Facebook Ads has many tools that allow us to expand our segmentations in an extremely efficient way. One of the most useful are the lookalikes. We tell you how to get the most out of this feature of Facebook Business Manager.
Similar audiences or lookalikes in Facebook Ads
A similar audience is a new segmentation that is created from an original one. The audience or users that make up this segmentation have similar characteristics to those of the original audience, but will always be different users. This makes it possible to segment a new audience without the need for us to manually indicate factors such as age, gender or interests. The similar audience extracts the most relevant characteristics of the original users and gives us a very similar audience. Therefore, if we create a similar audience and build on an audience that has already been successful, this new segmentation is more likely to work (a priori) than a regular segmentation.
How are similar audiences used in Facebook Ads?
A similar audience is one of the many options offered by Facebook segmentation. The first thing we have to take into account is what we are going to base it on. To create a similar audience it is necessary to have an audience created beforehand. Once we have chosen the type of audience on which we want to create the lookalike, in the audience section of Facebook Ads, we select create a similar audience.
- First we have to define the origin of the publicthat is to say, on which audience we want to base our lookalike. It can be one of the audiences that we have previously created (such as a database or an audience created from the visits to the website, or also on the users of the Facebook page itself).
- Then we have to choose the place where we want those users to be searched. In general, we select the country we are working on so that it covers the whole market. If we want to define it to something smaller, we can do it later in the segmentation of the campaign itself. In the latter case, only users from the locations we select will be selected and not from the whole territory, even if the lookalike created covers the entire territory.
- The last step to define our similar audience is the size of the audience. This part is important because depending on the size chosen we will have a different reach and a different similarity. The size is defined by percentage, ranging from 1% to 10%. This percentage indicates how many users out of the total size of the population will be used. For example, 10% in Spain would take the 10% most similar users out of the total number of users of the social network in this country. In this case the maximum reach will be about 2.5 million people.
The size of the original sample does not matter (as long as it is larger than the minimum necessary to create the lookalike, which is 100 people) because the total reach will always be the same if the percentage used is the same. Keep in mind that the smaller the audience size, the more similarity with the original (it is easier to find ten people with the same characteristics than a thousand cinema) so if we want a very similar audience we should choose a low percentage and if we need more reach, then we will increase the audience size.
Interesting tricks with Facebook Ads similar audiences.
- Capture the most qualified audiences in different countries. Consumers change a lot from one market to another. Manually segmenting a campaign in a country you don’t know well can be tricky. If you have an audience that works in your country, try creating a lookalike of that audience but located in the country where you want to launch your campaign. Facebook will take care of finding the best possible users for you and you are more likely to succeed with your promotions.
- Use customer databases to replicate the results on new users. If you use a lookalike and rely on people who have already bought from you, the resulting segmentation is more likely to work better than a manual segmentation, since they will be new users but with similar characteristics agent who has actually spent money on your product.
- The fans of your page can give you many clues. Fans often do not consume, but they are an interesting thermometer to define your target audience. Maybe these people like your product, but they can’t buy it. A lookalike on the followers of your page would give us a very interesting audience to launch ads to completely new users.
Lookalikes are a very powerful Facebook tool that is often underutilized. Try different lookalikes and you will surely get the key.
