You’ve heard us talk about the powerful targeting capabilities of Facebook, but today we want to share a really cool feature that you might not know about: Facebook Lookalike Audiences! 

Let’s explain Lookalike Audiences through an illustration. Say you have a frequent customer named Sally. Sally loves your lawn care service because she’s a busy professional with little time to mow her lawn, but it’s important to her to keep her lawn weed-free and freshly-cut. She loves flowers and often reads about gardening tips, even though she never has time to garden. Sally subscribes to your email list and regularly takes advantage of your specials. 

It’s great that Sally loves your service, but what about Pam? Pam lives just a few miles from Sally and cares about her lawn too. She reads up on gardening tips and even follows the same local florist as Sally. Pam’s also a busy professional, but she hasn’t considered outsourcing her lawn care. In fact, Pam doesn’t even know your company exists!

How can you use Facebook Lookalike Audiences to put ads in front of Pam and others who are similar to Sally? Simply upload your email list to Facebook and let them do the rest! 

How does it work? 

Because the majority of your email list subscribers also have a Facebook account, Facebook can identify them. Facebook will look at the demographics, behavior, and interests of Sally and your other email subscribers and compare them to their massive database of users to find similar profiles. These users who ‘look like’ your current email subscribers are added to an audience you can target with Facebook ads. This is called a Lookalike Audience. 

Email subscribers are just one source you can use to create a Lookalike Audience! You can also use Facebook fans, website visitors, or mobile app users. The source you choose will depend on your campaign goals. For example, your Facebook fans may work great for an awareness campaign, but you might want to choose your highly-engaged email list if conversions are your goal.

Why create a Lookalike Audience instead of using Facebook’s other detailed targeting capabilities? 

Interest and demographic-based targeting is very effective, but it does rely on you determining who would be interested in your products and services. Lookalike Audiences, leveraging Facebook’s extensive pool of data, takes out the guesswork.

We should point out that you may not have the option to create a Lookalike if your source audience is too small. You need a minimum of 100 people to build from, with most experts recommending a minimum of 1,000 people for an effective audience to be created.

If you DO have a large audience on your website, Facebook Business Page, or email list, creating a Lookalike Audience could lead to better results. According to an experiment done by AdEspresso, a Lookalike Audience was the clear winner in campaign clicks, cost per click, and cost per acquisition over the interest-based targeted audience. (Read the experiment HERE.)

We recommend testing out this strategy for yourself! If you want to dive into the power of Facebook Ads and want more guidance, we invite you to reach out to our Director of Sales, Sarah Gordee, at [email protected] or at 715- 396-1661.