How to Create Custom Audiences & Lookalikes in Facebook Ads
Let’s see how you can identify and laser target your ideal audience on Facebook with the help of detailed targeting.
What are Custom Audiences?
Custom audiences are those people who have already interacted with your business, on and off of Facebook. This could be your past customers, people who visited your website, liked your page etc.
Custom audiences make it easy for you to increase conversions by connecting you with people who are already aware of your business, and also a key tool in retargeting ads.
Different Types of Custom Audiences and how they work:
Two ways to create custom audiences-
- Using your sources
- Using Facebook’s sources
Using Your Sources
Creating a custom audience using your sources:
There are 4 ways with which you can create custom audiences using your sources-
- Website: You can create an audience of people who have visited your website, a particular page within your website or even too specific like add to carts, purchases etc. Using Facebook pixel, you can populate your website audience of Facebook by installing the pixel on your website.
- Customer list: For businesses with existing data of customers/leads, you can simply upload the data on Facebook and create a custom audience. Facebook matches profiles with the data you provide and create an audience out of it.
- App Activity: Like website activity, you can create an audience who have installed/interacted on your app, using the Facebook pixel.
- Offline Activity: Similar to uploading customer list, you can add the transactions you’ve made offline through your ads and create an audience with it. You can even get as specific as adding transaction IDs, order value etc
Using Facebook’s sources:
- Every like, comment or click that you get on your post matters to Facebook. That is why you have an exclusive set of sources with which you can create an audience using their interaction with your business inside Facebook. The sources include-
- Videos: Create an audience with the people who have watched your videos on Facebook/Instagram. The best part, you can even classify the audience based on the time they have spent on your video.
- Instagram business profile: Create an audience with people who have visited/interacted with your Instagram business account.
- Lead Form: The core component of lead generation ads, you can create an audience out of the people who have clicked or submitted the lead form.
- Events: Create an audience who have interacted with your event listings on Facebook.
- Instant Experience: Formerly known as canvas, instant experience is where you give audiences a website like feel within Facebook. You can create an audience out of people who interacted with your instant experiences.
- Facebook Page: Create an audience with those who like, follow or interact with your page.
With the help of custom audiences, you can connect easily with your existing customers, people who are most likely to engage with your brand again, target specific offers for a specific set of people thereby growing your business. Retargeting is possible only through custom audiences and by connecting with your existing audiences again, you are contributing directly to your business growth.
Now you might wonder, “What if I could interact with people who are very similar to my existing audiences?”
Well, that’s possible and Facebook facilitates that for you with the help of Lookalike Audiences.
Lookalike Audiences:
Lookalike Audience is a way to reach potential new people who are very similar to your existing audiences.
Instead of trying to break your head trying to figure out new targeting options, once you have data enough to create a custom audience, simply create lookalikes using them and Facebook takes care of showing your ads to people who are likely to be similar to your existing audience.
Once you select the source(custom audience), you have a 10-pointer scale with which you can create lookalikes, 1% being very similar to the source audience and 10% being less similar but more in audience size. Define that and you are good to go 🙂
The most important thing to consider while creating a lookalike is the source. As quoted by Facebook,
“if a source audience is made up of your best customers rather than all your customers, that could lead to better results.”
Point to remember, your source audience needs to be at least over 100 in size from a single country to create your lookalikes.