The BEST Lookalike Audience For Facebook Ads

0:00Hi guys, it's Ben Heath from Lead Guru and in this video I'm going to show you how to create the best look-alike audience for Facebook ads. Now, I talk to a lot of people advertising on Facebook. I do it all day long, comments, phone calls, etc. etc. And one of the questions I will often ask is, you know, when they want better results, I'll say, "Are you using look-alike audiences?" And people will say, "Yeah, yeah, I'm using look-alike audiences." And then I'll say, "What type of look-alike audience are you

0:25using?" Because the type of look-alike audience that you're using for your Facebook ads will have a massive impact on the results that you see. Look-alike audiences are not created equal. Some deliver much, much better results than others. So, I wanted to create a video around the best type, the best look-alike audience for Facebook ads, cuz I think if you use this look-alike audience, you have the absolute best chance for success possible. Now, before I get into it, just want to quickly mention that at the end of this video, I'm going to be talking about a free Facebook advertising resource I think you're going to find very, very

0:55interesting. So, I strongly recommend you stick to the end to hear about that. With that said, let's let's get into this this video. Let's get into the steps. So, I'm in a demonstration Facebook ad account. Don't worry about anything you see down here. It's all as I said, it's all for demonstration purposes. All sorts of errors are going to are going to pop up. I'm about to create this look-alike audience in a second. Before I do that, I just want to quickly explain what the best look-alike

1:17audience for Facebook ads is. The quality of a look-alike audience really depends on the source that you're creating it from. If you don't know what a look-alike audience is, that's absolutely fine. I will include a link to another video below that sort of explains look-alike audiences, explains how to create them, all that sort of stuff. So, if you're going, "What even is a look-alike audience?" That it's fine. That will be covered there. Go ahead and watch that and then you can come back to this video. Now, a look-alike as I said, a look-alike audience, the effectiveness depends on the source audience. So, who are you

1:47creating this look-alike audience from? If you create a look-alike audience from people that have, let's say, watched 3 seconds of a video of yours on Facebook, that doesn't really mean anything. Just cuz someone's watched 3 seconds of a video of yours on Facebook doesn't mean they're a good prospect of yours, doesn't mean they're representative of

2:04the ideal person that you want to reach. The best lookalike audience for Facebook ads is a lookalike audience based off of previous customers. People who have given you money for your products and services, you want to advertise to people that are just like them. Because people that are just like them are highly likely to be interested in your products and services, highly likely to buy them, and we run hundreds of Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising campaigns every year, and a lookalike audience based off of previous customers, previous purchases, delivers the best results, I'd say, nine times out of 10. Okay? So, that is absolutely the best lookalike audience

2:43to create. I'm going to show you exactly how we go about doing that in this, uh, demonstration Facebook ad account right now. Okay, so to create a lookalike audience, what you want to do is you Well, firstly, I'm in I'm in Ads Manager, but you want to click on these three little lines, and you want to go ahead and jump into audiences. Okay, so what you get Once you get here, you want to click create audience, custom audience. In order to create a lookalike audience, we first need In order to create a lookalike audience based on people that have, um, bought from you previously, we need to

3:11create a custom audience first. There's two ways you can go about doing this, and it'll depend on how your business is set up when it comes to your your your customer journey, etc. I'll explain in a second. So, if you're an e-commerce business, and you generate customers purely online, well, not purely, but mainly online, um, and you've got the Facebook pixel set up properly on your website to track people that are purchasing, the easiest way to do this is by clicking on website, and then we've got example ad accounts pixel, all website visitors. That's not what we want. You want to go ahead and

3:43select purchase. You want to make this audience as large as possible, which is 180 days, and then you just call this, um, well, we start everything with LG, but you call it LG purchase 180. Okay? Now this custom audience is going to contain everyone that has registered the purchase event in the last 180 days. So if you use a Shopify store, any other sort of e-commerce platform, and you've got the Facebook pixel set up on there, you will be tracking purchase events automatically. If you go ahead and select purchase from this list down here, and there will probably be other options, then you can go ahead and track anyone

4:20that triggers that purchase event within the last 180 days. You want that time frame to be as large as possible, because you want as many people in this audience as possible. When it comes to creating very effective lookalike audiences, you want to give Facebook as much data as possible. So the larger the source audience, the better. And a lot of people ask me things around, oh I've only had 200 purchases, can I go ahead and create a a lookalike audience? And the answer is yes, you can, but you should be aware that that lookalike audience will probably perform better when you've had 500 purchases or 1,000 purchases, because Facebook has

4:53more data in the source audience, and they can use that to create a more accurate lookalike audience. So hopefully that makes sense. So this is the way you want to go ahead and and set that up. The other advantage of doing it this way is that this audience will automatically update. So basically this audience will always contain people that have purchased in the last 180 days. So that's if I create that audience today, that's going to be 180 days from, you

5:19know, back from today. Um but if I check this in 6 months time, that's obviously going to cover a completely different time period. It's going to cover the next 6 months from now on. Okay? So you want to go ahead and click create audience. And then you get some options here. Your custom audience was created. It's going to take Facebook a few minutes to populate it, absolutely fine. But we can go ahead and create a lookalike

5:38audience, which is awesome. So once you select that option, you'll see a window that looks like this. Your custom audience has automatically been put into here. And then you need to select your location. Now, some ad accounts, you don't actually need to select a location. You can just go ahead and create a lookalike audience, and then at the ad set level when you put that lookalike audience into your campaign, and you select your location, Facebook will just automatically work out that that's the location you want to advertise in. Some ad accounts, like this example one, you need to pop that in. So, let's just say for example, I

6:06put in the UK in here. Okay? Then you need to select your audience size. Now, I have I I quite interestingly to me, I received quite a lot of messages from people that say, "Oh, I created a 1% lookalike audience, and I got 456,000 people in the UK. Is that good?" And I kind of go, "That's not anything." Um a 1% lookalike audience in the UK will always contain around about 450,000 people because what 1% lookalike audience means is it's the 1% of Facebook users within that location that are most like um your source audience, in this case, people who have purchased within 180 days. So, if I, for example,

6:50was to put in uh the United States in here, that audience is going to be, and I get rid of the UK, about 2.3 million. And it's going to be about 2.3 million because there are about 230 million Facebook users in the US. Just like in the UK, there's about uh 45 million Facebook users in the US. So, it's just 1%. Now, the percentage that you want to choose here depends on the area in which you target, uh and to some extent your budget. So, if you're operating on a nationwide basis, or even internationally, go ahead

7:20and start with a 1%. A 1% is going to be a more accurate lookalike audience than a higher percentage because, of course, that's got 2.3 million. If I go to 5%, we're talking about almost 12 million. But, if you're advertising on a local basis, and it's 2.3 million across the entire US, but you only operate in one little city, by the time you add this to your campaign and add in that location targeting criteria, you might only be left with 30,000, 50,000 people, which is probably too small. So, or maybe even less than

7:50that, maybe you could be 2,000 people. So, if you operate on a local basis, you're going to want a much larger audience, probably 10%. Okay? And also, if you're operating with a larger budget, so let's say you're spending $100,000 a month on Facebook ads, 1% is going to become too small quite quickly. You're going to want perhaps a 3 or a 5%. Again, it does depend on the country you're advertising in. If you're advertising in a country, you know, a a small European country or somewhere in the Middle East that's got a really small population, then again, you're going to need a larger percentage. If we were advertising

8:20purely in New Zealand, we wouldn't go with a 1%. Um we'd probably go we'd start with something like a 5% cuz I think New Zealand's only got 4 and 1/2 4 and 1/2 million people, something like that. Um it's going to be a lot smaller. Okay? For most people advertising nationally, internationally, 1% will do. But just have some common sense around it. Okay, that has now been created. So, that is going to take some time to populate. We've got people who have purchased within the 180 days and that lookalike. And that will update automatically, which is awesome. You don't have to do anything, as I said. If

8:52you generate go and generate 10,000 new purchases in the next 180 days, in 180 days time, this source audience will contain all those people and the lookalike audience will be based off of those new people, okay? But not everyone has an e-commerce business, not everyone is tracking customers generated by their website. If you're a service-based company or just do things differently, then you're going to need to upload a customer file in order to create a uh a lookalike audience based off of previous customers. Again, not very difficult to

9:21do. So, you want to go ahead and click create audience, custom audience, and you want to select customer list. Facebook is just telling you about all the various um identifiers that they can use to match people on your list to people's Facebook profiles. That's obviously what Facebook is doing, by the way. When you upload a list, they're taking the data that you give them and they're going, "Okay, this email address matches up with this Facebook ad account or this phone number, etc., etc." And that's how they work out who is how they work out who is actually should be included in your custom audience based on who's on your list and

9:56therefore who's going to be included in that source audience. So, you may have customer values, you may not. If you do have customer values, that's fantastic, click yes. Click yes. It's helpful to give Facebook this information because if you can tell Facebook, "Look, we've got 1,000 customers, but these 200 are worth five times as much because they've bought more." Well, great. You want Facebook to prioritize the people that are more valuable to you and prioritize them when it comes to creating lookalike audiences. But, most people won't have that. So, if that's the case, you can go

10:29ahead and click no. Okay, so now you can go ahead and upload your customer list. So, if I click upload file, I can grab example customer list here. Um I can call it whatever I want. Oh, by the way, you can also copy and paste data in. So, if you don't have This is an Excel document um saved as a CSV file. If you don't have that, you can go ahead and um and uh copy and paste the data in. Just select these options and pop the data in

10:52there. Um click next. And then, okay, so we've got match, we've got email addresses. Action needed. I can go ahead and So, for example, I've just This is just phony data, but I could put in first name, I could put in last name. Basically, what you're doing here is you're matching the columns in your in your file to what this information actually is. And the more information you have in here, the better because Facebook's going to be able to

11:19uh more accurately match those people. Okay? It's more accurately going to be able to work out, "Aha, this person on this list corresponds with this Facebook account. Therefore, let's include this person in the customer audience and use them in the source audience." Okay? With that said, you are not going to be able to match everyone. Facebook usually

11:35matches 40-50% of people. Um it does differ depending on industry. There's not a lot you can do about that, and it shouldn't stop you um you know, creating uh uploading your customer lists and using them as custom audiences for retargeting and using them as source audiences to create highly effective lookalike audiences. So again, exactly the same process. We can now create a lookalike

11:58audience. It's been populated in there. We could enter in United Kingdom 1% create audience. Done. Very very very straightforward. Okay? And now you can go ahead and use this and these uh lookalike audiences in your Facebook ad ad campaign. Let's uh quickly show you how to do that. Okay, so here I'm back now in Ads Manager. I'm going to show you how you actually go about targeting those lookalike audiences that we created, the ones based off of previous customers that are the best type of lookalike audience for Facebook ads. I strongly recommend you create them. Um so let's just create a dummy campaign for a second. So let's just go ahead with

12:41example campaign. It's taking a long time to load cuz I'm recording this at the same time. Uh let's just use traffic for now. That's all fine. And then let's call this example ad set. Um and we'll skip the ad for a second. We'll save that to draft. Okay, so we've got our example campaign, and now you

13:04want to navigate to the ad set level. That's obviously where you set all your targeting options. And then you want to scroll down to this custom audiences section here, and this is where you want to enter in the um custom audience and the Well, sorry, not the custom audience, the lookalike audience that we created. So if I put in here lookalike 1% either based off LG purchase 180, which is the first one we created based off the pixel data, or of example customer list. I'd go ahead with that one cuz this is the option that I would choose. And that's it. That would That

13:36will now target that lookalike audience. Obviously, you still need to select your location targeting parameters. Everything else you should leave open. When it comes to lookalike audiences, you don't want to enter in age information. You don't want to enter in gender info, any interest targeting, because it'll all reduce the size of your audience. And remember, this is the best lookalike audience to target for Facebook ads. It's the best cold audience you will almost certainly see results-wise in your campaign. So, you

14:04don't want to go ahead and narrow it. Allow Face- Give Facebook quite a lot of leeway. That says potential reach fewer than 1,000 down here because this audience hasn't populated yet. It does take around about 30 minutes or so. So, just make sure you you wait a bit of time before you launch a campaign like this. But that is the the best type of Facebook lookalike audience to use. We use them for every single client. Now, I can imagine that some of you watching this might be thinking, "Well, I haven't had enough purchases to do this or I'm just getting started." In which case, that's not This

14:32is something you can't do right now, but that's absolutely fine. All you need is 100 purchases, 100 customers to be able to do this. It shouldn't take you that long. Obviously, depending on your business. Some businesses it's going to take a long time, but if you're e-commerce, anything along those lines isn't going to take you that long. I've got lots of other tutorials around using Facebook's audience insights to find other targeting options that you

14:52can use before this option is available. I'll include a link in the video in the video description, so go ahead and check those out. But once you do have those 100 customers, those 100 purchases, you want to go ahead and use a lookalike based off of previous customers, cuz that performs really, really well. Right, at the beginning of this video, I talked about a free Facebook advertising resource I think you'll be find really, really interesting. And that's a free webinar that I've created called three killer Facebook advertising strategies to double or more your revenue. And if you want better results from Facebook ads, I would strongly, strongly

15:23recommend you check this out. So, in this webinar, I demonstrate three Facebook advertising sales funnels that perform very, very well. They're tried and tested. We've generated seven plus figures with every single one of these funnels for our clients. We do so repeatedly. We know they work. And I've explained in this webinar which one of those three you should be using

15:41depending on your products and services. And that's really important because it doesn't matter how good your targeting is. This this video's obviously all about targeting. Doesn't matter how engaging your ad creative creative is. If you're using the wrong strategy, the wrong sales funnel for your products and services, your your Facebook advertising is just not going to work. You're not going to deliver results. It's one of the things I see most common one of the most common mistakes I see Facebook advertisers make is they're using a strategy that worked 5 years ago, but it doesn't work anymore. And that's what this webinar is all about to help you get up to speed so

16:14you can generate great results. And yeah, strongly recommend you check it out. There is a link in the video description below. You can go ahead and watch that right now for free. Another thing I want to quickly mention is my free Facebook ads mastermind group. There's 28,000 members in there right community full of Facebook advertisers willing to answer your questions, get involved. We'd love to have you involved. Again, link is in the video

16:35description, completely free to join. And of course, if you are looking for better results with your Facebook ads, we as a Facebook advertising agency can almost certainly help. So, if you're spending more than $3,000 a month and you'd like to find out more about our services, how we can create, manage, optimize campaigns for you, um I'd love to have a free strategy session with you, completely free, no obligation, takes 30 minutes, just a quick chat to find out what it is you want, how we can help. Again, there's another link in the video description to our website where you can go ahead and book a free call

17:02with me if that's something you are interested in. Okay, enough said in that video. If you enjoyed it, please give it a thumbs up. Any questions, pop them in the comments below. If you enjoyed it again, let me know in the comments below. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel, and I'll talk to you

17:15guys soon. Bye-bye.