How to Improve Your Facebook Ads Campaign with Lookalike Audiences

How to Improve Your Facebook Ads Campaign with Lookalike Audiences. Facebook lookalike audiences. What is a lookalike audience? Create an audience blueprint Before you can create a lookalike audience, you need to create a custom audience. We have to create a custom audience first. We’ll be using it to create our lookalike audience later. We’ll be creating our lookalike audience from it later. Now that we’ve created the custom audiences we need, we can get started creating lookalike audiences with them. Facebook just doesn’t have much to go on. What lookalike audiences will you create for your ad campaigns?

Are you struggling to bring in traffic and conversions through Facebook ads?

If so, you’re not alone.

In 2017, WordStream found that most Facebook ads have a dismal 0.90% click-through rate.

facebook ads average click through rate graphic

Why the low rates?

The ads themselves are probably fine.

You’re probably just showing your ads to the wrong people.

Facebook has added a lot of new advertising features in the past few years.

You’ll continue to struggle if you’re not taking advantage of the new ways you can target potential customers.

The most common technique I see for targeting Facebook ads is to create a custom audience.

This works, but it’s not the strongest way to improve your campaigns.

My solution? Facebook lookalike audiences.

I’ve created Facebook lookalike audiences for my campaigns and achieved stellar results.

I’ll show you how to do the same.

But that brings us to a basic question. What is a lookalike audience?

What is a lookalike audience?

Chances are, you’re familiar with creating a custom audience on Facebook. This allows us to specify a lot of factors about our audience.

For example, let’s say you’ve created a workout tracking band.

You might create a custom Facebook ads audience of 30-50-year-old men who are interested in fitness and gadgets.

This could work great, or it could be a complete flop.

It might turn out that while your target user is a 30-50-year-old man, the actual purchasers are women who buy the tracker as a gift for their husbands and boyfriends.

There might also be a helpful factor you didn’t expect. Perhaps the biggest purchasers of this device are actually people who follow Olympic runners like Usain Bolt.

If you knew this, you could target the 19 million potential customers that like his page, but without that knowledge, your campaign lacks focus.

At its core, Facebook’s lookalike audiences are just audiences created with Facebook’s algorithm to find unexpected commonalities.

For example, I had never heard of Wealthsimple. I had never been on their website, or seen an ad from them before (that I remember). But this ad just showed up on my news feed:

This ad references investing and doing good, both of which are relevant to me.

I’ve learned a lot from my investing mistakes and done projects with large donations to charity. It also makes a Star Wars reference, which I also used in my SEO guide.

Okay, so how does Wealthsimple know about me?

They don’t, but they’ve likely used Facebook’s lookalike audiences to find hidden similarities in the people who become customers.

That functionality gives you all kinds of power.

The benefits of a Facebook lookalike audience

To see the benefits, you’ll need to have a solid grasp of Facebook ad custom audiences. You can learn about them in my simple guide to Facebook advertising.

Lookalike audiences have a few advantages over custom audiences.

When you target lookalike audiences, they’re more likely to buy from your page. You can find an audience of people like your current customers to increase sales.

Since you’ll be able to target the secret (and unexpected) commonalities among your audience members, you can customize your user experience.

Since personalizing your campaigns leads to an 89% uplift in conversion rates on social media, this is something you need to start now.

EconsultancyRedEye Impact Personalization Conversion Rates Oct2016

This message match—pairing the right message with the right audience—can make a huge difference.

When Brad Smith worked with a client to improve the client’s message match, they saw a 212.74% increase in conversions.

You’ll also find that the people you target are more likely to subscribe to your email list.

In fact, you can even create an audience similar to your current list (we’ll cover that in a minute).

This targeting has direct results that will improve your campaigns.

About 90% of the time, lookalike audiences will average a higher click-through rate than other audiences.

But the best benefit is really creating a virtuous cycle.

As you build a larger audience through your ads, Facebook becomes better at predicting who’s more likely to buy, subscribe, and convert.

As your audience grows, so does your ability to build a bigger audience.

Here’s how you get a lookalike audience set up.

Create an audience blueprint

Before you can create a lookalike audience, you need to create a custom audience. This will serve as the basis, a blueprint, that Facebook will use.

To get started, we’ll create a new ad. On Facebook’s drop-down, click Manage Ads.

In the upper-left hand corner, click the drop-down menu and select Ads Manager.

You’ll need to create a new ad for this:

Choose your marketing objective and name the campaign:

Now we’ll to create a new audience.

Select Custom Audience from the drop-down menu. Don’t worry about the lookalike audience option right now. We have to create a custom audience first.

You’ll be presented on this screen with the four possibilities for creating a custom audience.

I’ll go over how to use each one.

Customer file

To start, click on the first option on the custom audience menu.

If you’re using MailChimp, you can choose to import the contacts directly. If not, select the top option. (I’ll cover LTV in a minute.)

We’ll need to create a CSV file that we can drag into the uploader. Facebook will match the contact information you provide with registered accounts, which you can then target.