Facebook is by far the platform that we like the most when we need a cheap way to target audiences for our e-commerce store. One of the most powerful features that advertising on Facebook is the Similar Public or Lookalike audiences.
This is an advanced segmentation technique on Facebook that is usually highly effective.
In this publication we will explain what they are, we will name some examples and we will tell you why you should implement the Similar Audiences as part of your Facebook Marketing strategies.
First thing’s first…
To understand this topic well, it is necessary to know what a personalized audience on Facebook is:
A personalized audience is a list or group that is created on Facebook from a “source of origin”, this source can be:
- Your customer list
- Your Fanpage (Fans, likes, interactions, video reproductions, etc.)
- The Facebook Pixel (Website visits, landing page or App …)
Subsequently, your ads can be targeted to the audience you created. This is a highly recommended practice.
Having this concept clear, we can move on to the next step:
What are Similar Audiences on Facebook? (Lookalike Audiences)
Similar Audiences is an advanced segmentation option on Facebook that allows you to amplify important audiences for your business. That is, create new similar audiences (in interests, behaviors, tastes, etc.) using a custom audience of predetermined origin, for example:
- People who have seen your video
- People who have previously purchased.
- Visits on your website
This is not something new on Facebook, the Similar Publics began to be implemented in March 2013 and since then (like almost everything on Facebook) they have been evolving and improving their effectiveness more and more.
For now it is one of the most effective tools to reach similar people to your ideal client.
Facebook is based on all the data of your “public origin” and finds similar people and especially new people, depending on the percentage that you choose, in this case, the lower the percentage, the higher the quality of the audience.
One of the main advantages of the Similar Public before a simple segmentation by interests, is that it allows you to create the target audience giving you more control. As a result, you work with a better quality audience that will most likely react better to your offers.
Imagine being able to sell to people who behave, think, feel and like the same things as your current customers.
The Similar Audiences is one of the best alternatives to start in the first stage of your conversion funnel or purchase cycle.
Examples with which you can start using your Similar Audiences.
People similar to your Current Clients.
Imagine being able to “clone” your customers
The first recommendation is to start with what you already have. Exploiting our database or list of current customers is the first thing we should do.
For this it is necessary to create a personalized Public of your current clients. By uploading your file with the list of your clients (at least, Name, Email and phone) Facebook tracks and crosses this data among its current users and creates this personalized customer audience.
Now we can ask Facebook to look for people similar to those on that list. Creating an audience similar to the interests and behaviors of my clients.
Build a Public Similar to the “Like” of your Fanpage.
This option is very easy to implement since it is built from the list of followers of your Facebook FanPage. If you have a considerable list of fans who continuously interact with your organic publications, this strategy is ideal for finding similar audiences to segment.
For this reason it is important not to ask all your friends to like your Facebook page, if you offer quality content, those likes should be generated organically.
People similar to your website visitors
Some advantages of using this strategy is that you can be specific in terms of choosing all website traffic or specific pages.
1.- Find similar users to any visitor to your website. If you do not have a lot of traffic, this will allow you to segment the relevant users while expanding your network from what was initially a small audience.
2.- Find similar users to those who visited a specific page on your website. This is a wonder, you can use the thanks pages of your landing page or the confirmation page of an order in your ecommerce. This way Facebook would be creating a similar audience to people who have bought or registered.
* For this it is necessary to have installed the Facebook Pixel.
Similar Public with a Video.
The users in Facebook visualize more than 100 million hours of video every day in the platform, in a previous publication we explained the advantages of the Ads with video in Facebook.
Video allows you to build trust and brand recognition with your target audience quickly.
If you are running a video-based content strategy and want to expand your campaigns to reach more people, the Similar Audiences will allow you to find new people based on those who have already seen your videos.
One of the advantages of using Custom Audiences is the ease of scaling your campaigns in a quick and easy way.
Because you create audiences similar to those of a population in the destination country (from 1% to 10%), you can start with a fairly defined 1% and as you reach a higher frequency of ads, you enter the audience of 2% and so on successively.
Since you have some campaigns running segmented to Similar Audiences, compare them with Campaigns Segmented by interests or behaviors .
Also published on Medium.