Facebook Lookalike Audiences are my favorite way to target a cold prospecting audience. Now, a couple weeks ago, we talked about building “cold” prospecting audiences from Facebook's internal targeting options… and that's great if you don't have any strong custom audiences. But, if you DO have strong custom audiences – like those that we talked about last week – then you definitely want to stick around to learn more about Facebook Lookalike Audiences and how they can benefit your marketing efforts!
If you want to know all about how exactly Facebook creates a Lookalike Audience, you can check out this post from last year – while Facebook does change frequently, this is one of those things that has not changed. Today, we're going to take this all a step further and talk about Advanced Lookalike Audience Targeting and optimization.
Things to know:
- You can build a Lookalike Audience from a source audience with only 100 people, though having more is always better – and I recommend having 1,000
- You can test Facebook Lookalike Audiences from different sources, however I prefer to select a Lookalike based on a source audience that has already done whatever it is that you're trying to do. So if you're list building – use a lookalike based on your existing leads… and if you're working on Page Engagement, use a Lookalike based on a source audience of people who have already engaged with your page. The best source audience are people who have already done the thing that you want these new people to do.
- When selecting the location you can use more than one country.
- If you do business in only one country – just include that one.
- If you do business in more than one country
- You can build one audience with all you country sources
- Build separate audiences, one for each country – I prefer this for easier segmentation later.
- Size: What percentage of the population do you want to reach from 1% – 10% of the Facebook population in the country(ies) you selected.
- In most cases that 1% audience is all you're going to need because they are the most like your audience and the size is perfect (we'll talk more about size next week)
Advanced Facebook Lookalike Audience Strategies
- If you are a local business: you may not want a 1% audience because those people are not all going to be located in your city – so after you geotarget, it may make the audience too small. So for local businesses, I recommend you start with a 10% lookalike, and then geotargeting it down from there to only display to people in your city/state (or whatever location based demographics you have).
- Using Advanced Options to create multiple audiences at once: Creating audiences segmented by percentage will allow you to run ads initially to your 0-1% lookalike audience, and then when your costs start rising you can begin running ads to the 1-2% segment of your Facebook lookalike audience – when you build these out all at one time through the Advanced Options, you ensure that there is no overlap, and you can effectively extend your reach. How far you go down this range of 1-10 will depend on the results you're getting.
All that being said – in most cases you will want to start with a 1% audience if you're targeting the entire country, or a 10% audience if you're targeting a local area of the country.