For marketers, Facebook’s “Lookalike Audiences” has been a game-changing tool. It analyzes your most successful customers based on its learnings so it can bring in more audiences similar to your current customers, thus increasing your probabilities of successful lead conversion.

In other words, your Lookalike Audiences are audiences that you target because they “look like” your current customers, who are your custom or source audience in this case. Your custom audience can include website visitors, those who follow your business page on Facebook and even your customer list, among others.

Through Lookalike Audiences, Facebook can employ a segmentation tool capable of finding new users who share similar interests and belong to the same demographics as your existing followers/customers. As a result, they are more likely to be interested in your business and what you offer. If you are working with a leading marketing agency, they likely use Lookalike Audiences.

How to Use Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike Audiences, as mentioned previously, are created based on your custom audiences. Facebook gathers lots of data from its users. This data is derived from sources such as customer subscription information, website visitors, social media engagement, app activity, offline activity, and more. Athough this data is anonymous, Facebook shares it with advertisers, thus creating an effective personalized advertising strategy.

Creating a Lookalike Audience requires the following steps:

Step 1 –  Choose a source audience, which requires at least 100 users from the same country.

Step 2 – Pick the regions or countries you wish to target, that is, the area from which your Lookalike Audience will be based. This is more or less a geo-filter. People from your source audience and Lookalike Audience do not have to belong to the same country/region.

Step 3 –  Select your audience size, which is on a scale of 1 to 10. The higher the number, the higher the reach, while the smaller the number, the higher the similarity.

After this, you can create your ad. Seems easy, right? Well, those are the broad strokes, but there are many intricacies that require considerable experience.

What Does This Mean for Facebook Sponsored Ads?

Lookalike Audiences is a game-changing tool for Facebook sponsored ads and the top ad agencies that use them. Besides helping marketers zero in more closely on high-potential audiences based on accurate and reliable data gathered from their current customer base, Lookalike Audiences also allows you to make informed targeting decisions. This, in turn, optimizes your ad spend overall and lowers acquisition cost.

With low costs, you are free to test different audience sizes, thus making it possible for you to see how profitable your Lookalike Audiences could be before you decide to start spending lots of money on them. Testing your audiences with a smaller budget enables you to move forward cautiously and make smarter choices down the line. Depending on your results, you can scale accordingly.