Up
It’s amazing how easy it is to create and use a lookalike audience targeting. The entire step-by-step procedure of setting up a lookalike audience for your Facebook ad campaign has been discussed later in this post.
Creating a lookalike audience essentially comes down to two simple steps – 1) Choosing a custom audience list and 2) choosing lookalike as your option.
This simplicity helps you leverage the power of Facebook marketing without having to sweat for it. After quickly setting up the lookalike audience different versions of a campaign, you will all the time in the world to run split tests for maximum returns.
2. Helps Expand Your Campaign Audience
Okay, let’s face it. The complexity of the target audience differs from campaign to campaign. The interests and behavior itself can result in sets of audience having different data points.
These data points are virtually impossible for you to segregate. That’s exactly where Facebook lookalike audience helps. It automates the process of creating a Facebook campaign that has audience which looks exactly like your existing set of customers.
All you have to do is upload your list of audience data and Facebook will match the profile of all users to the submitted common characteristics. These characteristics are unknown to the average advertisers but Facebook knows it all. With the help of lookalikes, you can significantly expand your audience.
3. Goals Can Be Achieved Using Existing Lists
The base audience that you provide Facebook to create lookalikes from, can help you customize your ad campaign to achieve the metrics you are looking for. Through this, you can create lookalike audiences to achieve your specific marketing goals.
Let no one tell you that it is a complex thing to do on Facebook. It is very much straightforward and simple to understand. The list that you use to create a lookalike audience will provide you specific results. For example, if you use the list of existing customers, you will be targeting increased conversions, or if you are using email list subscribers, you may be looking to improve brand awareness.
These benefits should definitely make you try out the Facebook lookalike audience targeting option. It is really a great feature of Facebook Ads which might help you boost the ROI of your online marketing.
How to Set Up a Facebook Lookalike Audience?
As we mentioned earlier, setting up a Facebook lookalike audience is a cakewalk. Still, it is important to be careful and follow all the right steps to build a reliable lookalike audience for your next Facebook ad campaign.
The setup is the key here. So, let’s discuss the same. Here are the 7 steps you should follow to setup your own Facebook lookalike audience:
Step 1: Open Facebook Ads Manager.
Step 2: Go to the Audiences section.
Step 3: Click on Create Audience dropdown menu and select Lookalike Audience.
Step 4: Select the appropriate source for your lookalike audience. Custom audience created using an email list or website visitors can do the work.
Step 5: Select the country you want to find the lookalike audience in.
Step 6: Now select the audience size using the sliders provided on screen. You will be doing it taking the percentage of population of the country into consideration.
Step 7: Once done, click on Create the Audience.
These are the seven essential steps to creating a Facebook lookalike audience. These steps can be carried out without taking much of your time. However, Facebook requires almost a day to get the audience created.
Once that is done, Facebook makes sure the audience keeps getting updated with relevant and potential customers. You may also create a lookalike audience when creating a new campaign. The setup is straightforward there as well.
Top Strategies to Create Successful Lookalike Audience in Facebook Ads
- Enable Dynamic Lists Dependency
You can create audiences on the basis of how people interact with your website. The interactions can be segregated and used to develop lookalikes. Since the interactions keep changing, the factors on which the audience is created keep changing as well. Therefore, user behavior becomes a major driving factor in creating and updating such a lookalike audience.
2. Enable Automatic CRM Uploads
Most CRMs present in the market today allow for direct automatic Facebook API integration. You can use these direct integrations to create lookalike audiences as well.
Your CRM already has a lot of information about your customer and can really help you create base audience for a lookalike audience. This simplifies the process even further.
With this, you can save a lot of your time which was earlier spent on building customer lists, formatting and uploading onto Facebook to create lookalike audiences.
3. Create Customer List Segmentations
Different customers have different capacity to make purchases. We can use this characteristic to segregate the customer list and build lookalike audience.
The average customer value can be a medium to conduct natural segmentation for ecommerce stores. A very simple segmentation can be creating two different sets of users – 1) Customers with high purchase capacity and 2) Customers with low purchase capacity.
Creating advanced lookalike models requires making the most of the differences within your customer base.
4. Update with New Customer List Regularly
We highly recommend this method to create lookalike audiences if you are new to Facebook marketing.
This involves a very basic way to create lookalike audience. Uploading the customer list onto Facebook and updating it regularly to create new Lookalike audiences.
You can upload the list monthly or quarterly. Facebook’s algorithm brings the customers that are more valuable to your business and adds more new customers and simultaneously making the lookalike model more advanced.
5. Leverage Pixel to Use Other User Categories
Pixel can help you track the standard or custom events to identify more meaningful categories of customers which can be later used to create lookalike audiences.
The standard events like Add to Cart, Add Payment Info, Complete Registration, Lead, Pageview, Purchase, and more can be used to set up a more advanced pixel.
Over to You
If you are not targeting the right people on Facebook, chances are that your ads performance will not improve over time. That means you will be wasting a lot of time and your hard earned money.
Therefore, understanding your audience’s behavior and creating Facebook lookalike audience to leverage the insights is highly recommended.
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Happy Advertising!
