Facebook Lookalike Audience Tutorial, Pro-tips & Secrets

Key Takeaways

if you want to know how to use Facebook look-alike audiences to target way more of your ideal customers we are starting right now if you want to transform your website into a customer or lead generation machine I'll show you all my best tips tactics and secrets to get there fast let's dive in hey how's it going I'm West McDowell web strategist for the deep end and if you're not subscribed to our channel yet you're not gonna want to miss out on anything so just click on the little subscribe button and the bell icon next to it so you never miss another video you need to succeed online so what are the best ways to get cold traffic to your website is through Facebook Ads and they offer a lot of really cool targeting options but none is more effective than the look-alike audience now after analyzing tens of millions of dollars an ad spend look-alike audiences had the best click-through rates in 80% of campaigns and the lowest cost per acquisition in 60% of campaigns which means you can get as creative as you want in coming up with new and innovative ways of targeting new customers but your best bet is just gonna be to input your current customer list and let Facebook do the hard work of duplicating those people and finding them for you it's just gonna get you better much more accurate results so let's start by defining what exactly a look-alike audience is in its most basic form Facebook starts with a list of people who have taken some kind of action with your business already it then uses the hundreds of data points that it has on every single user and it basically comes up with a bunch of matches that come as close as possible to those original people uses things like basic demographics interests and just the overall likelihood that they are gonna take the same action as well now there are a few ways of making a look like audience one is from a customized audience of people who have viewed any of your videos or interacted with your facebook page in any way but by far the most powerful is by uploading a spreadsheet of email addresses of your current and past customers and there's a new feature they've added to this that can make it even more powerful which we'll get to in a minute so let's go over a few basics you to get started so first of all you can start with a general email list of subscribers let's say you have a lead magnet and people have just opted in you can use that list but it's always gonna be much more powerful if that list is actual customers so think about it do you want advertise to people similar to the people who've opted in for a free piece of content or would it be much more beneficial to be able to advertise to people that are just like your paying customers and one question I always get is how big is this initial listening to be well Facebook's technical requirement is you need at least 20 people but that's generally not nearly enough for them to do a good job of finding lookalike so what I recommend is a list of a thousand people or more if you have it several hundred admit a mum anything less than a few hundred you're likely just gonna be wasting money and you'd probably be better off just using using more traditional targeting options like basic demographics location and interests okay so now I want to go over the computer and give you a peek over my shoulder basically to see exactly how to set up your Facebook look-alike audience for maximum impact including the new feature that's gonna allow it to be even more powerful that's pretty new alright let's jump into it okay so the first thing you're gonna want to do is just go to the ads manager within Facebook and to get there just go to facebook.com slash ads manager okay so in order to set up your look like audience you're going to go back up to where it says as manager and you're gonna click on audiences and then just click on create audience creating a look like audience is actually a two-step process the first thing we have to do is create a custom audience that they'll look alike audience is built off of so let's go ahead and click custom audience and now here we've got some options so there's many ways you can create a custom audience for Facebook so the first one is customer file which is what we're going to be doing which is where you're basically uploading a list of your customers website traffic so if you have the Facebook pixel installed you can actually build custom audience of people who have been to your website or even as specific as any individual page on your website now this is also a great way of making a custom audience of customers because let's say you have an online store and once someone buys something they go to a Thank You page you can actually have this set up to make a custom audience of everybody who got to that Thank You page which you know means they ended up being a customer there's app activity so if you have an app it's anyone who's who's used it offline activity I have not really used this one yet so we're gonna skip that an engagement is basically just a way to target anybody who has interacted with either your Facebook page or watched a video ad or anything like that so but let's go back up to customer file that's what we're really going to be talking about today and now you've got another couple up shion's again so in this first case you can just upload a list of email addresses or a spreadsheet of emails names phone numbers all the information you have on the second option is if you use MailChimp as your email program you can actually import all that data right from MailChimp and this third option is what we're gonna be getting back to in a little bit it's similar to the first option but it has a little bit of a twist that might make it perform even better for you but to start let's just go to the first option okay so here is where it's going to give you the opportunity to upload all your customer information so the first thing you need to do is select the origin of the upload so basically there's a few options here one is saying from customers and partners this means you've got this information directly from your customers and maybe you have some of this information that you paid for from a data agency the second option is all directly from your customers and the third one is you basically bought all these email addresses in this case and kind of what Facebook wants is the second option they want to know you got it directly from their customers and from here I'm just going to drag and drop a CSV file right in there and all that file is is a spreadsheet of one column of email addresses that is and make sure the audience has a name I'm just gonna leave it example email list for now and then click Next now it basically just wants to know that that this column is to do with email addresses which it is and if you have a more complex spreadsheet that has a column of email addresses in a column of first names last names phone numbers zip codes whatever that is that's gonna come up here below and it's just gonna give some samples and then it's gonna make you choose ok these are the email addresses or these are the first names these are the last names these are the zip codes so it just basically is a way of mapping the information correctly but in this case it's a simple spreadsheet of just email addresses so I'm going to click upload and create ok and it's saying it was uploaded but with error which is common which just means some of the email addresses in there are not RI they're not formatted correctly or are not matches with the with Facebook users which is to be expected but we have 2025 rows uploaded so good enough to get started so now it gives you a next steps option where it says create a look-alike audience perfect so let's go ahead and click that and it's already going to bring up example email list as the source remember that's the custom audience we just uploaded now it's going to give you an option for location so what they want to do with a look-alike audience you can only do one country at a time so pick the country in this case it'll be the United States and the next thing is okay and here's where it gets a little interesting so it wants you to pick an audience size and I'll explain this as easily as I can so basically what they're asking for is of all those people on that list do you want us to find the 1% of the population of the United States that's most similar or do you want the top 2% and see how the the audience size keeps getting bigger so at 2% we're at 4.3 million people you can go all the way up to 10% which tells Facebook I want the 10% of Americans who were as similar to my list as possible and this of course gives you a bigger number but it makes the targeting a little less pinpointed so what I always recommend is start very small with one that gives you an estimated reach of over 2 million people which is almost always enough to get started then if you find that that's working really well and you want to kind of scale your ads up you can go and do this again and bring it up to 2% and so on that will double your audience and you can keep going this way until you start seeing that your cost per lead is going way up that's when you know it might be a good idea to take a step back and give up a certain audience size for a much more pinpointed targeted audience so let's go ahead and leave it at 1% for now and then just click create audience okay so what it's doing now we've got that email example email list which is the custom audience which is still updating it's still finding everybody and then once that's done then the look-alike audience can start building both of these steps individually can take anywhere from an hour up to I've seen it take as long as 24 hours before so you know step away from the computer get some coffee eat some lunch and then come back to it and see where you're at what you're looking for is for it to say ready just like that so once you're it to that point now you're look like audience is ready to use and you can go ahead and create your ad but remember I promised you an interesting tweak that you can add to this to make it even more powerful so let's go ahead and check that out real quick so we'll go back over to create audience custom audience customer file and now we're going to go with this third option customer file with lifetime value so what this option is is it still allows you to upload that spreadsheet or that CSV file with all your customer information with one additional column which is lifetime value so let's go ahead and take a look at what I mean okay so this is obviously just an example customer list I've only got a few fake names on here but so it's got your no first names last names email addresses you can have phone numbers on here zip codes anything that will help Facebook match more people to its database but then you've got this column here lifetime value so let's say you own a flower shop and you know about half your customers only come in once they buy one bouquet of flowers and you really never see him again but then you've got certain customer who come in every week and spend a certain amount of money no go keep the change hi dougie you're my favorite customer and then you've got certain customers who may have hired you to take care of all the flowers for an entire wedding so what this allows you to do is not only tell Facebook hey go get me a bunch of other customers that are just like my customers but it allows you to prioritize so basically you're telling Facebook get people like my customers but really put an emphasis on this one who spent three thousand dollars over a lifetime and this is the kind of thing that Facebook is really good at it's getting better at it all the time so when you can put in lifetime value so let's say you know tom has spent twenty four dollars over the years Patricia spent $3,000 over the years it's much more beneficial for you to find more people like Patricia right and you know it may or may not be feasible for you to add these values maybe you don't really have good records of it and if you do it might actually take a long time actually putting these values into the spreadsheet but this is something that's easily done by a virtual assistant or someone in-house and I think it would be well worth the time if you have those kind of records laying around or if you have an e-commerce store you should be able to export this list with all those lifetime values already inside of it now a few important things to note they do want you to just basically format it like this without dollar signs they definitely don't want you to do commas for thousands so it would just be the number would just be three zero zero without the comma and cents are okay as well so as long as you keep the commas out of it I think everything should be okay now you're just good let's go back to the ads manager and you're gonna name this audience let's call it example lifetime value and then you would just go ahead and you would upload that audience right here again select the origin of the upload and you would just click Next alright well hopefully that got you excited about setting up your very first look like audience one of my best performing campaigns I've ever run was based off of look like audience and I can assure you how powerful it really can be but now I want to hear from you and I want to know if you have any question about any of this or any tips that I may have missed if so go ahead and leave it in the comment section below I'll read all of them and I'll answer as many questions as I possibly can all right so if you're not subscribed to the channel yet just go ahead and click the circle icon right down here to subscribe you're not going to want to miss out on any of our videos and if you've not opted in to my free mini course how to guarantee website ROI you can find that by clicking the box right over here all right guys I'm West McDowell for the deep end and I'll see you in the next video