How Will iOS 14 Affect Facebook Lookalike Audiences?

0:00hi guys it's ben heath from lead guru and in this video i'm going to talk about how facebook look-alike audiences are likely to be affected by the ios 14 update and the changes that facebook is currently making in response to what apple have done and the new rules that apple have implemented um i've recently created quite a bit of content around ios 14 and how that's impacting facebook ads or how facebook's changing its platform really is what's impacting us as facebook advertisers and in those videos i've had a lot of people commenting saying what about looking like audiences how are look-alike audiences affected i know that so many facebook advertisers

0:35us included are reliant on lookalike audiences as their highest performing cold audiences and it's where you're able to scale your campaigns you get your best cold audience results from there absolutely fantastic we use them for almost every single client and i'm sure a lot of you do as well so people are worried about how look-alike audiences are gonna be affected that's what i'm gonna address in this video before we get into that just wanna quickly quickly ask for you to smash that like button please click that thumbs up button that would really help me out and of course subscribe to my youtube channel if you are new

1:02and haven't done so already so i'm not going to go into the details too much of ios 14 and how that's impacting facebook advertising changes i've got other videos on that so i'll include links to the video description in the video description below to those talking about what the changes are going to be and the likely impact of those changes do you want to quickly say that the impact of ios 14 the good news is it doesn't seem like it's going to be anywhere near as impactful as we first feared which is fantastic um means that a lot of the best practices and all that sort of stuff are gonna

1:31hold true as we move through these changes that are currently being implemented um as i'm recording this and um and that's the great news and facebook ads can continue to be a fantastic platform and all that sort of stuff i also very much expect as a result of that that look-alike audiences are going to continue to be the best-performing cold audience targeting option for the vast majority of facebook advertising do not expect that to change so in order to work out given that that's the case what how are lookalike audiences can be affected are they going to be less effective or they're going to stay the

2:04same et cetera that's what we're going to discuss in this video so i'm an example facebook ad account because i'm going to show you a few different elements here whenever we're assessing look-alike audiences and how they operate and how they might be impacted we need to look at the two component parts right so there's obviously your custom audience that you create first that's your source audience that's the group of people that you're giving to facebook for them to then go on and create a look-alike audience from that group people so find people that are very similar to that sort of audience and again i'm not going to show talk too much about

2:31how to create look-alike audiences i'll include a link to a video below that shows you exactly how to do that in a lot of detail shows exactly how they work why they're so awesome and all that sort of stuff so check that out if you're if you're not familiar with the process but when we're assessing look like audiences said we need to assess the customer audience we also need to assess the process by which facebook creates look-alike audiences and how therefore that might be effective so two component parts so the first thing is is the custom audience now it really depends what type of custom audience you use

3:01to create your look-alike audience from as to how much you are likely to be impacted so if i go into create audience and then click on custom audience we can see again i'm not going to go into details on this video links to videos in the description for look-alike audiences custom audiences all that sort of stuff but you can see that what we've got here is a number of different custom audience sources website customer list etc some are gonna be more effective than others a lot of people will create lookalike audiences based off of people that have visited their website or website visitors perhaps everyone is added to cart all that sort

3:34of stuff that custom audience is going to get smaller as people opt out of being trapped by tracked by facebook with the ios 14 update facebook is not going to be able to track as many people therefore if you're sending traffic to your website um not if facebook's capturing you know let's say 80 of those right now they never quite get 100 maybe 90 something they never quite get everyone perhaps that will decrease by 10 or so so if you have a hundred people visit your website right now facebook's able to produce a custom audience for you of let's say 90 people out of that that might go down

4:05to 80 because we're not going to be able to track as many people i don't think it's going to be that much more significant than that because remember obviously the ios 14 update only affects um people on ios devices right so all your android devices absolutely fine carry on as usual it's also only gonna affect the people that opt out and even the people that do opt out um we're not going to be completely blind as to what they go on and do on your website it's not like if they opt out we can't track anything we know that's not the case we know we can still see one conversion event and

4:36things like that so customer is going to get a bit smaller but not a huge amount so what does that mean for lookalike audiences well in general it's better to have larger source audiences to create lookalike audiences from because the more data you give to facebook you know if you give facebook 100 people and say create me an audience people that look like them or you give facebook a thousand people and say create me an audience that look like them the thousand person source audience for the look alike is usually gonna be better facebook's got more data they can create more accurate look like audiences so i

5:08think in terms of smaller custom audiences so smaller source audiences for those look-alikes we are going to see an impact particularly if you create them based off website visitors if you're doing things like uploading a customer list you know an email list perhaps um or you're basing your look-alike audiences off on from on facebook activity so people have let's say viewed a video you know facebook sources here people have viewed a video of yours on facebook as your source audience if you look alike perhaps people have submitted a lead form as your source audience for your look-alike interactive with your page instagram account or that's basically not going to

5:42change there's no reason why it would um it's really just going to change obviously app activity as well but mainly for most advertisers your website custom audiences are going to be smaller the rest of your custom audience is going to stay the same you know facebook can still track what people do on facebook so all of this stuff down here video views um you know engaging with your instagram account facebook page lead forms all that stuff the custom audiences are going to be the same after these changes more or less as they are right now um customers and email lists well you're uploading the data from an external

6:09source right so that doesn't really change um it's really just the website so which is probably the most common type of um of custom audience to create is based on website whether that's based on people who have purchased on your website or based off people that have uh you know visited certain pages or just anyone who's visited but it's probably only going to affect that and even that that it affects i'm you know it might make your audience 10 smaller it's not the end of the world by any means okay so the custom audience side of things is affected a bit but nothing to panic about so now

6:40we know that once you create your custom audience you then go ahead and you know create a look-alike and i'm not going to go through the process here because you know you can create lookalike and you'd have to select a source audience and you'll see that in the other video content that i've linked to in the video description if you're not familiar with that process so how does facebook create a look-alike audience well basically when you give them the source audience facebook has tons of data on that group of people okay so let's assume you've uploaded a a customer list of a thousand people right well facebook then analyze you go

7:12all these people have bought from me i know that this type of person is just the sort of person i want to advertise to facebook please go out and find me people that are similar to them that's the mechanism by which look-alike audiences work right and facebook's look-alike audiences have gotten better and better and better over the years because they have so much data on that thousand people that you've uploaded so they can then go and be like oh well we've worked out that the ideal prospect for this uh company is a woman who is 42 who has who lives in this location who is very active online who is interested

7:47in x y and z okay now with these changes the ios 14 changes the ability for facebook to acquire as much data as they currently do is going to be curtailed but not by as much as we first feared a bit so the process by which facebook takes a source audience and makes it look like audience from it is going to become slightly less effective but it is going to be very slight okay so facebook's not quite going to be able to track as much data from what people do once they leave facebook and instagram and go on to your website other people's websites and do all sorts of things

8:29but they're not losing all that data by any means as i've already said if someone click even if they opt out you know again this only affects 50 of the users then it only affects within that 50 the people that opt out and even the people that opt out we can still track what they do on your website or anyone's website to some extent not in as much detail as we have been able to but we can still do it to some extent so let's say for example you know someone is showing an ad for sunglasses and they click on it even without getting to the website

8:59facebook's like aha this person just clicked on an ad for sunglasses or even just a post on facebook or perhaps they're part of a group that shows that they're interested in soccer or whatever it happens to be facebook has tons of places to gather data not just what they do on on someone's website and then it's not like all that website data is going to go away so they've still got all the on facebook and instagram data that they gather which is very significant and they've got the vast majority they're still going to have the vast majority of the data that they get from when people go onto

9:31um someone's website and the interactions they have online and all that sort of stuff okay so basically i imagine that lookalike audiences are going to get ever so slightly less effective than what they are currently maybe five ten percent less effective so you might see if you're advertising to exact same audience you might see a five or ten percent increase in your cost per conversion something like that now if that's make or break you're in trouble anyway um you can't it's not sustainable for you to be that close to the wire over a long time period and it can be made up for in the case of

10:09lookalike audiences by just increasing the size of your source audience by 10 or 20 for the most part which usually is just a question of time that's why lookalike audiences get better the larger the source audience becomes and basically the more time goes on so we've got lots of clients we've worked with we've been running campaigns for like three years and in year one we were targeting look-alike audiences based on previous customers and they did well but now they do significantly better because you know there's i don't know 50 000 customers that have been generated and that data is so valuable um so don't panic don't think

10:42well how are local audiences can be created are they going to go away are they going to not work not work i think that's the case at all as i'm recording this video in january there are you know the changes that are coming facebook's response to ios 14 is being implemented sort of as we speak you know we're seeing it in some ad accounts not in others things popping up right um it may well be that your campaigns and your ad sets targeting look-alike audiences go a little bit haywire for for a week or so maybe a little bit longer whilst facebook recalibrates so if you if you watch this video and

11:18you think oh great look like audience still gonna be fine that's good that's what you should be feeling and then in a week's time or two weeks time you have four or five bad days don't think oh you know ben was wrong look like audiences are done we're never gonna do it again obviously facebook is adjusting a lot of its internal processes and systems right now so just be mindful of that there might be a little bit of a dip as they recalibrate but i am absolutely convinced they're going to come back and they're going to perform um very similarly to how they do now i

11:48don't think look like audiences are going to be hit too hard particularly if you're creating look-alike audiences based off of a customer list or an email list or you know either external to your website sources or or app um or on facebook stuff like you know people who watch videos of yours on facebook none of that's gonna change right people who have uh submitted a lead form open lead form none of that's gonna change okay so hopefully that puts your mind at ease and prepares you for what may be coming over the next uh weeks and months okay hopefully that video has been useful couple of things i want to

12:22mention uh before you go first is a free webinar i've created called three killer facebook ads strategies to double or more your revenue now this webinar has gone down tremendously well with my audience in it i demonstrate three different sales funnels that show you exactly how we go about advertising our clients products and services on facebook and there's three different approaches that we typically use we use ones you know they're tailored towards different types of businesses and that's very important right because you don't want to you don't want to use a strategy that works really well for high-end service providers if you're an e-commerce business and vice versa you just

12:59will not see good results at all you need to have the right strategy for your products and services that's what this webinar really shows you how to do so it's completely free to watch links in the description below 60 70 minutes long if you haven't already watched it absolutely go ahead and do so um it'll be well worth your time other thing i want to mention is our facebook advertising services so my company lead guru is a facebook ads agency we create manage and optimize facebook and instagram ad campaigns for our clients and if you're currently doing it yourself we're working with an agency you're not sure about the results

13:27they're able to achieve we can almost certainly help improve your results so we do have a 3k per month minimum budget requirement if you're not spending that much unfortunately we won't be able to work with you but if you are spending uh in around that or or above that um and you'd be interested in finding out more about our service and you can go ahead and book a call with one of my team members so just click on the link in the video description below uh tons of links in the video description by the way guys today as there often are but lots of useful stuff

13:53for you guys hopefully go ahead and click on that that will take you through to a page and a website you can book a free 30-minute strategy session with one of my team members informal chat they can let you know how we work how we might be able to help if we've worked with a business like yours before and you can tell us more about your business all that sort of stuff and we can we can go from there basically so hopefully uh you know you'll either be on the webinar or we maybe working with it with you in the near future helping you navigate what are certainly tricky times in the

14:20facebook advertising uh world exciting times as well right change creates opportunity never forget that change creates opportunity so definitely exciting times but just yeah you've got to be on top of things at the moment which we're certainly trying our best to do um yeah found this video useful please comment below to let me know comment below with any questions i get to as many as i can like this video click that thumbs up button and of course subscribe to my channel if you haven't done so already i've got lots of content coming out at the moment around facebook avatar around ios 14 and other things for advertising related

14:51topics as well but that's the big one that people want to know so um so yeah thanks a lot guys best of luck i'll talk to you soon bye