What are Custom and Lookalike Audiences?

There are many different options, too, which can be confusing to the average user (which is why we’d recommend working with us to understand the ins and outs of the platform).

One of the ways you can maximize your ROI with Facebook advertising is through the clever use of custom and lookalike audiences.

The basics are like this:

• Grab ahold of your customer data
• Upload that data to Facebook
• Facebook cross-references the emails and creates a Custom Audience
• Begin targeting those individuals
• Create a new list (the Lookalike Audience) from this data for additional targeting

The technical specifics are:

• You will need to use the Power Editor provided by Facebook for these ads
• You will need a CSV file of your customer data
• You will need to install Conversion Pixels on the pages you want tracked
• You will need to collect your advertising assets

When you are ready to begin:

1. Open the Power Editor once you’re on http://www.facebook.com/ads

2. Upload your CSV file within the Audiences -> Custom Audience selection

3. Use “Create Similar Audience” within the Audiences tab to create a Lookalike Audience

A full explanation and tutorial for creating these two types of customer audiences can be found through the following link: https://www.driftrock.com/blog/facebook-advertising-guide-lookalike-audiences

From there it’s a matter of developing your Facebook ads. With data you’ve uploaded you can select and refine your target audience to be very specific to your customers (and types). FB gives you plenty of opportunities for the creative whether its intentions are for page likes, offer claims, website conversions, or others. You may want to create variations of the ad to target these different types to see which lead to better ad performance.

Note: When you’re using lookalike audiences in the ad be sure to exclude the custom audience otherwise you’ll overlap the ads to existing customers instead of finding new ones.

With the tracking pixel you can then optimize your campaigns based on cold, hard data.

If you are having trouble wrapping your head around these types of campaigns then we’d urge you to get in contact. We have years upon years of experience working with the Facebook platform (and we even work closely with the FB team in Menlo Park as well as their international gaming office in Dublin).

We can help you with pulling the vital information from your customer list, get it setup properly in Facebook, and launch effective campaigns. Custom audiences and lookalike audiences are one of those benefits you gain with the network and one you gain from working with us.