Jani KahukiwaOur Meta Ads expert, Jonathan Paquin, is here to explain how to build lookalike audiences for maximum campaign results. He’ll walk you through the process so you can leverage your best customers to target a similar, larger group to get more sales.
Let’s examine the tools he finds best and the Meta Ads campaign features that enhance audience targeting efficiency.
Table Of Contents
Getting Started With Meta Ads Targeting
Getting Started With Meta Ads Targeting
Starting from the very beginning, Meta Ads calls your existing customers a seed audience. Prospecting can include a lookalike audience, a larger group that can cast its net wider and further, often with incredible results.
Let’s say we give your 5,000 existing customers over to the expert hands of Facebook. Facebook will take your buyers and access 1% of the U.S. population, replicating most accurately these buyers.
Meta Ads recommends a minimum seed audience of 1,000 to 5,000 people to get the best results. This is because approximately 20% to 30% of your lookalike audience won’t be a match. For large businesses, you can easily go up to 100,000 buyers. In cases where there are a lot of customers, however, we would prefer to look at repeat customers and those with the highest average order value (AOV).
Fun fact: Meta Ads will exclude your source audience from the lookalike audience.
At Solutions 8 we like to stack the lookalike audience (LLA) where we will take four or five groups of 1% lookalike audiences. Buyers come from email lists, repeat buyers, and Pixel groups. It’s a backup plan of sorts if one group doesn’t perform well.
Testing 1% of the stacked audience (or 5% or 10%) gives us a good standard base to go over. It’s a small, medium, or big audience that we’re examining, with 10% being the maximum size of our LLA.
Email buyers from the Klaviyo integration are ideal for creating Lookalike Audiences, as the seed audience dynamically updates with new buyers. Repeat buyers are a great pool to fish from since they are qualified and converted leads rather than just leads and 1,000 people from the seed audience is a solid start for LLA. Exporting Shopify and CRM are equally efficient.
Applying LLA to engaged buyers on social media for social proof has its benefits BUT this is only if there are not enough email buyers. Remember: Keeping the stacks from the same groups gives more structure.
Audience Targeting For New Businesses
A new business without a mailing list may have a good chance of applying LLA to social media followers. There must be a minimum of 1,000 visitors to their page in the last six months. Followers and engaged users are also good but a little early in the game to replicate if they have not visited the website yet.
Klaviyo offers you the option to look at the value spent which is higher than AOV. With an AOV of $200, Jonathon would start a new business at $250 value over time to get an LLA from higher spenders.
The Meta Pixel is a snippet of code that helps drive and decode key performance metrics generated by a particular platform. Using Pixel for buyers helps us retrace events in the past.
For example, looking back at purchase events in the last 180 days can give us a solid LLA although it’s not as strong as the email buyers. Analyzing purchase value in the last 60 days is also effective because we can target high spenders rather than low spenders, which are worth more.
For lead generation, a six-month period of converting leads is a great pool to fish from for an LLA.
We simply choose the value base and the Purchase Event (Recommended) to create a lookalike audience for Pixel. Select 60 days and you will see the highest value of sales in that period.
As you can see, the highest value passed in our example account is $3,000. This will have a far better impact than the lowest spend which is $9.50. Select the country where you want to create your LLA.
Here you can add your audience: 1%, 5%, or 10%. If this is your first time targeting LLA, we suggest you go for 10% to get a bigger sample size. It gives more inventory to Meta Ads to find the buyers you are looking for. 1% is fine-tuned to your warmer audience and is worth testing. At first glance, it may appear slightly limiting.
If the client doesn’t have enough purchase events, you can easily look in the Add To Cart which takes us from 143 to 292 as you can see here below. InitiateCheckout, AddToCart, Subscribers, Visitors, Engagers, Followers, and Video Viewers are alternative ways to expand your reach.
View content is another Event With Value group with more data, but there is no proof of intention to buy from these unique customers. Along with product ID, you can include AddToCart and InitiateCheckout amongst others.
Choose a custom audience source by accessing this page.
A new business with little data at its disposal may feel better by choosing its LLA from a small pool of 1% indicating to the algorithm exactly where it should go for its target audience, but there are no set rules on this.
Product/Collection Specific
Being product- and collection-specific is useful, especially for brands. Differentiating a women’s collection from a men’s product gives the Meta Ads algorithm two directions to move in since they are not the same buyers.
Interests
This next one is stacked into separate interests to get the most from our pool. Having a lot of overlaps won’t make sense to the algorithm or our overall strategy.
Each interest should be specific enough to dive into a huge number of potential audiences WITHOUT stepping on the toes of the other interests. And we do not want to have small pools of interest. The numbers we like are in the tens of millions, not the thousands.
There is an option in the settings to browse the different audience sizes based on interests. We can also save the audience type and compare the interests to make sure they are not overlapping.
In these cases where the overlaps are very high, you can divide the groups into bigger target interests.
Behaviors And Demographics
Browsing behaviors include anniversaries, mobile users, digital activities, consumer classification, music creators, zip codes, and more.
Advanced detailed targeting is the key to narrowing down your target audience. Are you looking for a demographic that has disposable income? The top 5% of a demographic in a specific zip code to narrow down a particular area for your services? Define Further is a great way to find the right people. Just make sure your audience pool doesn’t get too small.
Meta Ads will then tell you the percentage of how much lower the cost per result is with Advantage+.
Advantage+ Shopping Campaign
This new tool, Advantage+, is a relatively new feature. It is more flexible, focusing less on an established audience. In a normal 1% LLA, Meta Ads will not go beyond that one percent reach. With this option, however, it will spread its wings when prospecting.
It allows you to make suggestions to Meta Ads, pushing the algorithm beyond its usual parameters. Jonathan likes to add this to the 1% LLA campaign because he finds it particularly effective.
By using an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign (ASC), you can work around the iOS privacy policies. This lets Facebook work more easily to get the buyers you want. Adding gender and age categories in your selection settings would optimize your campaign.
An ASC allows for an existing customer budget cap. However, if you do not implement this single option in Advantage+, Facebook will work its magic on the account anyway and optimize for your client to the best of its ability.
There is an audit section where you can define your audience further.
Broad
Broad is very effective for any business with a lot of data because the algorithm knows exactly where to go with the history available to it. One thing we’ve noticed with Broad is that it crashes faster than Interests, Behaviors, or LLAs.
Broad has a wide reach. If you select men and 35 and over as a demographic, targeting the entire U.S. can give you as many as 200 million people in your audience pool.
So, that is it for our guide to audience targeting within Meta Ads. We hope you have found it useful and let us know if you find these hints effective in your campaigns. Solutions 8 is a team of digital marketing experts available to help you make an impact in the digital world!
