Knowing exactly who to target with your Facebook and Instagram ads can be quite a challenge.

Yes, you know (or think you know) about the demographics and interests of your existing and potential customers but it is often easier said than done to be able to target those people with your ads and avoid wasting money on people who are not interested in your business.

Testing multiple audiences will help, but what if you could tell Facebook to find the people who are most similar to your existing customers?

That is precisely what Lookalike Audiences can do.

As I said in this video, if you create a Custom Audience of people who made a purchase on your website (or took any other positive action such as downloading an ebook, registering for your newsletter, adding a product to the cart – or even just visiting your website or engaging with your posts) you can then use that audience as the seed audience for your lookalike audience and as a result, show your ads to the people who are most similar to those people who interacted with your business in a positive way.

This is gold when you are trying to scale your ads without losing the accuracy of your targeting.

When setting up a Lookalike Audience, I recommend that the base Custom Audience you are using contains at least 1,000 people.

In terms of the size of the audience and how similar it will be, you will have a choice of between 1% and 10% of the users in your target location(s).

So, for example, if you want to target people in the United States, and you choose to create a 1% audience you will have a Lookalike Audience of 2.15 million people (1% of the 215 million Facebook/Instagram users in the U.S.)

These will be the people who are most similar to those in your base custom audience, and as you make the audience larger, you will start including people who are less similar.

 

Video Transcript:

This week I have one more tip about creating audiences.

This time it’s a Lookalike Audience.

So what’s a Lookalike Audience?

Well, a Lookalike Audience is an audience that you can create based on a Custom Audience that you already have.

So let’s say for example you have a Custom Audience made up of people that have purchased a product on your website.

So what you can do when you go to create your Lookalike Audience is you select that Custom Audience and essentially you’re telling Facebook to go and find the people who are most similar to the people within that Custom Audience.

There are a few options in there as well in terms of how refined that audience will be – how similar they will be and therefore how small or how large the audience will be.

So go ahead and create a Lookalike Audience based on one of the Custom Audiences you already have and I promise you it will be brilliant for your targeting for your Facebook Ads.