If you read our post about Facebook Ads’ Custom Audiences , you read about how to convert your proverbial “low hanging fruit” in your email lists into Facebook Likes. We’ll be expanding on that conversation in this post and talking about Facebook Lookalike Audiences.
A lookalike audience uses either an existing custom audience or conversion data (conversion pixels) as a “seed” and an audience is built of similar users.
If you have an email list or Facebook Custom Audience with a minimum of 100 users, Facebook uses that “seed custom audience” to find similarities in those users to find other users who match similar interests based on the two different types of lookalike audiences. The two types of lookalike audiences are “similar” and “greater reach.” Similar audiences are more narrowly targeted and match the top 1% of your seed audience’s interests. Greater Reach audiences have… a greater reach than the similar audience. Instead of targeting the 1% of interests, it targeting the top 5% of interests.
Where are the original audiences coming from? You have a few options. As we discussed earlier you can use a Facebook Custom Audience you’re already assembled (and you can read all about Facebook Custom Audiences in part one of this series)
or you could use the users who Like your page as the audience.
You can narrow down Facebook Lookalike Audiences by combining them with Facebook’s ad targeting. As an example, Facebook warns that if your seed audience is gender specific, your Lookalike audience may not be. The same goes with location data. You can narrow your audience using targeting.
Are Facebook Lookalike Audiences right for you? Yup. If you’ve got an established Facebook Page, app with a custom audience, an email list, a website with a custom audience, or a MailChimp audience you should consider using Lookalike Audiences on Facebook to widen your audience.
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