How to Create Facebook Lookalike Audiences: Detailed Tutorial

Key Takeaways

hi guys has been heath from lead guru and in this video I'm going to show you how to create one of Facebook's most powerful features and that's a look-alike audience so in our agency for our clients we use look like audiences more than any other targeting option they're usually the best performing cold audience targeting options that's where we get the best results and for those who don't know a look-alike audience just quickly explained is a group of people that are very similar to another group of people I'll give you an example to show what I mean so let's say for example you've got a list of previous customers over the last two or three years you've collected email addresses or contact details of all your previous customers now you can load that list of Facebook and say to Facebook create me an audience of people that are very similar to my previous customers and that's what a look-alike audience is now because Facebook's got so much data on all its users these look like audiences are very accurate and the people in the look-alike audience will be very similar to your previous customers which is you can imagine is a fantastic targeting option because people who are very similar to your previous customers are highly likely to be interested in your products and services as well when you advertise to them they're going to buy they're going to inquire and that's why we get the best results usually from look-alike audiences and so that's why they're so important really really path what I definitely recommend that if you want better results on Facebook you experiment with them and let's get started with the steps on how to actually set them up so to create a look-alike audience the first thing you need is a source audience now that source audience is obviously the people that that look-alike audience is going to be based off and to do that on Facebook you need to create a custom audience so a number of different options in terms of creating a custom audience to base your look-alike audience off you can base a look-alike audience off as I mentioned previous customers you could do it off website visitors or video viewers Facebook page engages there's tons of different options gonna go through and show you how to create and each one of those and explain sort of the priority order in which you want to use them if you have that data available okay so first thing you want to do is head into the audiences tab in ads manager so that's where I already and that's what you can see on this screen here and if you're in ads manager wondering where to get doing stab just click on these three little lines at the top here and it might be in your frequently used if you use a lot of custom audiences if not it'll be under assets which is over here and audiences click on that and you will come to this page your page might look slightly different and this is my ad account within a business manager account on Facebook if you're just using a personal ad account then it will look slightly different but all the the functionality is the same so what you want to do to create your source audience is come in and click creates and custom audience that'll bring up these options as I said we're gonna go through these I'm going to show you how to to set these up so the first thing is a customer file so click on that option if you've got a previous customer list or an email list and you want to create look-alike audiences based off of those then that's the option you select if you have a MailChimp account and the details that you want to upload to Facebook your source audience is on a MailChimp list and you can simply click on that option enter your MailChimp login details and import that list directly very very straightforward if not if you go to some other platform or you've got it on a excel file something like that and select this top option here and then you can either upload a file or you can copy and paste the data whichever way either way it's pretty straightforward once you've done that you just need to give your audience a name out and you need to select the original data source is something fairly new that Facebook of added with all the sort of data protection issues that have been going around and hopefully you can select directly from customers but either way just select the one that applies then give your audience a name select next then Facebook we simply asked you to match your identifiers with the data so for example they'll say you know is this column email is this column first name match those up and then Facebook will use that information in order to match the data that you've uploaded with people's Facebook accounts so that you can advertise to them or in our case create a look-alike audience from them and advertise to that instead so I'm just going to close that down obviously not going to go through those steps I don't want to show you any sensitive information okay so the best look-alike audience to create is always one based off of previous customers that's the best and you know we want to advertise people that are like our previous customers but obviously not a lot of businesses or not all businesses and have that information if you're just getting started you won't have that information and if you're offering a brand new product or service it's not really related to previous ones and you won't have that data reader so in that case I would then move on to either an email list if you have that if you don't have that then go on to website visitors as the source audience for you look like again there's still gonna be a pretty good look-alike audience because people that are visiting your website are obviously interested in your products and services and advertising to people that are similar to those people will still usually perform better than just interest or demographic or behavioral targeting options that you might find when searching through ads manager so to do website visitors go into crate audience custom audience bring up this menu again select website traffic and here they're a bunch of options that you can go with so the first thing I'll say is that when you're creating a source audience for a look-alike audience you want that source audience to be as large as possible because that gives Facebook as much data as possible with which to create the look-alike audience and it'll make it more accurate and more effective when you have attached to it so in terms of retargeting website visitors and the maximum that allow you to do is 180 days so that's what I would suggest pop at 180 days in there and then you've got a bunch of options you've got you can create a source audience based on all website visitors or do people who've visited specific pages visitors buy time spend so you can go after the people to spend the most time on your website or people that have met certain events so whether they trigger the leads and maybe they purchase from you before something like that as I said most of the time and you want this source audience to be as large as possible all website visits is going to give you that now having said that if you just want to create a look-alike audience based off people that have become a lead for example then you could go in and select the lead code if that's what you're looking for in the future if you're looking for leads and you've had a significant number of leads then go out without option otherwise most likely you're going to go ahead with all web services as I am here so it's going to give this a names we're just gonna call it all website visitors 180 and then I'm going to select for look like just as a quick side note guys I was retargeting my website visitors with a specific offer I almost certainly wouldn't use 180 days someone's visited your website five six months ago and that person's not really a warm audience and that person's not likely to take your desired action so when I'm retargeting with specific offers or calls to action I usually use thirty days maybe fourteen if the websites Jenna quite a lot of traffic just a little side note so I'm gonna go ahead and create that audience that'll take a little bit of time to populate just click done for now we'll come back to all this in a minute that's gonna take a little bit of time to populate we're gonna use that to create our look-alike audience and in the meantime going to show you how to create the other types of source audiences that you can use so again create audience custom audience and then scroll down to engagement now there are more options I'm gonna show this video but the I'm just going to show you the ones that are the most common now we've talked about targeting creating a look like based off previous customers which is absolutely fantastic website visitors which works very well not quite as effective as previous customers so it's very well if you don't have a previous customer list and you don't have much website traffic then you can move on to the next option which is based off video viewers so if you've put some videos out on Facebook you've got some reasonable amount of video views then this can be a decent option to create a look-alike audience one of the advantages that video viewers based look-alike audience has is that usually it's easier it's much easy to get thousands of thousands of video viewers to provide a lot of data to Facebook than it is to get you know thousands of previous customers or thousands of website visitors that said someone who's watched a video may not necessarily be the best candidate to base a look-alike audience off when you're advertising your products and services so that's that's sort of a trade off that's why I would rather go with customer file then website visitors then move on to video viewers so what you want to do is pop in here the first thing you need to do is select the percentage of your video viewed that someone needs to have done in order to be included in this audience so in this case I wouldn't go with anything less than 25% because someone's watched three percent of your video it doesn't really make any difference that that doesn't prove that person is into your stuff then you need to select the videos that you want to to include so you know you could just go through and take all your videos you could scroll through and find one that has a lot of video views like this one for example 37,000 click confirm' there again we want this audience to be as large as possible because it's a source audience for a look-alike so I'm gonna go with 365 Facebook allows you to extend that time period a little bit for video viewer custom audiences and then just going give this a name video viewer 25% that's what we've gone with 365 and again I'm gonna pop in for look-alike and give great audience that so obviously select the videos that you want if you've got different videos on different topics and just make sure that they're appropriate to whatever you're going to be advertising in terms of products and services to that look-alike audience when you're ready okay we'll close that down now again you may if you're just getting started out you're just advertising on Facebook you probably don't have a previous customer list you probably don't have much website traffic you may not have any video views in which case the next option that I move on to is people who've engaged with your Facebook page soon as you start advertising even a little bit on Facebook you will have people to engage with your Facebook page I mean you can use you know just an example if you've been running lead generation ads people who have interacted with your lead for that option can work with only well but most people aren't using that sort of campaign and therefore it's not appropriate so let's go in here again there's a bunch of different options let's go with the longest time frame for this because that's what we want for look-alike audiences and then anyone who's engaged with your page as an option you can do various options on who click to action buttons send you a message etc but I'm gonna go with anyone who engaged because we want this source audience to be as large as possible gives Facebook more data okay so let's just you know what actually I'm not going to go through and create that just be exactly the same as the others so if I then go and close that down so now we've created a bunch of different source audiences for I look alike we now need to use that to create a look-alike okay so let's create that look-alike audience so let's scroll down and find one of our custom audiences that we can use you can see I've got tons and tons of look-alike audiences in my account cuz I use them all the time okay here we go perfect so video viewers it's a perfect example page engages we've got there now this process from here on out works exactly the same no matter what type of look-alike audience you're creating whether it's based on previous customers video viewers and page engages website visitors etc all exactly the same you can see that this one's got a hundred thousand and a decent size audience you can create a look-alike audience based off a source audience provided the source audience has at least a hundred people in it that's the minimum the Facebook requires in order to create a look-alike we find better results when source audience have a thousand plus but if you've got let's say 150 people in a previous customer list absolutely use that to create a look-alike audience and just make sure that as that gets added to its being automatically uploaded or you do it manually if you're recording them out out of a sort of an automatic system okay so select video viewers or whatever it your source audience will look like when it's going to be come up here and take actions and then create look-alike and that will bring up something looks like this so that just gives you your name your source now the first thing I need to choose is the countries that you want to target now you can add in multiple countries you know all regions and I usually just stick to a country basis and we don't add in multiple countries if you operate just on a local basis then what you can do is you can create let's say a uk-wide or a US wide and look-alike audience and then in the ad set in your targeting you target the look-alike but you specify the only people that are within that look-alike that are also within that safe 20 miles of wherever your business operates from and are actually going to be including this look-alike order so I'll show you how to do that in a second because I get a lot of people asking that they say how do I create a look-alike for you know just on a local basis this is how you do it so I'm based in the UK I'm gonna select United Kingdom and then the next thing you need to decide is audience size so here you've got percentage of the country or countries that you've selected so what this means is if I were to go with 1% the this look-alike audience walk-ins contain the 1% of Facebook users in the UK that are most like this source audience ok so that's why a 1% look-alike audience in the UK will always be roughly 400,000 because there's roughly 40 million Facebook users in the UK in the US this 1% is gonna be 2.3 2.4 million something like that and now the trade-off here is the larger percentage you go for so let's say we go you know go for 2% and we've got a larger audience so in terms of longevity of that campaign you may to run it longer before you run into advert Iggy shoes but the advantage of keeping it nice and small and just at 1% is that these people are the 1% that are most like the source audience so particularly if you're basing this off previous customers that's the people that are going to respond best to your ads they're most likely to buy your products and services so with a country that's got a reasonable reasonable population a lot of Facebook users I would I tend to go with start with at least a 1 percent local accordions if that's performing really well I may look to add in two three percent look-alike audiences if I start with a 1 percent particularly if you're advertising in the US which obviously has you know very very large population 240 million Facebook users one percents gonna already contain 2.4 million users that's a lot of people now if you are advertising a local basis this number four hundred and thirteen thousand is across the entire United Kingdom so if you operate just out of you know a city and the surrounding area you might limit that down to small so you may need to go out with five six seven percent look-alike audiences and you'll only really know that once you create a few look-alike audiences go into the ad set adjust your location targeting to your local area and then see that the size is old okay we've only got you know 1500 people to advertise to something like that we need to to create a larger look-alike audience for most businesses that are advertising nationwide to a reasonably large country and start with 1% anything under sort of two hundred hundred fifty thousand here I would probably start with let's say 2% okay so that's that for the look-alike go ahead and select create audience which again will take a little bit of time but in terms of for Facebook you have to populate that audience usually about half an hour but you can come back to it when it's ready and then go ahead and set it up in your ad account which is the next step so I said you can do this with a bunch of different look-alikes different countries I would separate them out by country and because you never know you may want to have a ties to one country so they're another and if you bundle five countries into one look-alike and in a month's time you want to change it you've got to completely remove that look-alike an acne once in becomes a little bit more complicated small point okay let's go ahead and now add back like audience into an ad campaign okay so here we are now inside of ads manager let's go ahead and create an example campaign just go over to that green plus create button and sorry it's gonna take a little bit of time to go through this process because I'm recording this the same time my computer will be a little bit slow so I'm just gonna call this example campaign I'm going to change that to a conversions objective and because that's what I use the most if you want to know more about campaign objectives by the way guys just go to lean guru WK /blog and i've got a blog post right there all about campaign objectives and what to use I'm gonna bother with the ad for now create a new ad set we'll just call this example ad set save to draft and then once this is loaded up we're gonna go into the ad set show you where to select your look-alike audience so let's minimize that down click into the campaign which gets you to your ad set level make sure that's highlighted and select edit which will load up this ad set and then scroll down I'm not gonna worry about any of the other features I've got other videos that talk about some that sort of stuff and here you go this is the section where you add in any custom or any look-alike audiences so for example if I start putting in look-alike into here it'll pop up with a whole load so here we go the UK 1% video viewers that's the one we actually just created which is showing fewer than 1000 because it's still populating and up here if once that's populated in fact I'll show you an example let's add in another one that I've created before so let's do oh these are custom audiences so let's do here we go 1% look-alike audience based off my total email list contains four hundred and ten thousand people so that's what I look like will contain now this is what I was talking about in terms of a local business now obviously this is uky which is how I would advertise most of my business but a lot of businesses operate locally so let's say for example if I get rid of that let's say for example you are in cirencester which is a town in England which I live in plus twenty five miles that look-alike is going to come down big time there you go it's just come down to ten thousand people which is too small so if I was just operating on a local basis business based in Cirencester and I wanted to advertise to the local area then I would probably create really maybe even a ten percent look-alike at least six seven percent look-alike because obviously each percentage when you go up that's going to sort of devil so it goes from 10,000 to 20,000 with two percent it will be 60,000 for six percent except it cetera and that's just because obviously you have resides in a local basis so you need to you can't be as specific with who you target same principle applies to all Facebook targeting by the way guys if you're a local business you cannot be as specific with your targeting as you can if you're advertising nationwide or or internationally so that's just a point on size so create a local local to one percent come in here add in your location targeting criteria and then if it's too small go ahead create a larger look like come back in it now because this and campaign is going to be advertising to a look-alike we don't really need to add in any other targeting criteria so we don't need to set age because if if let's say that people on my email list are all between the ages of 30 and 40 and then we're certainly not but let's say that as an example then that means that the look-alike is going to contain people that nearly all of them will be between that ages those ages anyway same if my audience is overly male or overly female except etc so you can leave all these other targeting options blank the way this works is once you've added in a custom or a look-alike audience all of this rest of the stuff is an and function so it's all things that are going to narrow your audience and make it smaller so if you're using a look-alike basically just leave this board one of the reasons why I love using look-alikes is not only they're very effective they're actually very easy to use you could basically leave everything black then you just need to go ahead and select publish and your campaign will start advertising to that look like audience no you know as with all facebook advertising you want to give it three or four days and to assess any results make sure that your ad sets have completed the learning phase before you start to assess performance that's very important that'll give you more representative view of how things are going but em but yeah but definitely look to experiment with look-alikes very very powerful very easy to use once you know how to use them as I said we use them more than any other targeting option when we're advertising on Facebook and one thing to really understand with look-alike audiences that a lot of people get wrong is that not all look-alike audiences are created equal so a look-alike audience based off video viewers is not as powerful as a look-alike audience based off previous customers okay so a lot of people say I try the look-alike audience didn't work my first question is what did you base your look-alike audience off because if you based it off people who have visited your Facebook page I might not mean too much but if you base it off previous customers or people who've you know spend a lot of time on your website or visited your sales pages on your website that's fantastic those perform very very well now just we go and before I wrap up this video something I want to tell you about I think you'll find very useful and that's a five part Facebook ad template that I've created that you can download right now for free so this ad template includes some of the best performing ads we've created for our clients in a number of different industries basically what I've done is have broken down each ad and explained what I've included in each and why explain why performed well you can obviously model from the ads if you're looking to get better results from Facebook then and obviously use look-alike audiences that I've been talked about in this video but also go ahead and grab this this template you should be able to help your ad performance so as I said you can download it right now for free just click on the link in the video description that'll take you to a page on website and you'll be able to download it there thanks a lot guys and if you've got any questions then please pop them in the comment section below if you enjoyed this video you want me to create others you've got ideas for other videos again pop them in the comments below I will be sure to get to them and I will talk to you guys soon thanks a lot bye