Our tips for building Facebook lookalike audiences

If you run a business, you may well already be using Facebook ads to look for new customers. If so, you’ll need to know about creating lookalike audiences in order to get the most from the platform.

What Is a Lookalike Audience?
A lookalike audience is a way of targeting your marketing at people who you have already had some contact with. This could be your email list, customers who have bought something from you before or those who have watched your video.
Used correctly, lookalike audiences are an extremely effective way of reaching potential customers or clients.

How Do They Work?
Basically, you first need to identify an audience who you have already interacted with. Facebook then takes the data from this list and uses it to find similar lookalike audiences you can then target with marketing.
The beauty of Facebook is it puts you in control of all the criteria – you can target a specific profile, location or people with certain interests. It’s largely up to you.
Important: The larger your source audience is, the better the lookalike audience will turn out to be, because there is more information to use to find your new audience. As a general guide, your source audience should have no fewer than 1,000 people.

Using Emails
One of the most commonly used lookalike audiences, because they are usually the most successful, is based on your email lists.
As with any Facebook lookalike audience, you first need to create a customised email audience, which you then use to formulate a lookalike audience to target people who closely resemble your existing customers.
It is a fairly simple process, and Facebook guides you through it admirably. You can even upload your email list to make it easier.

Using Page ‘Likes’
One of the simplest ways of creating a lookalike list is to use one based on the people who have already Liked your Facebook page – you won’t even need to create a custom audience first.

Using Videos
Did you know that Facebook users, on average, watch a staggering 100 million hours’ worth of video each day?
Videos provide an instant way of connecting to potential customers, enabling you to build brand loyalty and recognition in an engaging way.
You can easily create a customised video audience on Facebook which will help you market to people who have already viewed videos like the one you want to show them.
You can even create different audiences for the different lengths of time people have spent watching your existing videos.
Once you have created a customised audience, you can then make lookalike audiences based on the criteria you have already set.

Using Conversions
This type of lookalike audience allows you to use a source audience of people who have already completed a specified conversion event on your website. This could be people who have bought one of your products using a discount code, for example.
Note that you need to be tracking conversions on your website before you can set up a source audience.