The Definitive Guide To Lookalike Audiences For Facebook Ads

In this video, I want to give you a complete crash course on how to correctly set up, build, and utilize lookalike audiences inside of your Meta advertising. There's a lot of videos out there showing how to set them up and maybe just how to plug them into your ad campaigns, but I want to show you a few different ways and styles in a way that you can build lookalike audiences so you can plug them into your campaigns and use them for your specific purpose. So let's get right into it. The first thing I'm gonna go over is how to actually create a lookalike audience, and then we'll go into different ones that you should be looking at making. And then I'll actually show you where to plug them in strategy-wise to boost your results, whether that's purchases, leads, booked calls, or whatever it is that you're looking to get more of, how you can use lookalike audiences to help you with that objective. So let's look at how to actually make a lookalike audience. So if you're here inside of the Ads Manager, What you'll do is you'll go to the left-hand side over here to all tools, and you'll see audiences. If you don't see audiences on this side over here, you should be able to see it in this all tools section, whether that's up here or somewhere down here as well. You can see it's in a few different spots, but we'll go ahead and click on audiences. And that will take us to this window here. At that point, we can actually start with making the audience. So just as a quick overview for those of you that don't know what is exactly a lookalike audience, A lookalike audience is where you give Facebook a set of data, whether that's a customer list, people that have engaged with your ads, any kind of a data point that is like the source of that data. And you're telling Facebook, hey, I have this source of data. I want you to find people that match this source of data or that are similar to the source that I'm giving you. And that's all a lookalike is. So to start with a lookalike, you actually have to start by making a custom audience before you make a lookalike. Um, so we'll go ahead and click custom, and then you can choose a few different options as far as how you actually want to, um, pull the sources from to make the custom audience, which will eventually make your lookalike audience. Now, ideally you want to have a customer list or some kind of action or data point that has at least 100 pieces of data. So ideally, if you have a customer list or a lead list, you ideally would like to have 100 leads on that list. If you're retargeting people that are on your website, you would want to have at least 100 website visitors, so on and so forth. It's definitely not a requirement, but the lookalike audience will work better the more data points and the more data that you just give the platform, which makes a lot of sense. Now, a lot of people will start with just a customer list, so they'll choose customer list. We'll go to next here, and then we'll actually upload the template, upload the CSV file, and the download of people that you're looking to retarget. And that's usually where people will stop with lookalike audiences. So I'll pretend that that's what I'm going to do here. Let me, um, just upload a list. So you upload a list, you'll name it whatever you want to name it. Let's call it test. And then we hit next down here. And then you basically choose people's phone number, email, et cetera, et cetera. So we'll import all those. This is just a completely test list. And at this point, Facebook gives you a few options. It says make a lookalike, create a campaign, or make another custom audience. Just for ease, I'm just gonna pretend that we were making a lookalike off of this. The important thing to note with lookalikes is you do have to choose the area or the location. So we'll choose United States. And let's say you have a list that has people from the US, Australia, and Canada. You wanna pick the country that where most of your list is coming from. If you do have a mix and it's truly like 50/50, you can add multiples, but Facebook is really going to be looking at, okay, does this list mostly have people from the US? Can we match people to the US? That's what we're going to go with. So it may not let you make a lookalike audience with multiple countries and locations. You can, but I would actually recommend keeping them separate, having some for US, Some for Australia, for example, some for UK, some for Canada, and so on and so forth. The next thing to be aware of is the actual audience size and like the number of lookalike audiences. And this is the, this percentage meter right here. So kind of like Facebook saying here, a 1% lookalike consists of people most similar to the source of the audience that you uploaded. As you increase the percentage, the audience becomes broader and broader. So all this is saying is that at a 1% lookalike, If you uploaded a customer list of 1,000 people, 1% is going to be as similar to those 1,000 people that you uploaded. 2% is still going to be similar, but it's a little bit broader and so on and so forth. 10% is still similar to those people that you've uploaded, but you're telling Facebook and you're giving it more leash to say, hey, you can actually go a little bit outside of this and you can look a little bit broader than just staying in the confines of that list that I uploaded. Now, recently inside of Meta, I would say that a broader lookalike tends to work a little bit better. We actually tend to use lookalikes that are up to a 5% lookalike, or we'll even do in-between ones where we'll do like a 4 to a 6% or a 4 to 8%. Those tend to work better versus traditionally a lot of people would just stick with a 1, 2%, maybe a 3% lookalike audience. I'd recommend testing a little bit of everything to see what works for you. 1% still crushes it. But for us, I'd say anywhere from like a 1 to a 5 or 6% lookalike has actually been doing a lot better. And we've actually had great results with a 10% lookalike as well. So don't shy away from that just because it's broad, giving Facebook a little bit of room to breathe tends to do really, really good stuff. So that's basically how to set it up. Now I want to go a little bit of a step further here and not neglect the other kinds of audiences and other kinds of lookalike audiences you can actually make when you're in here. Because a lot of people would just stop at the customer list and they'll just say, okay, I'm just going to upload my customer list. That's it. But if you're getting ad engagement, if you're getting new followers, if you're getting engagement on your Instagram account, those could be really, really good data sources to use for your lookalike. The more data that you can give the platform, the better you're going to perform overall. So don't feel like you have to do a customer list or you have to do website. If you have an Instagram account and you're getting a lot of really good engagement, there are so many different, um, kind of sectors that you can target. Anyone who engaged with the account, who started following, anyone who just visited it, anyone who engaged with a post or an ad, anyone who saved a post or an ad. If the ads that you're putting up there are more targeted and the way that you're speaking to people are more direct to your audience, Why not make a lookalike of anyone that engaged with a post or ad? I would say for my ads, if someone engaged with a post or an ad of mine, I would say that they're generally speaking going to be a pretty good fit compared to someone that maybe just saw an ad. They actually engaged it, engaged with it. They're going to be a better fit. So a lot of the time I like to do this as well. Usually like 90 days is a good cap depending on how much engagement you're getting on your ads. You could go up to like 100 or 150 days. I'd recommend keeping it at 90 just to keep it recent. But once again, you can make a custom audience of this. And then what you can do from there is actually make a lookalike of that as well. So I'll do an example here for, for these guys and kind of show you what it looks like. So once we go ahead and make that, we can then make a lookalike. I'm going to go a bit broader here and do a 5%. And we'll do United States, close to 14 million people. That's more than enough. So we'll make that audience. And then let me show you really quickly how to actually set this up if we were inside the Ads Manager. So once we're in the Ads Manager, you're going to want to take an ad that has proven results. So this one here, we've got 14 purchases, $21 per purchase. This is something that's working really, really well. I think it'd be great to make a lookalike audience and pair it with this. So we'll duplicate. And I'm just going to rename this here to LAL 5% of buyers or whatever it is. Scroll down and you'll see these custom audiences here. This is where you can kind of hover, put your cursor in this box, and then there's the lookalike audience that you made. You can also filter it just to show you the lookalike audiences versus having it show you like the lookalikes and the customs. Um, but you can go ahead and do that. And then you may need to wait for it to populate. You can see it says that it can take up to 3 days, but I've normally had never, never had a problem with starting the lookalike audience immediately. By the time the ad gets reviewed, which can take an hour or 2 to actually like start delivering and spending money, it's matched a majority of the people. But usually with lookalikes, give it a few days. I usually give it a little bit more grace versus if I was running an ad with a custom audience that's just interests. Lookalikes, you can give a little bit more time to. And that's essentially it. That's how to set up lookalikes. The big thing I wanted to share in this video is one, a crash course, like I said, of just how to set these up and what they mean. But 2, I want everyone to know that you don't have to make a lookalike of just buyers or just a lead list. You can make a lookalike of people that are engaging or interested with your ad, because you're just gonna take your ad from a broad audience, putting it in front of people that may or may not know who you are, may or may not be interested. Then you're taking it a section down in the funnel for people that actually engaged with the ad. Now you're doing a lookalike of people that engage. You're telling Facebook, I have all these people that have engaged with my stuff. I want more people like that. And most likely those people will start to take action. So I think it's super important to do that. Go ahead and test this out in your ad campaigns and see how it goes. If you have any questions, be sure to drop them below. And you'll see in the description that we have a free school community. It's totally free. There's no catch or anything. If you join the group, we drop a ton of really useful, insightful practices that you can use inside of your advertising. You can ask questions, get feedback, get an ad account review totally for free, no strings attached. So click below, join that. It's the best school group when it comes to marketing, paid advertising, and growing your business. So I hope to see you there. I'll see you in the next video. Thanks again for watching.