Improving ROI with Facebook Lookalike Audiences

It’s well proven that remarketing can help achieve better ROI. In this post I talk about how you can improve your ROI using Facebook Lookalike Audiences.

Your customers or subscribers are the best audiences you can target because they’ve already shown some interest in your products, your brand, your website, your sales process, delivery and everything else.

It is easier, safer and cheaper to target them over finding new customers.

The probability of converting an existing customer is 60-70% compared to 5-20% for a new prospect.

That said Facebook offers something even better by giving you both – it essentially takes your existing clients and audiences and finds new ones with similar traits and demographics.

How it works

If you have an email database, and we are sure you all have at least one or two, what you can do is upload that list into the Facebook and create a custom audience from that list.

But here’s where things become interesting: you can take that custom audience and turn it into the lookalike audience.

What that means is that Facebook will connect your emails with real Facebook profiles and take their interests, demographics, age and other parameters to find new people similar to them.

And as we all know, Facebook has a lot of data about each one of us and it’s not hard for Facebook to find people with similar interests.

You can determine how far are you willing to go when it comes to the similarity. Facebook allows you to choose a sliding scale of similarity from 1% to 10% when building Lookalike audiences.

However, have in mind that the broader you set your bar the broader results you will get.

It all depends on your type of business, but we would recommend somewhere between 1-5% to get an accurate result. Everything above 5% will be too broad. Again it depends on your business type and your advertising objective.

Now when your Facebook Lookalike Audience has been created you can start serving your ads to the people who are more likely to engage with them and convert.

The possibilities are endless. You can set up several different audiences depending on your customers buying cycle/product, interests/countries etc… if you are selling different products you can have different lists for different types of products and so on.

Conclusion

As marketers, we are interested in reaching the right kind of customers, people who are more likely to engage with our ads or convert. What Facebook offers is exactly that.

From reaching the right kind of users to re-engaging existing customers Facebook’s advertising services help us stay in front of current and prospective customers while they browse their favourite social network.

If you need help with Facebook marketing or Social Strategy, get in touch.