The Facebook Lookalike audience algorithm is an absolutely fascinating piece of technology – and the reason you would want to do this is this: you may already have a core group of current customers you’re advertising to and it’s working – so now you want to find more of them.
That is precisely what a Facebook Lookalike audience is designed to do: finding commonalities in certain traits.
It may be demographics. It may be psychographics. It may be interests, age, location. Whatever it is, Facebook Lookalike audience is designed to understand a core commonality between a group of people and then find that in other groups. It is, indeed, an incredibly powerful technology.
We’ll go through the exact step-by-step process that you need to set up a Facebook Lookalike audience. It will take about 5 to 10 minutes, and here is the high-level overview on what we’re going to do:
- The goal: To create lookalike audiences that you can use to expand your Facebook ad audience (and, consequently, expand your customer base as well).
- The ideal outcome: You will have a Lookalike audience in the target country of your choice, therefore, you will be able to show your ad sets to a larger audience consisted in Facebook users.
- Prerequisites: You need to have a Facebook Ads account, and, in some cases, depending on where you want your data source to be from (e.g. website visitors), you may need the Facebook pixel running on your website. In general, though, you probably want to install Facebook pixel on your website regardless of this, because the Facebook pixel data can be used in a multitude of ways.
- The importance of this action: A lookalike audience allows you to take a selected source audience as an input and then create these other groups of people that have similar qualities – whether it’s demographics, psychographics, interests, location, salary, etc. This allows you to scale your ads very effectively to other subsets of people.
- Where this is done: This is done in the Facebook Ads Manager’s Assets Library.
- When this is done: Whenever you’re scaling your prospecting campaign. If you have a Facebook campaign that is working and if you want to find a new audience to roll it out to, this is when you should do that.
- Who does this: The person who is responsible for paid advertising.