The best part about Facebook advertising are the targeting parameters. These parameters are diverse and provide data that is useful for brands for advertising. As an Advertiser, you have always been intrigued by the different type of audiences Facebook can cater to. There are three kinds of targeted audience:
- Custom Audience
- Lookalike Audience
- Saved audience
For now, let’s concentrate on Lookalike Audience.
What is Lookalike audience?
The Lookalike audience targeting is around since 2013. This allows all advertisers to target all Facebook users who are similar or share same traits with their customers who are on Facebook. With this parameter, advertisers can ask Facebook algorithm to find the following kinds of audience- 1% which is optimized for similarity and 5% which is for greater reach. It is a great way to expand the small customer list that consists of 1,000 people and then can be turned into a Lookalike Audience to reach out a larger pool of audience.
Lookalikes for Website
When Facebook launched its Website Custom Audiences, it allowed all advertisers to target visitors who went to their websites. This included a common visitor to the entire site as well as a visitor who went to specific pages. With Lookalike audience for the website, it has been a boon to users.
With this, an advertiser can find users who show similar behaviour as that of your website visitors. With this, if you don’t get much of traffic to your site then you can target a wider audience pool.
With this, an advertiser can find users who have similar interests to those visitors who visited a specific page on the website. An advertiser can select the success page to track converting users.
For example: By your Lookalike Audience, Facebook will help you find users who are similar to those visitors who bought a particular product. You can target them by demographics, age, and gender. Interest targeting is an important feature of Lookalike audience.
You can also target users who are very similar to those visitors who have visited a specific section on your site.
For example Visitors of a retail website that sells apparels for all genders. It is important that Lookalike audience is created for all the sections.
Following are the other objectives of which you can use Lookalike audience:
- Lookalike Audience for Custom Audience
- Lookalike audience for Pages
- Lookalike Audience for Mobile App users
How to Target Lookalike Audiences?
Once you have created your Lookalike audience, you can start targeting your ads to users. The ad will reach out to users who have similar interests to the Lookalike audience and then you will have a proper audience set on your platform that will perform the activity of buying, liking, reading or viewing.
This can be done from the Custom Audiences text field which is a part of the “Audience” step as shown below:
