Don’t let Facebook custom and lookalike audiences confuse you. In this full guide, you’ll learn how to create and share them with whoever runs your ads. For agencies & freelancers… there’s a little secret about reducing friction with getting access to your clients’ custom & lookalike audiences. 🤫🔐
Here’s a little secret: You can share specific custom and lookalike audiences on Facebook with others.
Here’s why you should care: Sharing audiences with other businesses saves time and money and helps optimize your Facebook ad campaigns by targeting a high-intent audience — that is more likely to become a customer.
Facebook offers one of the most accurate ad targeting tools, but few know how to leverage them to get the most out of their ad campaigns.
This post will teach you about Facebook custom audiences & lookalikes, specific scenarios when sharing them makes sense, and how to do it correctly.
The Difference Between Facebook’s Custom Audience & Lookalike Audience
To get the most out of Facebook custom audiences and lookalikes, you must first know what they are and how they work.
Facebook custom audience and lookalike audience are two ad targeting options on the Meta (Facebook) Ads platform. Rather than advertising to a general audience (i.e., everyone), you define who you want to reach and where they will see your ads.
Facebook Ads Manager allows you to create broad audiences or gives you various options to hyper-target your ideal customers. Being specific about who sees your ads may give you a higher return on investment (ROI) on your ad spend. The right approach depends on your goals and available resources.
These are the key differences between custom and lookalike audiences:
| Parameters | Custom Audiences | Lookalike Audiences |
|---|---|---|
| Source | Your own data | Based on your existing Custom Audience |
| Purpose | Retargeting and nurturing existing leads | Expanding reach and finding new potential customers |
| Audience size | Depends on the size of your source data | Determined by the percentage of similarity (1% to 10%) |
| Target audience | Specifically focused on people who have interacted with your business (remarketing) | Broad and targeted towards new people who share similar characteristics with your customers |
Ad targeting helps you reach existing and new customers to increase sales online, generate leads, build brand awareness, or drive in-store traffic. These benefits also apply to social media ads and social media channels.
What is Facebook Custom Audience?
Custom Audiences are a type of audience you create on Facebook, consisting of your existing and potential customers who have engaged with your business, online profiles, content, or website.
Using Facebook Custom Audiences allows you to:
- Connect with existing or past customers to upsell a product
- Nudge visitors who have used your app/product towards taking the next step
- Target people who have interacted with your profile or content
- Retarget website visitors to turn them into customers
Types of Custom Audiences
Facebook allows you to create custom audiences based on 13 different sources of customer information:
- Website: visitor information picked up by a Meta Pixel.
- Customer list: upload a list of your past or current customers.
- App activity: people who interacted with your app, such as making an in-app purchase.
- Offline activity: people who interacted with your business offline, for example, phone calls, store visits, etc.
- Catalogue: people who interacted with items on your product catalogue.
- Video: people who have interacted with your videos (views, likes, comments, and shares.)
- Instagram account: followers or those who’ve interacted with your business or creator Instagram account, posts, ads, or campaigns.
- Lead form: people who opened or submitted a form on one of your lead generation ads.
- Events: people who interacted with one of your Facebook Events.
- Instant Experience: people who opened your Instant Experience on Facebook or Instagram.
- Facebook page: create an audience of people who follow or have interacted with your page.
- Shopping: people who viewed or shopped your products on Instagram or Facebook.
- On-Facebook listings: people who interacted with your on-Facebook listings on the Catalogue.
How Does Custom Audience work?
- You’ll provide Meta with “identifiers” or information you’ve collected about your customers.
- Identifiers include email addresses, phone numbers, and street addresses.
- Meta Technologies then matches this information (hashed for privacy) to their existing audience (over 3+ billion profiles!) to find these people.
- You can now target ads specifically to your customers across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp!
Example Custom Audience
Let’s take an example of a footwear brand using custom audiences. Initially, it sold footwear to both men and women, but the newest launch is for only female audiences.
By creating a custom audience using website traffic as a specific source and setting targeting filters (e.g., female, between 25 and 60), the brand can only show targeted ads to highly interested audiences for better conversion rates.
You can also leverage event targeting for more specific customization.
For example, you can’t target everyone if you’re selling a high-ticket online program. In that case, you create a custom audience by using a specific trigger as an event, like “placed the order but didn’t complete the purchase,” to show your ads to people who stopped the purchase.
How to Create a Custom Audience on Facebook
Creating custom audiences is easy! We will explore the four main ways to build them. The first few steps are similar for each, so start by going to Meta Ads Manager and navigating to the “Audiences” home page.
Secondly, from the Audiences home page, click “Create a Custom Audience.”
Thirdly, choose one of the thirteen sources to populate your Custom Audience.
💡 You can create up to 500 Custom Audiences per Ad Account.
We’ll now separately cover the remaining steps for how to create a Custom Audience from a Website, Customer List, Video, and Instagram (separately!).
What is Facebook Lookalike Audience?
A lookalike audience is a group of people who share similar characteristics with your existing custom audience. Custom audiences can sometimes be limiting, especially for businesses with a small customer base or traffic.
Rather than filtering and choosing audience demographics on your own, you leverage Meta’s algorithm to identify other users most likely to be interested in your ads.
Since Meta’s audience base is large (3 billion average as of June 2023) and analyzes Facebook audience activity using 200+ factors to understand user behavior, leveraging this audience to identify potential customers makes a lot of sense. It takes some guesswork out of figuring out who to target besides your current customers and followers.
How to Use Lookalike Audiences
Suppose your goal is to increase the membership subscriptions of a music streaming app. Then, using your existing customer base as a custom audience, you can create a lookalike audience to identify new people based on your customer’s favorite genre, artist, or music style.
Once you set criteria, Facebook analyzes its audience base to identify people who share key characteristics, giving you a new audience you haven’t advertised to yet.
You can create multiple lookalikes from all primary custom audiences: website traffic, app signups, customer lists, video engagement, lead form interaction, Instagram account activity, Facebook page activity, and trigger-based events.
How to Create Facebook Lookalike Audience
Lookalike audiences are always based on your existing custom audiences.
- Navigate to the “Audiences” tab in Facebook Ads Manager and click “Create a Custom Audience.”
- Select a custom audience source or create a new one.
- Decide on the lookalike audience location (regions or countries).
- Select audience size (keep it as high as possible when you’re starting to increase your audience size.)
💡 The percentage slider for lookalike audiences adjusts the degree of similarity between your source audience and the new audience Facebook creates.
- 1% lookalike: The most similar to your source audience but with a smaller potential reach.
- 10% lookalike: Less identical to your source audience but with a larger potential reach.
You can increase/decrease the parameters to adjust the audience size.
- Once you’ve set the filters, click “Create Audience.” And that’s how you create Facebook Lookalike Audiences.
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Benefits of Facebook Audiences
After you’ve built and created Custom or Lookalike Audiences, there are some situations where sharing them with your agency, freelancer, partner, or influencer can benefit both parties:
Benefit 1: Collaborations with influencers/content creators
If a cosmetics brand wants to sell its new matte lipsticks, it can request access to an influencer’s female audience. Most brands target influencer audiences for better conversions. Want to learn more about leveraging an influencer’s audiences?
Benefit 2: Partnerships with complementary businesses
Two complementary businesses (such as an interior design and a furniture company) can share audiences to reach the highest-value customers together.
Benefit 3: Event promotions
If a brand organizes a massive music event, it can request access to specific audiences from music brands like Shopify, Netflix, etc.
Benefit 4: Agencies onboarding a new Meta client
After onboarding new clients, agencies need to request access to their client’s assets, including Custom and Lookalike Audiences.
To get all audiences that exist in a Meta Ads account, the agency can get access to the ad account directly using Leadsie; it’s super simple!