{"id":224607,"date":"2020-04-10T08:43:54","date_gmt":"2020-04-10T03:13:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qcsglobal.com\/?p=224607"},"modified":"2020-04-18T17:10:18","modified_gmt":"2020-04-18T11:40:18","slug":"how-to-use-facebook-lookalike-audiences-effectively","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qcsglobal.com\/blogs\/how-to-use-facebook-lookalike-audiences-effectively\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Use Facebook Lookalike Audiences Effectively"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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If you have a business and you advertise online, you probably hope to reach new customers.<\/p>\n

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The only way for a business to grow is to win more customers, and Facebook is the most popular and best advertising platform for reaching new customers (together with Google).<\/p>\n

The problem with targeting unfamiliar audiences is that you don\u2019t know them, and therefore have no idea what are your chances to drive conversions.<\/p>\n

In order to save time and money, you have to find methods to make your full-funnel targeting strategy more efficient. Luckily, Facebook has been working hard for you and has provided you with an intelligent capability for improving the targeting precision of prospecting customers: Facebook Lookalike Audiences.<\/p>\n

What is a Facebook lookalike audience?<\/h2>\n

A lookalike audience<\/a> provides you with an opportunity to reach prospective customers, who share similar characteristics with your existing ones or with people who showed interest in your brand.<\/p>\n

In order to create it, you first need to choose a source audience that will be the seed audience to lookalike from. Typically, this would be a custom audience<\/a> created based on Facebook pixel<\/a> data (website or app via SDK) or from your email list. Facebook then identifies the common qualities of the users included in your custom audience, like demographic information, interests, groups, friends lists, and other historical data, and creates a lookalike audience: a collection of users sharing those common characteristics.<\/p>\n

You can define the size of your lookalike audience. While making this decision, you need to keep in mind that although creating a larger audience increases your potential reach, it decreases its level of similarity to your source audience.<\/p>\n

Dictating the size of your lookalike is done by defining a percentage of the population in your target country. In Facebook Ads Manager you can create a lookalike audience of up to 10%.<\/p>\n

Currently, Facebook lets you select countries to include when creating your lookalike audience, but this might change in the near future. Note that Facebook requires that your source audience includes at least 100 people from the same country.<\/p>\n

In order to get the best results possible, it is recommended that you use a source audience that includes between 500-50,000 people. According to Facebook, people in your source audience will be excluded from your lookalike.<\/p>\n

Lookalike audiences<\/a> are updated every three to seven days, so they automatically keep up with the changes made in their source audience.<\/p>\n

Why should you create a Facebook lookalike audience?<\/h2>\n

Do you want to reach the people who will most likely be your next customers? If the answer is yes, you should use Facebook Lookalike Audiences \u2013 it\u2019s that simple!<\/p>\n

Why are they more useful than age-, gender-, or interest-based targeting? First of all, Facebook interests might be outdated or incorrect because of a misinterpretation of a single data point.<\/p>\n

Check the interests that Facebook defined for you and see for yourself:<\/p>\n

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Furthermore, your assumptions concerning your potential customers might be inaccurate.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say you\u2019re selling lingerie, and you think your best audience is women between the ages of 20-50, but your top purchasers are actually men who buy your products as a gift for their girlfriends or wives. Lookalike audiences are made to find these unexpected commonalities among your current customers and create a more accurate profile of your prospecting ones.<\/p>\n

Targeting unexpected commonalities will help you customize your creatives and tailoring content to audiences, which can lead to a major uplift in conversions.<\/p>\n

Lookalike audiences are especially useful when expanding your business to new and unfamiliar territories. You can leverage customers\u2019 data from your current market to create a lookalike for your target region\/country either using the default lookalike creation or the international lookalike creation via the API. That can be a very good starting point if you don\u2019t yet know which interests to target in a new country.<\/p>\n

How can lookalike audiences be so accurate in targeting prospective customers?<\/h3>\n

Although Facebook doesn\u2019t explain how exactly they create lookalike audiences, Facebook advertising experts assume the data used includes:<\/p>\n