What are Facebook Lookalike Ads?

If you’re into Facebook ads, I decided to talk about a term you’ve heard many times before today.

Facebook lookalike audience, aka Lookalike Audience.

Lookalike is a Facebook audience segmentation tool that finds users similar to their audience, demographics, and current followers.

These audiences are easy to create and implement. k

nowing how to use the application, the advantage you will get also plays a very important role.

All of this makes these audiences an extremely powerful marketing tool for efficiently finding high-converting users.

Facebook similar target audiences, which should be used especially by e-commerce brands, provide great advantages to brands and advertisers, especially thanks to the Facebook Pixel tool. 

So, what is this audience tool and how to use it?

What is a Facebook Lookalike Audience?

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We met this target audience tool for the first time in 2013. We do not know if Facebook, which activated this feature through the target audience tool for creating a lookalike audience, predicted that this tool would have such an important place today. 

However, this feature has given brands and social media experts an excellent opportunity.

In addition, the fact that Facebook offers us the data it collects from both its own and other social media channels that it owns and all other data it collects through cookies on the internet has emerged as a much more decisive factor. 

Facebook not only collects the data of its users on Facebook and Instagram, but also collects all other data of its users on the internet.

Of course, when it comes to these specific audience components, your website and social media accounts, which are located right in the middle of your traffic source, it helps to reveal a target audience that can have a higher success rate. 

This, combined with the similar target audience feature, makes it even more successful.

Do not treat this data as a small data! Because with more than 2 billion users, Facebook holds more data than you can believe.

This makes the Facebook lookalike service incredibly successful.

When the system creates a similar audience, it asks you for a resource. You can usually use a users’ mailing list on your site, the traffic your website has, or the interaction I get directly from an Instagram or Facebook account.

Facebook cares about even data that you might consider unimportant. Thus, all these behaviors create a wide spectrum and find other people who exhibit similar behaviors. These similarities aren’t just about age or interests.

 What Facebook is more interested in is behavior. Users’ shopping behavior, what they buy, where they buy, how often they buy and much more play an important role in determining these target audiences.

Afterwards, the Facebook algorithm finds potential customers who exhibit similar behavior based on this data. Facebook’s algorithm will begin to question its entire user base, looking for people who most closely share the profile and behavioral characteristics it has identified from its source audience. 

As a result, it puts this potential customer base at your service, which is very similar to its current customers.

⭐Thanks to the Facebook lookalike audience feature, it becomes very simple to reach people who are similar to their existing customers. This high-quality and potential customer base will have a great deal of power to drastically increase conversion rate and return on investment.

What are Facebook Lookalike Audiences?

What should be known when creating a similar target audience is that such target audiences are created according to the source audiences. With data from a specified traffic source, Facebook creates a lookalike audience and you determine how wide or which regions this audience will cover.

Of course, having a few different options for the source traffic to be determined brings the potential to create a very wide target audience.

Wondering what resources you can use?

• Customer Information: Newsletter subscription list or customer file list can be used as traffic source. You can continue using a .txt or .csv file, or copy and paste the information you have.
• Website Visitors: The most used traffic source when creating Facebook lookalike audience is website traffic. You can base your website visitors to create a custom audience. You can get the resource through Facebook Pixel , which links to your ad account and website . With Pixel, you can target people who visit your website, view a product page, complete a purchase, and engage in more different behaviors.
• App Activity: With active Facebook SDK activity tracking, app administrators can collect data about people who install your app. You can use one of 14 predefined events that can be tracked, such as “added to cart” for retail apps or “level reached” for game apps.
• Engagement: An engagement audience consists of people who are interested in your content on Facebook or Instagram. Engagement events include different options to choose from, such as video, lead form, Canva and collection, Facebook page, Instagram business profile, and event.
• Offline activity: If you have a list of users who interact with your brand by phone or other offline channel, you can create a Facebook lookalike audience through this list.

Multiple lookalike audiences can be used simultaneously for the same ad campaign. You can also match these audiences with other ad targeting parameters such as age and gender, interests and behaviors. In this way , it will be much easier for you to find the right strategy on your brand and target audience by doing A / B tests .

How to Create a Facebook Lookalike Audience?

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In a few steps I’ll explain how to reach these perfect audiences. If you’re ready, sit back and take the pen and paper with you. 🙂

First of all, I recommend that you switch to the new Ads Manager. If you are still using the old interface, you may not be able to use some features. If you’re on the new interface, let’s continue.

While in your Ad Account, click the 6-dot icon above.

Click “Target Audience” from the drop-down menu.

The Target Audience page will open. Here you can see, review and change many target audiences you have created before. But our job is directly with the “Create New Audience” button. Click here and select “Like Audience” from the drop-down menu.

Then a page will appear where you can create your audience. Here it will ask you to select the source, location and audience size.

This is exactly where the magic begins.

First you will need to identify the source and I will help you with this.

Identifying the Source

The source is the current audience you want Facebook to use as a basis for finding a similar audience of certain people. You can use an email list, a custom audience on your Facebook Pixel, or even fans of your Facebook or Instagram page.

If you already have a source audience, you can specify it in the “Choose an existing audience or data source” section. However, you may not have that type of target audience. So what should you do in this situation? In this case, you need to press the “Create New Resource” button. Two options will appear before you.

When you choose the first option, “Custom Audience”, you will be greeted with many custom audience options. These will include website traffic, Facebook or Instagram pages, application and many different options

Many of these options are resources you can get quickly on Facebook. Others are resources you can access using Facebook Pixel, such as the Website.

No, if you say that you will prefer the other option instead of the Custom Audience, a page like this will appear.

Many of these options are resources you can get quickly on Facebook. Others are resources you can access using Facebook Pixel, such as the Website.

No, if you say that you will prefer the other option instead of the Custom Audience, a page like this will appear.

If this is your first time using it, it will ask you for confirmation to be able to use Value-Based Custom Audiences. Then it will redirect you to another page where you can upload the file.

Here Facebook expects you to add a client list, and also allows you to download a .csv file sample to show you how to add this client list.

After creating this file as desired, you can continue by adding it.

That’s it!

While determining the source, there may be question marks in mind on some issues. How about I answer some of these questions?

• Minimum Audience Size for Source

The recommended source audience size should be at least 1000 people or more. As the audience grows, it helps Facebook have more resources to build a strong Facebook lookalike audience, and the algorithm works much better. The quality of the source audience is also a very important factor for best results.

For example, a target audience of your most loyal customers will be much better than the source audience of people who have purchased a product from you once.

So what if you don’t have 1000 buyers from the past?

There are a few other resources you can use in this situation.

1. Do you only have a customer database of 100-200 people? Forget about a 1000-person list and just use this old client list. It will help you a little bit.
2. Have a list of email subscribers? Use this list as a direct source. After all, these people consist of people who have entered your site and interacted with your site at some point.
3. Got Website Visitors? Use this to build a lookalike audience. Especially targeting people who go to your product page will help you get a much better result.
4. Do you have a fan base on Facebook or Instagram ? Then use the people who follow you and interact with you on these channels as resources

Choosing the Location

If you have a single big market, you should target Turkey directly, just like Turkey in general. But if your store is a brand that targets and serves many different markets, it is a very important advantage to create similar target audiences here.

what?

You will have a resource with many more people than a single grocery store, and it will be impossible for you to reach everyone. For this, it will be more important than anything that you target your potential customers within this large target audience. By creating a Lookalike Audience for each location, you can separate your ads and deliver more personalized ads to each geography while performing A/B tests .

Its results will perhaps even affect the decisions you make in that market.

Choosing a Target Audience Percentage

Another variable you need to determine is the target audience percentage. The target audience percentage is actually a very simple thing. The percentage you set here depends on how big you want your audience to be. For example, when you choose Turkey, you will encounter a target audience of 400 thousand in 10% of your language.

What I would suggest here is obviously to start with 1% when setting this percentage. This percentage will give you the audience that most closely resembles the main source. Think of a center and surrounding circles in your mind. Here, the first flat closest to the center will be the 1% flat.

The common opinion of marketers is usually to start with 1%, and once they feel that they have scaled as much as possible with that audience, it is best not to rush before the 2% or 3% ad spend of £10,000 (or more) is incurred. First start with %1, then start growing according to the situation.

⚠️When creating a percentage audience, you can also choose how many audiences you can create. In this way, for example, you can have three different target audiences by separating all these 1% while determining a target audience of 3%.

Ad Management with Facebook Lookalike Audience

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Now that we’ve built a Facebook lookalike audience, it’s time to create ads! The formula we see most used by e-commerce marketers is to combine lookalike audiences with Conversion-targeted ads.

It’s easy to overlook this step as Facebook’s way of trying to figure out what your marketing goal is, but what you choose here is actually very important. If you are an e-commerce brand and your goal is to increase sales, it would make much more sense to choose the Conversions goal here.

Why Are Conversion Ads Important for Lookalike Audiences?

When you select the conversion goal, Facebook allows you to choose the Conversions ad model for Ad Optimization. Here you will see three different ad models that you can choose from. Conversions, Catalog Sales and Store Traffic.

This isn’t just Facebook’s way of trying to find out what its marketing goals are. What you choose is a really important factor. One of the activities that Facebook watches closely is the online shopping of users.

When a user makes an online purchase, Facebook records that activity in the user’s profile and uses it to determine which users are most likely to shop online.

By choosing the Purchase event as the conversion for optimization, Facebook will identify its data to isolate the users in your audience who are most likely to purchase from an online store. But how will he know? When a user makes an online purchase, Facebook will record that activity on the user’s profile and use this to determine which users are most likely to shop online.

📜

Conversion Window Optimization

Another benefit of choosing a conversion goal is that you can choose a conversion window to optimize.

I suggest you start with the “Conversions” options here, with the “1 day click” and “Automatic bidding” settings.

Facebook saves data for every user from all kinds of different data points. One of these data points is the online purchases users make after clicking or viewing an ad. If a user clicks on an ad and converts within 1 day, Facebook will log that user’s activity. If another user clicks on an ad and converts within 7 days, Facebook records that as well and adds the data it has stored for that user to its records.

When you choose a setting like this, you’re asking Facebook to prioritize delivery of your ads to people who have previously interacted online, clicked on an ad, and converted to purchases within 1 day (or whatever you choose).

Facebook has a very clever way of prioritizing ad delivery, in the hopes that those who have taken the kind of actions you describe here will behave alike once they see their ad (just as they have shown such behavior before).

Naturally, you want to target users who will click your ad and buy within 1 day of that event. That’s why I see marketers starting with a 1-day click configuration here and expanding to larger windows after their audience starts to get saturated. However, as in the similar target audience example, it may take 10 thousand ₺ for the audience to start to get satiated. For most people, 1 day of clicks helps them go a long way.

Detailed Targeting Settings

With each Facebook ad, you have the chance to set detailed targeting options such as interests, demographics or behaviors.

My most common advice here is to leave this section blank. The combination of similar audiences and “Purchase Conversions” optimization is often enough to allow Facebook to do its magic to narrow down the ideal audience to serve ads.

The combination of a strong lookalike audience and a “Purchase Conversion” goal is often enough to allow Facebook to do its magic in narrowing down the ideal audience for serving ads.

If you add too many details, you can suddenly be left with a target audience that you cannot reach.

 In addition, the lookalike audience you have already created means an audience with all those details made for you and your advertisement.

 In this case, it is important not to confuse too much.

Choosing the Right Creative

Choosing the right advertising materials is the part where you want to try the most. 

But the common choice I see a lot is a carousel ad featuring compelling lifestyle images of some of the brands’ most popular products. However, you don’t want to edit your ads too often.

If I had to give a few examples of this;

Your ads will start getting likes, comments and shares. Positive interaction with ads will act as social proof to get visitors to pay attention as they scroll through their posts.

When you make an edit to the ad, previous broadcast interactions will be deleted and you will have to start from scratch.

Determining the Right Budget

The biggest mistake new advertisers make is spending too little and leaving too soon. The most important thing to remember is that Facebook’s algorithm gets smarter over time.

If you follow the steps above, you’ll have given a ton of data to work with Facebook to show your ads to the right people.

 However, a very important part of Facebook’s ad delivery algorithm is learning from the data it collects from the campaign itself. 

Allowing a campaign to run costs money, so you should be comfortable spending some money on it.

You should be prepared to spend around $50 to $100 per day for about 1 week before it ends on a campaign.

I saw that there are digital marketing experts who use the formula I described above more or less . $50 to $100 per day should probably be the minimum you want to spend before exiting a campaign (about 1 week).

What type of ROAS should you expect?

First of all, if you have questions about what ROAS is;

ROAS, in English “Return on Ad Spend”, means revenue from advertising expenditures. In short, it is a metric that shows you the return on your ad.

In general, if you’re seeing a 1 to 3x return on ad spend, your campaign is in good shape. 

This means that if you spend $700 on ads for a week, you’ll want to see sales between $700 and $2,100 as a result of your ads. This is the average return for a successful campaign.

What is the effect of average order value on ROAS?

The average order value is the revenue divided by the number of orders. Average order value (AOV) is a very important metric that plays a big role in its final ROAS. It is often the difference between a successful or unsuccessful campaign.

Let’s look at two scenarios to see the effect of AOV.

In both scenarios, you spent $500 on ad spend and made 23 purchases. However, in one case, a sale was made for $1,495, and in the other case for $575. That means almost 3x ROAS in one case and 1x ROAS in the other.

Can you see how AOV can make a difference?

To increase the probability of success with Facebook ads, your AOV must be $50 or more.

I’ve also seen low AOV advertisers still find a way to success, but mostly if you want to increase the probability of success with Facebook ads ,you should have an AOV of $50 or more.

9 Ways to Master Your Facebook Lookalike Audience

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You may need these tips to find the right audience and reach new people on Facebook. Since this applies to all of us, I have listed 9 different ways that have helped me the most.

1. Use the Right Source Audience for Your Goals

Different custom audiences match different goals.

For example, if your goal is to raise awareness of your business, a lookalike audience based on Page Fans might be a good idea.

If your goal is to increase online sales, a Facebook lookalike audience based on website visitors would be a better choice.

In short, whatever your goals are, it will be a resource to choose from. The longer you determine this correctly, the better your results will be.

2. Get Creative With Custom Audiences

You can create custom audiences around various parameters. It will be a much more important factor for you to examine the most suitable options for your campaign goals and not make a suitable choice.

I can list the following as different ideas for Custom Audiences:

• Video Viewers: If you’re starting a video-based campaign, building an audience based on people who have interacted with your videos in the past will get you more conversions. Because there will be people who are already interacting with your video.
• Recent website visitors: All website visitors can be very extensive from one list, especially if your goal is conversion. You can target users who have visited your website in the last 30 days, or visitors who have put something in their shopping cart. Even a tip from me, you can choose who abandons the cart.
• Email audience: You should announce news and opportunities about your brand to people who subscribe to your newsletter. Because these people will be an audience that wants to get these news about your brand. You can use this audience to get more subscribers or if you’re planning a campaign with similar content.

3. Test Similar Audience Size

You should say different audience sizes for different campaign goals. I always say it’s something you should try in your digital marketing campaigns, and I’ll mention it again. If you’ve read my posts before, you know how much I value A/B testing. 

The same applies in this case. Different sizes compete with each other in similar target audiences. You can get a much bigger conversion than you can imagine.

Smaller audiences (1-5 on the scale) will fit most closely to your custom audience, while large audiences (6-10 on the scale) will increase their potential reach. But it will reduce the level of similarity with your specific audience. 

If you’re optimizing similarity, it makes more sense to target a smaller audience. You can also try to expand to reach potential customers in the most accurate way.

If you compare them with each other, the results may surprise you.

4. Choose High Quality Data

The better the data, the better the results. Simple.

Facebook recommends 1,000 to 50,000 contacts. But an audience of 500 loyal customers will always outperform 50,000 good, bad, and average customers.

I recommend avoiding broad audiences like “all website visitors” or “all app installers”. These broad audiences will soon include excellent customers, along with bouncers.

Choose your metrics that identify your best customers. These often go further down the conversion or engagement funnel.

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5. Always Keep Your Audience List Updated

If you are providing your own customer information, you need to make sure it is as up-to-date as possible.

 If you are creating a custom audience with Facebook data, you must add date range parameters. In this way, you will have an up-to-date target audience.

For example, if you are adding a custom audience based on website visitors, you may want to target only those who have visited your website in the last 30 to 90 days. In this way, you can better capture the time period and target audience you want.

Lookalike audiences are dynamically updated every three to seven days, so new users who visit will be added to your Facebook lookalike audience.

6. Use Similar Audiences with Other Features

Improve your lookalike targeting by adding more targeting parameters such as age, gender or interests.

When it wanted to launch its home theater speaker PLAYBASE , Sonos developed a multi-layered campaign that used lookalike audiences in conjunction with video ads, link ads, and Facebook dynamic ads.

 Phase one of the campaign targeted video viewers , with phase two retargeting existing customers and new customers based on their interests . Thus, it reached different target audiences in a much more comfortable way.

You may remember that I told you not to fill in these fields too much. I still stand by my word, but depending on the terms of the campaign, these elaborations may come in handy.

7. Optimize Bids with a Set of Similar Audiences

You can use your most effective audience to stratify lookalike audiences that overlap.

 To do this, you’ll need to click Advanced Options when choosing your audience size. You can create up to 500 similar audiences from a single source audience.

For example, you can segment an audience by most similar, second most similar, and least similar views and bid on each.

8. Identify the Right Places

Lookalike audiences are a great way to target expansion in new global markets.

Often times, marketers know where to look for new purchases. If global domination is your goal or you’re not sure where to focus, you might consider building a similar audience in app store countries or emerging markets.

Facebook will always prioritize similarity in location. This means that lookalike audience may not be evenly distributed across locations.

When sunglasses retailer 9FIVE wanted to expand their US campaigns to Canada and Australia, they created an international lookalike audience based on existing customers in both countries. 

Ads were also segmented per region and targeted with unique dynamic ads. They reduced the cost per acquisition by 40 percent and reached 3.8 times the return on ad spend. In short, they used this target audience feature very well.

9. Try the Lifetime Customer Value Option

If your brand includes customer transactions and interactions that happen over a longer period of time, you might consider creating a customer lifetime value (CPI) custom audience. But even without that, customer total value can help you separate large spends from less-than-large ones because it impacts consumer CRM data.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is a Facebook lookalike audience?

A lookalike audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they are similar to your current best customers. Facebook lookalike helps you achieve your marketing goals using different traffic sources. These resources may include your website, social media channels and e-mail lists.

Why is Facebook lookalike audience important?

Facebook takes all data points from the source audience and finds new, like-minded people using a percentage of the population in your chosen country. The audience you build with these people will allow you to target these interactors and the like.

What are the advantages of Facebook lookalike audience?

Facebook will identify key similarities between members of the original custom audience and find similar users to target in a new campaign. Facebook’s lookalike audiences tool is the most effective way to reach your ideal audience, even if they’ve never heard of your brand.

How to create a Facebook lookalike audience?

It is created using the Facebook Pixel tool, social media accounts or subscriber lists from the Audiences menu of Facebook Ads Manager.

Does Facebook automatically update lookalike audiences?

If you’re using Facebook Pixel, lookalike audiences will be automatically updated in 3 to 7 days.

What is the audience like the 1%?

Facebook lookalike audiences are an excellent way to reach users who are similar to their current customers and followers. When creating a Facebook lookalike audience, you can choose between 1%-10% of the total population in the country on the target audience you choose. In this case, the 1% is made up of people who most closely match their source.

Conclusion

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You’re more likely to get lost among all the different ads and experiments you might run to drive traffic to your website. When you’re just starting out, the best approach is to start simply and add more and more complexity. In this way, you can get the appropriate audience for your brand and advertisements day by day.

In this guide,

I have combined it specifically to help you lay the foundation for your Facebook advertising strategy. Because many digital marketing experts do not use Facebook lookalike audiences much. Especially Facebook Pixel has started to be used recently.

Remember, driving high-quality traffic to your store is critical. But once you start driving traffic, you’ll want to have a solid retargeting strategy. Moreover, you will not only want it, you will even need it very much. On average, 98% of visitors will leave without completing the purchase.  allows you to come across these users again and encourage them to come back.

Thanks to Facebook, this retargeting has become very, very easy, and it becomes impossible not to use it. This is where the Facebook lookalike audience feature comes into play and becomes the most important advantage in campaigns.

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