How to Create The Best Facebook Lookalike Audiences (Full Tutorial With Pro Tips)

Key Takeaways

hey Andrew Hubbard here and in this video I'm going to show you the best Facebook look-alike audiences to use for low-cost leads and the best return on your ad spend and I'm going to show you step-by-step how to set each one of them up now if you haven't done it already please give this video a like hit the subscribe button and click that little bell to get notified whenever I release a new video on facebook advertising or digital marketing Facebook look-alike audiences are the most effective way to target cold traffic and that's because we're leveraging the power of all of Facebook's data that it has on its users a look-alike audience is simply a group of people that are similar to an audience that you provide to Facebook let's say you have a thousand leads already you can give that list of people who are already leads to Facebook and tell Facebook hey I want you to look at this list and go and find me two million people who are very similar to this list Facebook will then use its data to go out and match up and find people who are similar to your existing leads that you just provided it and it will bring you back a look-alike audience containing those two million people who are very very similar it uses all of the data available to do that matching which makes it a very powerful way to find those people who are very similar to your existing audience already imagine doing that with a customer list which is one of the things I'm actually going to show you how to do in this video which leads me to what you actually need in order to start using look-alike audiences basically the only thing you need is that seed audience you need what's called a custom audience that contains at least 100 people in order to use that as a seed for your look-alike now a custom audience is simply a list of people that meet a set of parameters that you specify for example people who visited your website or people who've watched a video of yours on Facebook or people who've engaged with your Facebook page or it's an email list that you've uploaded directly to Facebook now I said you need at least a hundred people that is the minimum that Facebook specifiers but I highly recommend you have at least 500 people in your custom audience before you use it to create a look-alike and the reason I say that is because as I just described Facebook takes that custom audience that you provide that list and it goes and use is it for matching to build your look-alike now obviously the bigger that custom audience is the more data that you're giving Facebook the more accurate that look-alike is going to be in finding people similar to the ones in your custom audience so if we only have a hundred people in the custom audience Facebook doesn't have a whole lot of data to work with and so your look-alike audience isn't going to be that strong if you've got let's say ten thousand people in the custom audience in comparison that's going to be a very strong look-alike because it's got 10,000 different people it can use as data points to go and match up for the look-alike okay so I recommend as I said at least 500 people in a custom audience before you go and use it to create a look-alike so what is the best look-alike to use well that's a pretty simple one the best look-alike and the ideal look like audience is one based on your customers and there are two ways to do this so you can go ahead and export all of your customers from your email tool whether it's activecampaign Infusionsoft whatever you use you can export that customer list upload it into Facebook and instantly give Facebook a custom audience based on your existing customers that it can use to create a look-alike the other way to do it is to create what's called a website custom audience which is a custom audience that contains everybody who's visited a specific webpage and you can put in the Thank You page or the confirmation page that your customers see after completing an order so you can say I want everybody who's completed a purchase and I know they've done that because they've visited this particular URL in the last 180 days to go into a custom audience you can build that website custom audience and then you can go and create a look-alike audience off of it now the downside to that way of doing it is your custom audiences can only go back or your website custom audiences I should say can only go back 180 days meaning you only have 180 days worth of customer data in that custom audience compared to the entire email database of customers that you export so just something to think about there ideally if you can export the email list that's the best way to do it so that's the best list you can use as a seed for your look-alike okay look-alike based on customers is the most effective look-alike you can go and create now what happens if you don't have that well I just go through a very simple process of moving up the funnel so if a purchase is at the bottom of your sales process or sales funnel but you don't have that 500 customer list just yet you simply move one step up the funnel so the next step up is everybody who's added an item to the cart or hit your checkout page okay so you might then be able to say well I don't have enough customers but I do have enough people who've added an item to the shopping cart or who visited my checkout page and I'm going to create a look-alike based on that what if you don't have that will you move further up and you might say everybody who's visit or product or sales page I can use them to create a custom audience and then use that as the basis for my look-alike moving up from those product page visitors or sales page visitors you've probably got all of your leads okay all leads you can export those into a custom audience or use a website custom audience to create a look like based on your leads and then above that you've got your website visitors and then above that you've got people like video viewers and engages on Facebook and Instagram so you just keep moving up until you find that point we've got at least 500 people to create your look-alike and then as you start to go through and run ads for a little while you'll start to get more customers and you can start moving back down the funnel and creating new look-alikes as you get more people hitting your checkout pages adding things to your cart and then buying and becoming customers so you can create those better and stronger look-alikes as your business grows and as you start to get more sales all right so let's jump over the ad manager and look at how we set these up so once we're in the Facebook ad manager the first thing that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to go to the audiences tab so you click up here on the menu and you can go audiences mine's here as a shortcut if you don't see it scroll down to audiences just here and click on audiences so I'm going to show you first as an example how to deal with a customer list so step one of this is to go and create so the first thing that you're going to need to do is create they're going to base your look-alike audience it off so the first thing you're going to want to do here is create your custom audience that you're going to base your look-alike audience off so what we want to do is click create audience and click custom audience now I'm going to show you an example with a customer list so this is it the case where we've exported an email list and we're going to upload it to Facebook so I click customer list and I can go down here and hit next and then does it include a column for customer value now what this means is if you know the value of each of your customers and how much money they spend and can export that from your email tool then that's great you should absolutely export that if you don't have it don't worry about it but if you do have that value Facebook can actually then take that look at the value of each customer and it can create a look-alike based off the highest value customers not just customers so that's an even more powerful look-alike if you have that value if you have it great if not just tick know so I'm going to say no for this one now all we need to do is get our list so in a CSV or txt format so go to activecampaign Infusionsoft convertkit whatever tool you use I use activecampaign personally export your list of customers only into a CSV file and then you just come and drop it here so I've just dragged my list here or customers in and you can give it a name so I'm going to say all customers email list export and I'm going to click Next so now on this screen it's very important here we match as many fields as we possibly can so you can see in the mapped section that shows fields that Facebook has already mapped on a time so Facebook has figured out ok this email field maps to our email on Facebook and this phone number field in the CSV that you just gave me maps to the phone number field and Facebook but over here we've got action needed 30 Facebook saying there hey I need little help can you tell me which fields in your CSV file actually match up to what in Facebook so I'm gonna go through and do that now so you can see your first name I want to match that to first name in Facebook so I click first name and then I've got last name this is my column in my sheet and I want to click that and click last name and just telling Facebook what to match it with if I go down here I've got empty row empty row that's fine and I'm just looking is there anything else country we're in a match to country region we don't have any specific one for region so all we're going to do is click upload and create once we map those out the reason you want to map as many as possible and have as many matched as possible is because Facebook is now taking that CSV file and it's trying to match it up with Facebook users the more data you can give it in the CSV and the more fields you can match the higher match rate you get which means the bigger your custom audience is going to be generally when I upload an email list I tend to see 70 60 to 70 percent of those people in the list getting matched to actual Facebook users okay so we've got that it says done we just click done and now we've got our all customer email list export to create our look-alike now is actually really simple we just tick this box click this these three dots here and click create look-alike from here we select the country that we want to target so we can select multiple countries so if I want to target people in the United States Canada UK Australia now let's add New Zealand in there as well one not so we go down here and here's where we can select our audience size now the reason this is important is because what we're telling Facebook is how many people we want in the look-alike audience and how similar those people will be to our custom audience so when we choose a 1% look-alike it's saying I want to create a look-alike that contains people most similar to my look-alike sauce if I go higher though I get a bigger look-alike you can see it's now 35 million and if I'm at 1% it's only whoops it's only well it's only 3.6 million so I get a bigger look-alike if I go to 10% but it's less accurate ok because as you go higher as you go up towards 10% it's going to give you more people but they're going to be less less of a match to the existing custom audience so for most cases starting with a 1% look-alike is a great place to start you really don't want to go into bigger look-alikes until you feel like you've tapped out that audience and a 3.6 million person audience is pretty big so you're not going to tap that out anytime soon so we simply select the size and click create audience now what you're going to see is both of these say below 1000 and populating now it takes a little bit of time you need to wait it can be a few hours it can be up to 12 hours sometimes before there's actually populate so you want to wait make sure these populate before you go and start using them when it's time to start using them you simply go into an ad set when you're starting to set it up in the custom audiences section you just add your look-alike audience and boom you're off to the races so that's how you set up an email list based look-alike to set up a website visitor based custom audience and use it for a look-alike let's jump in and see how we do that now so I'm going to go custom audience again and this time I'm going to choose website because what I want to do is create a custom audience that contains everybody who's let's say visited my thank-you page so I know they've bought because they've hit my post purchase thank-you page or my post purchase confirmation page and then from there I'm going to create a look-alike on that so it's a very similar process we go website this time we're going to say people who visited specific pages and I'm going to set it the longest possible time period because I want as many customers in this audience as possible so I can have the strongest possible look-alike so I'm going to do that and I'm going to contain the final the slug of my URL the final part of my URL so mine is thank - you - for - okay so in this example when people buy a product from me they see thank you for purchase they see Andrew Hubbard CEO /you for purchase so I'm just saying URL contains this I'm not putting the entire URL in just the unique portion of it or the slug which is the piece after the slash okay now I'm going to give it a a name so I'm going to say hit and I'll give it a call it all customers hit post purchase Thank You page and create that audience and this part is exactly the same so we'll take our custom audience we select it hit these three buttons click create look-alike enter the countries that we want to target it's like 1% or whatever percentage you want most cases 1% and then boom we've got our custom audience ok so that's how you create an a website visitor based look-alike we create their custom audience first and then we gonna create a look-alike so if you needed to go up higher in the chain let's look at one other way to create these custom audiences that we can then use as a base for our look-alikes okay so the next thing I want to show you is how to create a look-alike audience based on people who've initiated the checkout that haven't quite finished their purchase this is for those situations where you might not have enough customers ready to create a custom audience and then a look-alike audience based on your customers so you want to move up the funnel and create an audience based on people who've initiated checkout sequence so we're going to go first custom audience and then website one thing I will note before we finish setting this up is this is dependent on you having conversion tracking setup on your website so you need the Facebook pixel and conversion tracking setup and I'll include some links to videos I've created to show you how to do that in the description below so if you haven't got the pixel setup and conversion tracking setup it's absolutely essential for this you need to after you watch this video go ahead and look in the description follow those links get that all set up so you can go ahead and use these look like audiences so what you need to do here is click on the drop-down and then if you go down to from your events so you can see here we've got a bunch of different events that I've triggered or that are being used on my account that I can use so I can click here and go initiate checkout so then I choose in the past 180 days now what I'm telling Facebook is I want this custom audience to contain everybody who's initiated the checkout process in the last 180 days to go into this custom audience and then I'm just going to call it and you share to checkout I'm gonna hit create audience now I've got a brand new custom audience that's going to be populated with whoops and I named it wrong it should be 180 days but it's going to be populated with everybody who initiated the checkout process in the last 180 days fantastic then what I can do is I can go ahead and create my look-alike audience based off it so let me rename this first done and then I'm going to simply follow that same process I'm going to select the audience here click the drop-down click create look-alike select my countries 1% and click create audience now I can go and use that look like once it's populated to target a list of similar people to those who have initiated checkout all right the final type of look-alike I'm going to show you how to create is one based on your video viewers this can be quite effective if you do a lot of Facebook live or a lot of video from your Facebook or Instagram page and you want to get in front of people who consume a lot of that video content or people who are similar I should say to those who have consumed a lot of that video Conte to do that we go create audience custom audience and we choose video down here now what this does is it allows me to create a custom audience based on people who've consumed videos on my Facebook page so I can say I want to add people who've watched 95% of my videos to this custom audience once I have that custom audience I can then create a look-alike based on that now it's obviously not going to be as strong as let's say an email list full of leads or people who've initiated to check out all my customers but this can be great if you're doing other things like promoting your videos on Facebook if you've got a custom audience full of people who've watched 95% of your videos in the past and you go and create a look-alike based on that then you're probably going to get a big audience full of people who are likely to watch your future videos so another great way to use this now what I will do is I will go choose videos and just choose all of the videos on my page or whatever videos you think are relevant and then we just click confirm again we can choose a time now this type of audience a video view based audience can go up to a 365 days our website visitor audiences only went up to 180 but these have a bigger limit so you can choose up to 365 and I can say watch 95% call or whatever you want and then hit create audience now we're going to have an audience of people who've watched at least 95% of one of those videos I selected in the last year now I can select that boom hit create look-alike select my countries in click create orience and now I've got a look-alike that contains people who are similar to those that have already watched 95% or more of my videos in the last 12 months all right so you've just seen how to create your custom audiences how to then set up a look-alike audience is based off them and now all you need to do is go and setup your campaigns and ad sets to target those brand new look-alikes as I said with the customer list first if you don't have that work up the funnel until you find a custom audience that does contain at least 500 people and start with that for your first look-alike and then work back down the funnel closer to your customer list as you get more leads and customers coming through your business now I really hope you've enjoyed this video if you have give it a like for me it really helps the channel grow tells me that you enjoy this type of content and I know to keep creating more of it also hit the subscribe button a little bell to make sure you never miss a video on facebook advertising or digital marketing because you'll get notified every time I release a new one again thanks for watching appreciate you taking the time and I'll see you in the next video