Chapter 4: Audiences
Lookalike Audiences: Lookalike Audiences (LLA’s) are the single most powerful aspect of advertising on Meta. Custom Audiences are great for targeting specific groups of people, but not great for expanding your target market. That’s where Lookalike Audiences (LLAs’) come in! LLA’s work by giving the Meta algorithm a data pool, like a custom audience, and allowing Meta to go find people that are demographically similar to the people in that data pool. Essentially, you give Meta a picture of your ideal customer, and they go find a million other people that look just like that customer (same age, locations, interests, income, etc.). From a marketing perspective, this is a ridiculously overpowered tool, and a massive benefit of Meta’s billions of active users per month across platforms.
LLA’s look better the more data that you give them to work with. It’s a lot easier to find demographic trend lines between 10,000 data points than it is for 50. For that reason, we recommend never creating an LLA for an audience with less than 100 new data points per week, with the ideal quantity being 1,000+ per week.
If you click “Create a lookalike audience”, you will see the option to select the lookalike source. This can either be your pixel (for website data), or one of your existing custom audiences. Note: this means that you can create a lookalike audience for ANY of the data sources available to create a custom audience. Just create the custom audience first, then select that audience as the data source. To select a custom audience for an LLA, click “select your lookalike source”, then click “Other sources”, and your custom audiences will show up there.
Once we have our source selected, we have to choose a location for this LLA. Keep it country-wide, this shouldn’t be complicated. Finally, we need to choose the size and number of lookalike audiences. LLA’s operate on a percentage scale, with a 1% lookalike consisting of people that are MOST similar to the audience source. Increasing the percentage results in a bigger and broader audience. I like to generally create LLA’s that are no larger than 1 percent at a time, but I may create multiple LLA’s. For example, 5 different LLA’s: 0-1%, 1-2%, 2-3%, and so on. Sometimes, you never know which one will yield the best results, so I like to test.
Some of the best Custom Audiences to make LLA’s out of include:
Purchase Events
Email Subscriber Lists
95% Video Views (VV)
Top 25% Time Spent on Website (TS)
Use Cases: LLA’s allow us to fully take advantage of the Meta ads manager. Meta has literally BILLIONS of people in their database. Once you have enough data on who your ideal customers are, LLA’s allow you to point Meta in a direction and just say “Go”. For most companies, once your pixel has enough purchase data, your Meta ads will be nearly infinitely scalable. There are so many people out there, so many potential customers… and LLA’s allow you to go after them like no other advertising method. The best part is, they only get cheaper and better over time. The more data you feed your pixel, the more refined your LLA’s become, the lower your average cost per conversion and the more profit you make.