# Facebook Ads Lookalike Expansion: Yes or No? Channel: Ben Heath Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd4A71Aihzo Duration: 9 min Language: English Words: 1888 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/Rd4A71Aihzo --- [0:00] hi guys it's ben heath from lead guru and in this video i'm going to talk about whether or not you should use facebook look-alike audience expansion when you're adding in look-alike audiences into your ad sets you may see that there's a little checkbox option for look-alike audience expansion which operates in a similar way to detail targeting audience expansion but there are differences and i'm going to cover whether or not you should use it in which scenarios you should use it and all that sort of stuff in this video so if you've been wondering about that i think you're going to find this quite useful before we go into that trying to very quickly [0:29] ask you to smash that like button please click that thumbs up button that helps me out and of course subscribe to my channel if you are new and haven't done so already so i'm just going to quickly go through the process because i think it's you know if you're not familiar with this feature then this is going to be helpful so i'm in an example ad account and i'm going to quickly create a look-alike audience i'm going to do it based on all website lists so i'm just going to select all website visitors and i said this is an example that accounts there's just a whole bunch of like dummy stuff [0:53] created in here click these three and then go with create lookalike let's just pop in the united kingdom for now and we'll go with a one percent look alike which is absolutely fine so we're going to create audience and you can see that there we go we've got our look-alike there get that out the way all website visitors one percent fantastic so let's go ahead and jump back over into the ad account and we've already put a a um an example campaign together so it's new convergence campaign there's like nothing in this thing by the way but if we jump to the ad set level um this is just for demonstration [1:24] purposes and then we click edit we can scroll down to this section so custom audiences um and we want to pop our lookalike audience in here so there we go lookalike audience one percent all web services the one that we just created in the audiences section and you can see here we have lookalike expansion and there's a little checkbox here and it says reach people beyond your lookalikes when it is likely to improve performance which is interesting and then this is the data that facebook gives about it with a short snippet i'm going to quickly read this because i think that's helpful expansion allows us to reach people [1:57] outside your selected look-alike audiences which is probably not very surprising expansion won't go beyond the age gender language or locations location selections in your ad set and doesn't apply to audiences you are excluding expansion isn't available for some local audiences okay so that's very important so what you're basically saying to facebook is like right now we have a one percent look-alike audience that we're targeting in the uk 540 000 people are in this thing if we tick this you see that jumps up to 48 million which is roughly the number of facebook and instagram users within the uk currently um which is recently increased which is [2:37] which is interesting more of a reclassification on facebook's side of things i would say um so what you're saying to facebook is look this is the audience i really want to target but i'm actually happy for you to go beyond my lookalike and target anyone within these other parameters that you think is likely to do whatever it is that you want i want them to do so if i've got a conversions campaign i'm optimizing for purchases if there's someone outside that one percent that you think's likely to purchase please go ahead and advertise to them so it sounds like a no-brainer that you would always want to turn this on [3:12] but that's not the case this effectively turns your ad set into not full broad targeting which is just like open no targeting options anything like that it's not quite the same setup but it's moving from where you are at the one percent look-alike audience along the spectrum towards that so i think a lot of the principles apply the types of businesses that want to use open targeting at least test it are the ones that want to turn on look-alike expansion i think that if you have a brand new ad account and you don't have much or even if you don't have a huge amount of convert [3:49] you don't have a lot of conversion data you haven't generated say 500 or 1000 purchases or leads or whatever it is that you're optimizing for in your cam in your ad account i'd be very reluctant to turn this on there is always a trade-off between open targeting options and specificity specificity is more valuable and better to go with when your ad account is newer when you need to you need to direct facebook you need to be like facebook i don't i know that your machine learning process does not know how to get me a conversion yet but that's fine because i'm going to show you who i think [4:24] is the best prospects that's where specificity comes in that's why it's really important at the beginning and as facebook learns okay people aged 42 to 46 love this thing people who live in this town love this thing people who are interested in this stuff love this whatever this advertises advertising they love it as that increases um facebook has more and more data and your your best performance will come from more open more broad targeting options usually so you want to turn on look-alike expansion if you have a mature ad account okay you want to turn that lookalike audience expansion if you've got a campaign that's performing well and you're looking to [5:03] scale it and you want to be able to reach more people you are more likely to see better results with look-alike expansion if your product or service has fairly broad appeal okay there are certain products or services that loads of people might be interested in you think of like cars you think of like a mid-range suv or a mid-range you know family car okay um that has really broad appeal loads people interested in that if you are just selling um you know brazilian jiu jitsu geez very niche you're not going to do as well with look-alike expansion so that's another scenario in which you want to uh [5:41] to want to use it you want to be using look-alike expansion in a similar way to where you want to be using detailed targeting expansion when you are looking to expand within facebook and instagram itself when you are thinking we've shown this can work we've got potential here let's go ahead and and open things up i would also usually increase my percentage look-alike before i turned on look-alike expansion so you can see we've created a one percent i would usually increase that to a two percent then perhaps to a three percent then to a five percent before i then went to turn on look-alike expansion um [6:16] i think that again whether we do that or not is going to depend to some extent on in what situation that account is in mature right account we might just stick it straight on straight away if it's relatively new ad account we're going to wait longer and these are these are important important factors um you can another thing i want to touch on within this look-alike expansion is is some of the stuff that they said is that what you expand into is not going to break any of these other criteria that you set at the higher levels so you're not going to go outside your locations don't worry about [6:50] that you're not going to go outside your age range so if you were wanting to look like an expansion on but you really really just want to be targeting 25 to 35 year olds that's absolutely fine you can go ahead and do that don't feel like you can't um so it's it's something so i i probably made my my thoughts on when i would use it fairly clear with all these tools monitor the performance closely and see if your campaigns perform better or not always be willing to turn something off don't just watch a video of mine or anyone else's and think ah i want to use that i i fit the criteria [7:27] of where that's likely to work well there's always nuances for every market for every business turn it on if if you meet the criteria that i've talked about definitely test it but just be aware you might need to turn it off because you might see better results that way always be flexible that sort of stuff that's something that's really important i want to get across in a lot of my content a lot of the questions that i receive on all platforms the honest and best answers not the answer people want but the honest and best answer is often for me to say why you test both [7:55] you could test both those two options that you've just said should i use this or this test both give it a week you know which one's better you can then run with that for the next two or three years maybe you want to re-test you know year down the line or so but that's fine but just do it like that okay okay so hopefully that's been useful before you go a few things i want to quickly mention the first is a free webinar i've created called three killer facebook ad strategies to double or more your revenue and this webinar lays out strategy sales funnels the really really important things you [8:24] have to get right to succeed with facebook ads before you do anything else use the wrong sales funnel for your type of business and yes you need different sales funnels if you're selling a 30 product versus a 5 000 service absolutely need different sales funnels um you're just not gonna it's not gonna work you have to get that part right that's what this webinar is all about completely free links in the video description below strongly strongly recommend you check that out and go through that if you uh if you haven't already i think it'd be well worthy the hour hour tender takes to uh to go [8:51] through that okay um if you found this video useful please comment below i get to as many comments as i can i certainly see them all like this video please give it that thumbs up that really helps me out it's much appreciated and of course subscribe to my channel if you uh if you haven't done so already thanks a lot guys bye for now --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). 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