What is a Lookalike Audience?

If you’re starting out at as a digital marketer or making your first foray into Facebook ads for your business, you’re probably seeing a lot of information regarding Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences. An audience is simply the collection of people who will (potentially) see your ad on Facebook. Lookalike audiences are imperative for being able to scale your business—but what are they, exactly?

Lookalike Audiences

A Lookalike Audience, sometimes abbreviated “LAL” and other times “LAA,” is an audience that you can create (primarily in Facebook) that mimics the demographics and interests of a pre-defined group or audience. Basically, once you have a list of customers or high-value leads, you can upload that list into Facebook, and tell Facebook to find other people who are similar (lookalike) to the people on your list.

Why create Lookalike Audiences

Facebook gives you a huge number of parameters to create your own audiences—you can narrow by interests, demographics, behaviors, etc.—but even the most finely tuned and targeted audience doesn’t take into account anywhere near the totality of what Facebook knows about its users. The amount of data that Facebook is able to mine from the behaviors of its users is immense. Using a Lookalike Audience builder allows you to harness a large amount of this user data, without any technical knowledge. Facebook creates the audience itself, behind the scenes, just based off of your list of names or email addresses.

Using Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike Audiences are perfect for helping to scale a business. It’s the easiest way to find potentially interested leads on Facebook. A business that is already established, and has customer lists for different product offerings, can create lookalike audiences for each of its offerings, and serve targeted ads to those individuals.

Additional Resources

Creating lookalike audiences in Facebook is a breeze. I cover that in another blog post here. And if you’re interested in learning more about the strategy we use to get the most out of Custom and Lookalike Audiences, check out our strategy blog post here.

If you need help implementing your online marketing strategy, shoot an email our way and we’ll figure out how we can help!