A lookalike audience is a group of machine-learning-generated audiences built using first-party data gathered from your existing audience list. Lookalike audiences on Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook tend to differ slightly. Still, the critical concept remains the same: a group of users similar to the people your business has targeted in the past.
By utilizing lookalike audiences, you can gain a larger pool of individuals who share similar browsing behavior and interests as your existing target audience. However, there are several sources you can get your lookalike audiences from, which include:
- Website visitors
- Custom audiences
- Page fans
- Email subscribers
What are the benefits associated with using lookalike audiences?
Cost-effective
Only a fraction of people who get your message will care about it. However, you can significantly increase the number of people who get your message by utilizing lookalike audiences. Your past advertisements can lay out what kind of people have been interested in your products or services. By adding these people to the lookalike audience feature, you can target your ads directly to them in the future. Doing this will enable you to acquire more customers for your business within the same advertising budget.
Better conversion rates and ROI
If your existing audience finds your advertisement worthy and relevant for engagement, it only makes sense for their lookalikes to feel the same way. What this means is that the lookalike audience is a valuable source of engageable leads for your business.
Google, Facebook will notice and provide you with a higher relevance score, helping you bring the price of the advertisements down. This reduced cost combined with a higher conversion rate results in a higher return on your investment.
Monitor your ad performance
Thanks to lookalike audiences, you can now closely monitor who your advertisements are shown to and how they respond to these advertisements. It allows marketers to fix any potential issues early on in the process and make any necessary adjustments before they start costing your business money.
Flexible audience size
When you create a lookalike audience, you can determine how closely your lookalike audience matches the original custom audience (also known as the source audience). If you wish your new audience to share ninety percent of your source audience’s traits, you will get a narrower audience that is even more accurately targeted. Nevertheless, depending on your advertisement objectives, you may target a larger audience over the accuracy, in which case your new audience will share a lower percentage of your source audience’s traits.
Takeaway
Lookalike audiences are a great way for businesses to expand their reach to new people online. Moreover, since lookalike audiences have specific characteristics that make them perfect for your business, you know your budget will not be wasted on the wrong prospects.
