Guide To Facebook Lookalike Audiences

Facebook lookalike also known as similar audience is one the interesting targeting options on Facebook/Instagram advertising. Facebook has around 2 billion daily active users, so targeting the right audience becomes an important aspect to drive value from the media investments you are making. Furthermore, finding the right audience on Facebook network becomes an integral part of your strategy, and that’s when lookalike audiences comes into picture.

What is Facebook Lookalike Audience?

Facebook/Instagram lookalike audiences are a segmentation tool that helps to discover new users whose demographics and interests are similar to those of your customers. It discovers audiences based on different parameters including website visitors, app users, engaged users and converted users. 

Value of Facebook lookalike audience

Lookalike audiences improve reach, engagement and conversion for your marketing campaigns, which in simple words improves brand visibility and revenue.

How to Create Facebook lookalike audience

In order to create Facebook lookalike audience, visit your Facebook business manager account and then click on audiences as below.

Creating Facebook Lookalike Audiences

Once you click on audiences, you will land on the below screen, now click on create audience blue button and then click lookalike audience.

Lookalike Audience Creation

Further once you click a popup would appear as below

How to Create Facebook Lookalike Audience

Now select the source from the first option or say create a new source as below. As we need to have a base to create lookalike audience, we are first going to create an audience and then create lookalike audience of it.

Once you click custom audience, below screen will appear. From here you can create a custom audience, I have already discussed Facebook custom audience in this article earlier Facebook Custom Audience

Social Media Custom Audiences

In this article I am going to create custom audience for Facebook users who have engaged with my Digital Bharat Page (R Academy), and then create a lookalike of this to find more users who would engage with Digital Bharat page.

So once I click the Facebook page option under Facebook sources, below screen will appear.

 Now select the page from the page option and then select the event from the events option. 

Facebook custom audience creation

As I want to create a custom audience of engaged users, I am going to select 2nd option. You can select option based on your requirement.

Next is to define the name of the audience. I have defined as Digital Bharat Engaged Users (this is for our internal reference, as we would create multiple lists, and it would be easy for us to know what the list stands for) 

Lookalike Audience Creation

Now say create audience. Once you click below screen will appear which will now allow you to create lookalike audience. Now click on the first option create lookalike audience.

How to create lookalike audience

Once you click below screen will appear, where you will see the lookalike source (as we have created a custom audience, the source is automatically selected). Now select the location, I have selected India as country, you can select a specific geography with respect to the region you want to target. City level location selection is not available while creating lookalike audience.  

Lookalike Audience Creation

Now select the audience size, which is the number of lookalike audiences you want to create. I have selected 1, as I only want to create 1. Further, you will see a range from 0% to 10% to select. Select 1% because the broader the range the broader the audience, as we most similar audience, so we are selecting 1%.

You will now see estimated reach at the bottom and then say create audience. Now the audience is created and you will be able to view it under audiences as below 

Facebook Custom Audience

Conclusion:

Facebook/Instagram lookalike audience is a powerful technique to drive reach, engagement and customer acquisition. The efficacy depends upon what kind of custom audiences you are creating and how you are testing these audiences. Also, it’s important to create differential communication to these audiences so that the users are influenced towards getting into the funnel.