What is lookalike audience?

Digital Marketing
#1

A lookalike audience is an audience that “looks” – or, more aptly, behaves – like the audience you chose to base the lookalike audience on.
A great way to take full advantage of this feature is to create a lookalike audience of your customers based on lifetime value (LTV). In essence, you upload a customer list to Facebook that includes the monetary value of each customer on the list over the lifetime of your business relationship. Facebook takes this data to find out the characteristics of your most valuable customers to spend your ad budget targeting other Facebook users who share those specific characteristics.
To create a new lookalike audience, open Business Manager > go to “Ads Manager” > click the menu icon in the top left corner > click “All Tools” at the bottom of the menu > select “Audiences” under the Assets tab. Click “Create Audience” and select “Lookalike Audience” from the drop-down menu. The audience builder pop-up will look like this:
The source of your lookalike audience is the audience that you’d like Facebook to analyze and find other Facebook users who will most likely behave in a similar way too. For example, you could create a custom audience of people who have made a purchase in the last 30 days and create a lookalike audience of people who the Facebook algorithm thinks will behave like those customers and will also make a purchase on your site.
The location of your lookalike audience is simply the country or region where your lookalike audience lives. If you have a successful campaign running in the United States, for example, you could create a lookalike audience of people who live in Canada that share the same characteristics as your U.S. audience*.*
The audience size is the percentage of the selected location population that will see your ads. Remember that Facebook is creating a lookalike audience based on users who fit your criteria the best , so the larger your audience size is, the less likely your lookalike audience will share the same characteristics with your custom audience. This doesn’t mean a 1% lookalike audience is always the wisest choice, though, because a 2% or 3% lookalike audience might have a very similar cost per acquisition (CPA) while advertising to millions more people than the 1% audience.
Like dating, finding the right audience to market your product or service to can be frustrating at first and exhausting when it doesn’t work out. The best advice is to stay calm and keep testing; there are a billion more fish in the Facebook sea.
Now that you’ve got a handle on who you are targeting, let’s take a look at how to choose relevant ad creative.