In this tutorial, Nicolas Korvessis explains why many advertisers still use outdated lookalike audience strategies from the pre‑iOS‑14 era and provides a step‑by‑step guide to building more effective lookalike audiences in Meta Ads Manager. He emphasizes the importance of segmenting source custom audiences by recent engagement and high lifetime value (LTV), and shows how to pull organic engagers from Instagram/Facebook (messages, follows, saves) as additional sources. He then walks through the lookalike creation UI, highlighting that advertisers can select specific percentage bands (e.g., 2‑3%, 3‑6%, 5‑6%) rather than defaulting to a 1% lookalike, and stresses testing multiple lookalike ranges alongside strong creative. The video concludes with a call‑to‑action offering a free account audit, citing experience auditing over 200 accounts and managing roughly $2 M/month in ad spend.
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If you're running paid ads on Meta and you're using any kind of lookalike audiences, you're probably using them incorrectly, 'cause most people's accounts that I audit or that I look at, they're using lookalike audiences like they have been in 2021 or pre-iOS 14, which I know was a while ago, but a lot of people are still using lookalike audiences that same way. So I'm gonna break down exactly how to use a lookalike audience in this video, a very simple overview on how to set them up, and then how you should actually loop them into your strategy actively for your marketing for your business, so they're actually useful in generating valuable results for your business besides just being another setting to turn on and hoping that it actually does something for you. So let's get right into it. First things first, I wanna show you how to actually make a lookalike audience just in case anyone here doesn't know how to. Very simple crash course. If you're in your Ads Manager right here, what you'll do is you're gonna click on this Audiences tab right here with like these 3 little people, and then that'll open up a page that looks like this. From here, the first step to making a lookalike audience, and this is actually one of the areas where a lot of people will mess up, is by uploading a custom audience. Usually by default, what a lot of people do is just upload their customer list from the past 6 months, years, or few years in business, and pretty much just call it at that. The first thing that you have to do is make sure you're segmenting whatever it is that you're basing your lookalike audience off of to get better results. So like I said, a lot of people will just upload their customer list, their whole email list, whatever it is. I think there's a few simple things that you can do to actually make this a lot more valuable and actually benefit your business on paper at the end of the day. First is if you're uploading a customer list or even your email list, maybe they're not all customers, you wanna be segmenting by the people that are actively engaging and interacting with your business. So inside your email service provider, if you're just doing your email list, don't take your whole email list and upload it. Filter by people that have been actively opening and clicking on your email in the past 30 to 60 days. And that should be one lookalike audience that you can start testing right away. Super valuable, really, really great. Second is by optimizing for people with a higher LTV in your business. So you could take some of your customers that have been with you for the longest time if you have a recurring revenue model, or if you don't have recurring revenue, take the most recent sales that have came in. I don't really recommend taking the past like 2 years, year, even 6 months of data. It can become too much. And the more recency you have to it, the better those are going to work. So same goes for any kind of like customer list or list of people that you're uploading. You want to make the recency really good and you want to make sure you're segmenting it by recent actions and high-value actions. Once you have that ready, if you're doing a customer list, you'll click on that, you'll click next, next again, and this is totally fine. And then you'll upload your list right here. It gives you templates and shows you how to do it. You'll upload it And then you'll be good to go. Before I continue to make that, I wanna back up and kinda share some of the other lookalike audiences that we've actively been seeing working right now. And a lot of people forget these. First is if you're posting organic content on Instagram or Facebook, you should be leveraging those people that are engaging with your content inside of your lookalike audiences. So for example, if I pull my Instagram here, obviously you've got all these different options here, people who engage, started following, visited. All this different stuff. I'd suggest checking out people who have sent a message to your account, especially if you're doing a lot of like DM ads or something like that, or you do a lot of business in your direct messages, check that out. People that engage with any post or ad obviously is gonna be a big one. And I'd say the max for this one is gonna be 60 days. If you don't have enough engagement to make a lookalike audience, get your engagement up organically. All it takes is posting a few Reels or a few photos a week, and you're gonna see a really, really big difference. So past 60 days, and then you could actually include even more people. So you could do an or statement, or you could even do, they have to meet all of these, an and statement, and the audience size could be too small depending on how many people you've got. But either way, what you could do is layer in not just people who engaged, but you could also layer in people who started following you or people who saved your poster ad. I've noticed that when I do engaged and saved, I'm getting a subset of people that are really, really solid. So then you can go ahead and name that audience. And then when it comes to actually creating it, I'm just gonna say test audience. The next step, once you've chosen, I'm gonna go through a few other ones, but once you've made your custom audience, which is the first step, then you can make a lookalike. You could click right here to make it. However, I'm just gonna go the long way. You'll find whatever audience it is, click on it, create audience, and then you'll click on create lookalike. Then that'll open up this window. You're gonna wanna actually put the source in, and you just have to click other and then find that lookalike. And you can even type in, like, there's that test audience one that I just made. Now, this is where most people go wrong, is first off, they assume that they can just do anywhere from 1 to 10%. Really cool thing that a lot of people don't know is that you can actually filter this a little bit differently and do between 2 to 3%, or in between 3 to 6%, so on and so forth. So that's one thing that a lot of people don't realize that you can actually do. And second, back in the day when it was a lookalike audience, it was basically setting up a 1%, 2%, maybe a 3% lookalike. But most of the time you'd see people doing a 1% lookalike. 'Cause a 1% lookalike means it's the most similar to the people in the original audience that you're pulling from. However, I think recently Facebook needs more room and your creative is doing a lot of the work when it comes to the targeting. And if you feel like it's not, you have to dial that in because this lookalike audience isn't just gonna magically save you. But as long as your creatives are dialed in, giving Facebook a little bit more room to breathe can actually be better. And I'll do between a 1% and 5% lookalike, or even testing like a 5% to 6% lookalike tends to actually work really, really well. And a lot of people just set it and forget it, but you should be testing multiple different audiences of these lookalikes in a few different variations and in a few different ways. That's what we've seen work the best as it comes to lookalike audiences. And that's a really quick crash course on setting everything up. Obviously, they're pretty simple to set up once you know how to, and you should be testing these consistently. They should be in your audience rotation when you're testing new stuff. Super easy to set up, like I just mentioned, and they can produce some really, really good results. So listen, if you're spending money on your Meta advertising and you don't feel like you're getting the results that you want, maybe you've been trying to scale, maybe you've been struggling with getting better qualified leads, this is going to be a great test that you can use to to kind of break through some of those plateaus, but it's not the end-all be-all. Every account is different, every account is unique. So if you want me to personally audit your account, not a salesperson, not someone else, me, click the first link in the description, get a free audit, no strings attached. I'll check out your account and I'll tell you exactly what I would do if I were running the campaigns. We've audited over 200 accounts just in the past few months, and we've been managing spend of almost $2 million a month. So we're gonna be telling you from small accounts to big accounts and everywhere in between what you should be doing and what we would do if we were running your ads. I hope you enjoyed this video. Test some lookalike audiences, and I'll see you in the next one.
