Introduction to Facebook Audiences
Facebook advertising really paved the way for a lot of the social targeting, bidding, and optimizing tools available now. Investing in social ads is all about finding the people who will love your business. Custom and lookalike audiences are some of the advanced audience selection tools widely used across platforms. In this episode, Kelsey, Bri, and Molly talk about using Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences to find people who are most likely to find your ads relevant. Buckle in for this one; these ladies are digging into the trenches of the differences between these two targeting tools and sneaky ways to use them.
What are Facebook's Custom Audiences
If you’ve got any sense of Facebook ads, then you’re probably familiar with custom audiences. Building your custom audience is a great way to increase the detail of your ad targeting and improving the results of your adverts on Facebook. Why? Simply put, custom audience allows you to reach people who already have a relationship with your business. These are your existing customers and prospects who have just interacted with your website or social media platforms. You can create a custom audience by applying your data such as page likes, email addresses and phone numbers.
There are several ways to build up your custom audience. You can:
1. Upload a customer file
Upload a customer file to your Power Editor, then Facebook will blend the records with existing user accounts and create custom audience from the matches. Interestingly, advanced matching can range from 50% to 80% depending on how much data you provide. Providing an extensive file with phone numbers, first names, last names, emails, cities, states and zip codes should bring in a match rate of 80%.
2. Leverage your Facebook Audience Pixel's data
Leverage your Facebook Pixel’s data to create custom users who visited your site and accomplished a specific on-site action.
Apart from these two methods you can also build your custom audience with:
- your offline conversions
- your app activity data
- or Facebook engagement data
Also, ads created with custom audiences get evaluated by Facebook’s Relevance Score.
This score determines your advert’s potential and, in particular, if you are pairing the right message with the right audience. The best part is that, statistically, the higher the relevance score is, the better CTR and the lower CPC you can expect.
Facebook custom audiences serve to target your prospects more accurately. This will let you capture (even better) ones that know about your company, browsed around your site and then left it without completing a purchase.
That makes it a great retargeting tool, as people who are your current customers are more likely to buy once again or upgrade.
Using a custom audience for it will let you maximize your selling potential within the platform and check out how much you can get out of your current prospects.
What are Facebook's Lookalike Audiences
A lookalike audience is a real game changer in ad targeting and a step ahead of custom audiences.
Wonder why? Because while a custom audience is built with your existing prospects, lookalike audiences let you explore and reach entirely new people who haven’t heard of your business ever before, but at the same time, they are very similar to your buyer personas and your current customer base.
This similarity makes lookalike audiences very likely to buy from your company. The lookalike audience gives you all kinds of advertising powers because you can indefinitely explore new customers. In fact, your client base is constantly growing and so are your lookalike audiences. This makes infinite room for progress and improvement.
You can base a lookalike audience on:
- your customer data
- your custom audiences
- page likes
- Facebook users who watched your video
- users that performed a specific action on Facebook
Once you provide the data you want to create lookalike audience with, Facebook analyzes their profiles and identifies parallel users based on similarities. This lets you skip on the guessing game. You don’t need to identify the successful patterns alone anymore. It’s done automatically.
In addition, lookalike are awesome when you’ve already reached the limits of your current prospects’ potential and you strive to expand the scope
Tips for Using Facebook's Lookalike Audience
Audience Segmentation
First of all, bear in mind that your customers aren’t equal. Building a lookalike audience starts with the efficient segmentation of your user base. Even if it refers to your customer’s list – context is necessary here. There is a significant difference between your returning customers and small timers – lifetime value defines their importance.
Budget
Remember, you shouldn’t put your entire budget into ads right from the start nor increase it too soon. The rule of thumb here is starting small and ramping up your limit slowly. This should go along with the (continuously getting better) results.
Use the right resources
Determine what content should be used for your lookalike campaigns.
Of course, this relies heavily on goals you’re trying to aiming at. Fortunately, your targeted audience represents similar groups to your current prospects, so you can easily foresee how they are going to resonate with a given asset. Make sure you recycle your best performing posts depending on the preferred content type.
I mean that if you leverage videos on Facebook and this is how you acquire your follower base, the same content should be applied to your lookalike campaigns. Ultimately, lookalike campaigns deliver prospects based on your winning marketing strategies.
Lower Funnel Targeting Audience
Moreover, Facebook recommends to use lookalike campaigns for the lower funnel targeting. Therefore, instead of promoting blog posts or guides, better create adverts wrapped around your product.
Of course, that’s only a recommendation and just a theory. The best idea is to experiment with that and learn it yourself. See how your lookalike campaigns perform if you promote blog posts and videos too. Surely, you’ll optimize it overtime whenever you choose.
Wrapping up Audience
Facebook is a highly visual platform and users jump on it when they’re trying to make a break or just procrastinating work related tasks. That’s something to remember while creating ads with the use of custom or lookalike audiences. Make them outstanding and eye-catching so Facebook users stop scrolling to see them.
Finally, remember that having your Facebook pixel properly installed on your site is crucial for ad campaigns no matter what audience you’re going to target.
Are you using custom and lookalike audiences? What results are you seeing?
Custom Audience
Lookalike Audience
Lookalike and custom audiences are targeting tools used in digital advertising, particularly on platforms like Facebook, to reach specific groups of people. Here’s how they differ:
A lookalike audience is a group of people who share similar characteristics with your existing customers or custom audience. The advertising platform analyzes your custom audience to find new people who have similar behaviors and interests.
: Based on your existing data (customer lists, website visitors, app users, engagement).
For finding new potential customers who resemble your current ones.
Website Traffic: Target people who have visited your website or specific web pages.
Lookalike : Created from a custom audience or another data source to find similar new users.
Requires detailed information about your current customers or users.
Needs a source audience (custom audience) to create the new audience.
What do the lookalike percentage options mean? Smaller percentages: If you opt for a smaller percentage (e.g., 1% or 2%), the resulting lookalike audience will closely resemble your source audience. These are people who mirror your existing customers the most accurately.
- Go to your Audiences.
- Click Create audience and select Lookalike audience.
- Choose a source and country for your audience.
- Choose the number of audiences you want to create.
- Adjust the sliders to choose how similar you want your audiences to be to your source.
- Click Create audience.
