The Lookalike audience feature on DMC Explore is being updated on the Dentsu Marketing Cloud Product Suite. The use of the feature will now lead to the creation of a dummy campaign on the selected ad account and will host dummy ad sets of the lookalike audiences selected on the DMC Explore input form to fetch audience sizes from Facebook.
Why this update?
Recently, Facebook has undergone a plethora of changes. Some of these changes were communicated to us as Facebook Marketing Partners and others we discovered on our own from working with the Facebook Marketing API closely. One of Facebook’s latest changes has been pertaining to lookalike audiences, they will no longer provide audience size data for these audiences.
What’s the Impact?
Due to this change our users would not be able to view important insights like audience profiles & preferences, devices used as well as age & gender breakdowns on DMC Explore Charts as our algorithm takes into account the volume as well as efficiency in order to mine these insights.
In the aftermath of Facebook’s decision to stop sharing Lookalike audience sizes there are two challenges that we need to mitigate:
1. Ensure our users are not left in the dark, unable to get a complete view of who their audience really is.
2. Tackling the problem of over-saturated audiences that can impact campaigns negatively.
How it works
Even though Facebook no longer provides audience sizes for lookalikes, they still do provide users a view of the audience size for their ad sets. By creating a dummy ad set for any given lookalike audience on your ad account we can keep delivering on our unique insights like audience profiles & preferences, devices used etc.
Let’s deep dive into this:
When you select the Lookalike audience feature and select the audiences you want, we will check if the audience size data is available for these audiences. A pop up will provide you information about which lookalike size data is available and which is not:
If the lookalike audience size data is not available we would automatically create a dummy campaign on the Facebook ad account the user had selected previously, for example we selected an ad account called “My Campaign” so the dummy campaign would get created on this ad account:
This entire process can take up 30 minutes to complete, we advise our users to wait for this duration and then come back and create the Explore run again when the audience size data is available:
The campaign that would be created on your ad account would look like this:
Only one campaign will get created and any time you run the lookalike feature on DMC Explore any ad sets that are created to fetch audience size data would be hosted inside this campaign only.
“Dentsu Marketing Cloud Explore allows us to really understand who our audience is- their consumption patterns, their interests, what devices they use. This is unique to the DMC Ecosystem and these insights help us kickstart our campaign journey and get to the right audience from the get-go!“
Ishaan Malhotra, Manager (Business Strategy), Merkle Sokrati
If you have any further questions about the lookalike audience feature on DMC Explore, feel free to reach out to us : dmcsupport@dentsu.com.
