Meta (Facebook’s parent company) has a wealth of data about its users from its various products – Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, etc. Using this data, Meta can provide various targeting options to their advertisers to effectively reach their target audience and meet their marketing objectives.
Recently, marketers have been seeing great results with Facebook’s Lookalike Audience targeting option.
What Exactly is Lookalike Audiences?
Lookalike audiences basically mean audiences that are similar to a source or seed audience set. The source audience could be – your purchasers, people who filled your lead form, people who liked your FB page, etc.
With its big data and efficient machine learning algorithms, Facebook can create lookalike audiences with better scale and accuracy than most other ad platforms.
Limitations of Facebook’s Lookalike Audience
Facebook in general does provide lookalike audiences with scale and relevancy, however, they are dependent on the source audience used. This can lead to saturation of audiences, especially where the source audience has a low size.
Facebook does provide users to an option to increase the size by allowing users to select a percentage between a range of 1%-10% of the total population in your chosen target country while creating a lookalike audience, with 1% being those who most closely match your source. However, from our various tests as well external tests like AdEspresso’s, that increasing the percentage greatly decreases the relevancy and subsequently the performance of the campaign.
Furthermore, it is near impossible to understand who really are these Facebook users that fall under your lookalike audience. What are their interests, behavioural patterns, demographics, etc.? Unfortunately, Facebook provides no tool or resource to understand this.
The DMC Advantage
DMC Explore allows users to understand the preferences & digital consumption patterns of an audience set. Using our partnership with Meta, we have access to exclusive APIs that allow us to gain insights of a lookalike audience in Facebook.
These game changing insights can help users in two ways –
- It can be used to help drive the creative strategy for a campaign targeting the selected lookalike audience
- As mentioned, saturation of lookalike audiences is a problem. Using these insights, you can activate a campaign directly from DMC. In effect, reaching a wider audience while maintaining the relevancy.
This strategy has seen many successes with our users. Below is a snapshot of a recent case study –
The iPropsect team in Vietnam were able to extract granular audience insights from their Automobile’s client Lookalike audience using the DMC Explore Audience product.
This enabled the team create a highly targeted campaign plan in a data-driven fashion.
The agency were able to generate more than the required number of leads at a 50% reduced CPA.
Read the case study here.
If you have any queries on how best to maximize the performance of lookalike audiences for your FB campaigns, reach us at dmcsupport@dentsu.com
