Want to grow your audience in a methodical manner? Need to show your ads to more people who will convert?
We will show you how you can grow your audience in a safe and gradual manner using lookalike audiences.
A lookalike audience is an audience built using information from people who have previously engaged with you in some way. They let you reach large amounts of people who share the same qualities as your previous audiences.
How do lookalike audiences work?
Lookalike audiences work based on a percentage, with 0-1% being the most similar, and 0-10% being the least similar. While this 0-10% will be a bigger audience their similarities to the original will be so dilute they may not prove to be useful to your business.
When you get so large, you do not play to the algorithms strengths and thus, it struggles to know who you want to target. Unless you have a massive account with tonnes of information this targeting may not work for you.
However, a super lookalike may be just what you need. This is when we took a number of very accurate lookalike audiences and combine them together into a big audience. This audience is large, but they are all high value customers to us. This lets Facebook do all the prospecting we need for it to get us the very best customers.
Using this super audience in an ad should yield a high click through rate and conversion rate meaning we got a lower cost per impression, meaning cheaper ads. These super lookalikes work for nearly every industry and can be highly useful for growing your customer base.
How can you make lookalike audiences to grow your business?
Use Top Customer Information
Having a quality base to build your lookalike audience from is crucial. Therefore, using customers at the bottom end of your funnel is a must.
The first way to do this is to create a value-based custom audience. What this means is you get the customer list you have and create an audience using it. Taking this audience you then create a lookalike based on it. Update it regularly to keep it relevant. You can also do this using the information gathered from your pixel, and this will automatically keep itself up to date. Other audiences you can base your audiences are, are your top spenders, those who spent the most time on your website and those who watched X%of your video.
E-commerce is a little simpler to create lookalikes from. Use the add to cart, initiate checkout, add payment info and purchase events as the basis for your lookalikes. Just make sure you have your pixel installed and to use these.
To do this, go to audiences in your Ads Manager and click create audience.
Then choose website as the source for your audience.
Then from the dropdown that appears pick whatever option you want based on the information from your website.
Do this to create any other audience based on your website that you want.
Combining all of this information will create partial overlaps but it doesn’t matter considering since all of them are combined into the same adset and won’t be competing against each other.
Putting bottom-of-the funnel audiences together means you will be targeting those most likely to purchase from you or start the journey to purchasing from you.
Lookalikes Based on Powerful Custom Audiences
The key to this lookalike is finding your best audiences to base your lookalike on. To do this, look at the KPI’s like ROAS or CTR to find the most useful group to you. Then create low percentage (0-3%) lookalikes and combine them into one ad set.
To do this, take a look at your best performing ad sets and the audiences that power them. Take these audience names and make a lookalike out of each of them. Combine these (3-15 per ad set) in the same way as described above. Doing this will make a potent collection of ad sets with your super lookalikes.
You Have Your Lookalikes, Now Scale Them.
Providing you’ve done the work correctly, you will have grown your business thanks to your lookalikes. Once your super lookalikes have stabilised in terms of growth you can grow them horizontally.
Grow those percentages
Are all of your lookalikes based on 0-1% or 0-2% audiences? If so, try putting that out to 0-5% or 0-6%. Monitor their income and understand where your break even point is. When doing this always keep your smaller percentages in with the larger ones, there will be a cross over but will all be in the ad set so the effect will be unfelt. For example, if you stretch the audience out to 0-5%, keep 0-1%, 0-2% etc. as part of your ad set.
Variety
Don’t just use one place as a source for your lookalikes. Here are the four places we find best to use;
- Website-Use high intent customers as your basis for your lookalikes initially and then grow this out to lower intent audiences like people who viewed your site.
- Social Media-All of those likes you have on Facebook or Instagram? Put them to use by basing your audience based on those who have engaged with you recently.
- Email List-People who have bought from you or are on your newsletter
- Ad-Anyone who has engaged with your business through your paid ads.
Time
If you’re creating a lookalike based on information from your website or social media, you can decide how recent you want it to be. From 1-365 days, you have a lot to choose from.
Conclusion
Lookalikes are a powerful way to grow your business, and the more information you can feed them the better they’ll perform. Give them as much as you can and they will make use of Facebook’s algorithm to help you expand. Finding the ideal of balance of size to accuracy is key and thus super lookalikes are very useful. Make use of your businesses experience to help it keep growing.