Are you shutting down potential sales on Facebook?

If you are using lookalike audiences on Facebook, you could be limiting your potential sales on the platform.

Working with lookalike audiences on Facebook also means you are narrowing down your target group. In fact, Facebook is often better than you or I at targeting ads according to both campaign type and the objectives of your Facebook campaigns.

Here you will find practical tips on how to scale your sales on Facebook with and without using lookalike audiences, as well as how to test your lookalike audience against a cold audience.

What are lookalike audiences on Facebook?

Lookalike audiences are groups on Facebook that resemble people who are ALREADY in your existing audience. Lookalike audiences allow you to narrow your reach in terms of the number of people to whom you show your ads.

You can create lookalike audiences on Facebook with sizes ranging from 1-10%, which are similar to your current audiences.

Your current audiences could be, for example:

• Visitors to your website
• All purchasers
• Users who have added items to their basket
• Anyone who has engaged on Facebook or Instagram
• All newsletter subscribers
• And so on…

For example, if you sell women’s shoes, you can create a lookalike audience based on previous buyers from your webshop.

You set up a lookalike audience in Facebook under Audiences > tick the audience you want to copy > choose audience location (country) > select audience size

• 0-1% lookalike audience are those most similar to your target audience
• 1-2% lookalike audience are those next most similar to your target audience
• 2-3% lookalike audience are those somewhat less similar to your target audience
  and so on…

For example, you can create a 1-10% lookalike audience, which gives you a group of up to 433,200 people in Denmark.

Below is an example of a 0-1% Facebook lookalike audience, which is similar to all visitors in the last 60 days.

BUT with Facebook lookalike audiences, you risk missing out on potential sales! (OUCH OUCH)

BECAUSE! If you only advertise to a 1% lookalike audience, you are NOT reaching all the other potential buyers in your chosen country – and there are many. They could potentially be in the remaining 99%.

BECAUSE! Facebook’s algorithm might not function optimally in the learning phase (read about Facebook’s learning phase here)

AND! Your audience can become depleted (because it’s too small) + the frequency of ads shown to each person increases (making each sale more expensive).

AND! You don’t know if a 1% lookalike audience converts better than a 2% lookalike audience.

AND! You don’t know if a “cold” audience performs better than lookalike audiences.

Okay! So what should I do?

You should try allowing Facebook to manage ad delivery, so you focus LESS on the audience and let the AD CONTENT determine your SUCCESS.

In other words, you now test your ad content against different audiences, instead of the other way around (which has traditionally been the case). The previous approach (and still the case for some) was to choose demographic + interests for your audience and create a specific ad for them. This is very time-consuming (read: expensive). 

BECAUSE: Facebook knows BETTER than both YOU and ME who should see your ads (and with which message), based on the campaign objective you have selected 👇

Example of selecting a Facebook campaign objective

Isn’t there always a “but…”?

YES, there certainly is – as with almost everything else in online marketing. It might work, it might not. But if you don’t test, you might miss out on leads or sales, as you’re limiting both yourself (and Facebook) with lookalike audiences.

SO!
You need to work MUCH more with your ad content, try to focus less on audiences, and let Facebook do the work. Facebook’s algorithm is very good at delivering ads to the right people.

AND!
You should try split testing lookalike audiences against a “cold” audience.

How to use a cold audience for a Facebook campaign

Using lookalike audiences for a Facebook campaign

Building a Facebook campaign with cold audiences and lookalike audiences

“Stacking” Facebook audiences

You can also “stack” your lookalike audiences. Here you use one ad set for, for example, 0-1%, 1-2%, 3-4% and so on. You will notice that different lookalike audiences perform differently. “Stacking” is useful if you have smaller Facebook budgets to work with. Below shows an example of how you “stack” lookalike audiences, and how in this case the individual lookalike audiences perform. Here you can see that the 7-8% lookalike audience performs better than the 0-1% lookalike audience.

This was an overview of how you can work with Facebook lookalike audiences, cold audiences, and how you can “stack” your lookalike audiences to see what works best for your Facebook campaign. But REMEMBER to test and see what works for your specific Facebook campaigns.