Using Facebook Lookalike Audiences to get new customers

Advertising of any kind only works if it is directed at the right people. The strength of the Facebook advertising platform is that it can help you target the right people.

Today we will cover Facebook Lookalike audiences and  how they can help you target the right people with your ads.  We also show you how to actually implement this strategy.

Your own personal BAU

I am a big fan of the tv program  Criminal Minds. If you have not watched it  the premise for the show is that a group of super smart people from the Behavioural Assessment Unit in the FBI  use profiling to solve crimes.

They arrive on the crime scene and looks at how the crime was committed, they then come up with a profile of the person who did the crime based on others who have done the same crime in the same way in the past.

This narrows the search for the police.

It is fiction but you are now able to use the concepts in a real and effective way to

narrow the focus of your advertising on those most likely to buy.

Before delving into this you should be clear in your head what Facebook is. You may see it as a place where people go to exchange photos , stories , share experiences etc and you would be right.

But you would be wrong to think that is all it is,  it is so much more than that.

It is a massive profiling engine.

When you register on Facebook you give up information like your address, age, gender, marital status  etc.  After that while using Facebook you click on ads , you like posts , you share posts. When you move you change your address, if on getting married you need to change your name you update your Facebook name.

Everything you do in Facebook is added to your Facebook profile.

In the States Facebook are even buying data from third party companies of your activity outside of Facebook.  to add to your Facebook profile. They have been doing this for over a year and will be providing this service to UK marketers soon.

All this means that Facebook is really good at building up a profile it members. You may find this a bit creepy but forget about that here.  We are looking to sell.

How useful to you would it be to be able to profile your existing buyers and then find others who match that profile. ?

I think the answer should be VERY USEFUL

Criminal Minds eat your heart out.

Lookalike Audiences

Remember good advertising is based on good targeting.  In a previous article I talked about using Facebook Custom Audiences to create lists of your buyers.

We did this by uploading your list of the email addresses of your customers info Facebook or by creating a Website Custom Audience of visitors to your thank your page,

That article covers how to create a custom audience of your buyers.

Lets  assume you have your buyers custom audience set-up and there is more than 100 people in it.

You can now ask Facebook to look at your list of buyers and give you back a list of people who match the profile of the buyers in your list.

To do this I use Google Chrome and Facebooks Power Editor.

Once in there click the Create Audience tab and select Lookalke Audiences from the available options.

You will then get the following screen

1. Source – type in the name of the existing custom audience you want Facebook to match. Remember it must have at least 100  people in it for this to work.
2. Put in the country you are creating the list for. Again you must have at least 100 people from that country in that list.
3. Similarity or Reach. This will dictate how big your list is , the closer the slider is to similarity the  the tighter the profile match will be , move the slider towards reach and you get bigger numbers but the profile match will not be as good. At the extremes it varies from the top 1% of Facebook users in your target country who best match your existing customers to the top 5%.
4. Click create audience, you may have to wait 24 hours for your list to be created. It will then appear in your list of custom audiences under the list that was used to create it.

Note the size of the list that was created from an original list of only 200.

You can now run ads that target your Lookalike List.

Smaller is Better

I actually prefer to target small highly focus lists if possible.

As per our example above targeting 26,000 is a bit large for the company so I could narrow this by adding other targeting options when kicking off the ads

1. Select the Facebook Lookalike Audience you want to use. In this case I have selected the one we created above and it has 26,000 members
2. If you have another list to use as an exclusion then put it in here. For what we are doing here you probably will not have and there are better ways to narrow the ads targeting focus.

If you look further down the page you will see various other targeting options, one of them is Interests, in here you can put what you think are the interests of your target audience.

In our example we are dealing with a B2B company selling informational products  so I have added business as an added interest we want our target group to have.

Adding this reduced my target audience from 26.000 to 9,000.

In the hunt for new customers this is a great new tool. For some businesses it will be a game changer but it is worth testing for any business.