The Only Facebook Ads Hack You Need To Scale Exponentially

Facebook has come a long way since its launch in the early 2000s. In the past, it has been questioned about its credibility for its subpar nature as a marketing service network.

It became a common laughing-stock when professional analysts started dismissively describing it as an amateur drive where people “hang out” and announced that it had very little scope for trading opportunities and commercial potential.

Repeating since its inception. Starting in 2013, it has been launching many innovative strategies for small business owners to social influencers to target their audience. It formed partnerships with a number of businesses to buy data. Today, Facebook has one of the most massive databases.

Marketing and remarketing your brand has been a primal feature and is known by all investors. There exists a grey area known as Facebook lookalike audiences that started its beta-testing in 2013.

This blog will help you understand the workings of this targeting option for you to leverage it to the best of your ability to optimize the on-screen appearances of your ads to reach new customers every day. Get ready to bite the bullet!

Enter Facebook Lookalike Audiences, Here is How To Optimize Ads To Reach New Customers

What Is A Lookalike Audience?

A lookalike audience is a customer targeting option section in Facebook business manager to reach out to its fresh bunch of potential customers based on the degree of similarity or shared prospects with someone who has interacted with your website or app in one way or the other.

This option, along with the previously existing option of Custom Audiences which targeted its list of users with one more interaction with your Facebook pixel, helps brands to extend their business further to newer avenues to attract new customers through the medium of advertisements.

Even though Facebook provides such intimate information while working in cahoots with these businesses, it is important to lay bare the truth on how these options work before you get rattled with issues like consent and privacy.

The general public be can rest assured that there are rules and regulations which protect them from these businesses from using inauthentic measures. These options do not provide them with any customer information; rather, Facebook will try to find degrees of similarities with respect to the common number of hashes.

These data in the form of email IDs will be sent to these businesses with built-in programming that will not allow these businesses to trace it back to your account/profile.

A Leaflet About Things-To-Know

It is often recommended that crafting smaller sample sizes of lookalike audiences is preferred over massive ones. The reason being, lookalike audiences of small measure are more intrinsically associated with the source audience.

In addition, Facebook suggesting to target a source audience ranging from 1,000 to 50,000 is wildly discouraging for small businesses. The only caution in this process is to identify and target the quality source.

Firstly, here are some of the terms and conditions that you need to accustom yourself to before you get the ball rolling.

Secondly, if you want to target geographically and add the names of countries during the creation process, the prospects created by the end of the process will belong exclusively to those nations only. Further, the degree of geographic similarity between your source and lookalike audiences does not affect the process.

Lastly, you are required to have at least a minimum threshold of 100 sources, to begin with. Furthermore, one source can account for a maximum of 500 prospects. Naturally, source and lookalike sources are exclusive. Facebook usually does not take more than a day to create your lookalike audience.

The Creation Process

After you locate the “Create Audience” option after you have already logged into your Facebook Ads Manager account. It is available in the top-left corner.

Select Your Source Audience

Here, you have many choices. These choices can come to you in the form of Facebook Pixel, Pages, etc. But above all, the sample of people that reaches the top of the pinnacle for our purpose is your custom audience. Here, you will be required to provide a list of already-existing customer information.

Select Your Audience Location

Against each source, you are required to add your desired location for targeting. This helps you if you are looking to target internationally.

Calculate Your Audience Size

How alike do you want your audience to be? Here is a step to help you ensure that. The logic here is, the percentage value you choose is inversely proportional to the degree of similarity between your lookalike and source audiences.

How About An Example?

Let us say you are advertising for an e-commerce website. Your marketing and remarketing strategies usually include viewing content, potential customers who added merchandise to the carts or wish-lists and already existing customers who bought merchandise in the past one or two months. Here is a flow chart to help you understand the processes involved.

The icons which have a dollar sign designated to it means that these are steps where your money will be spent. These paid advertisements will help you increase your customer base which, in turn, will act as your custom audience for you.

Facebook Pixel

Facebook Pixel will provide you with information on customer action on your website. After creating your pixel, you can then opt for a number of options from the events that you would like to trace. Some events that are available are “Purchase”, “Lead”, “Add to Cart”, “Search”, “Add to Wishlist” etc

Insert Interests

Another way to gear up for efficient targeting is to fill in the “Interest” field. Since Facebook mostly is an extension of people’s social life rather than a shopping platform, finding an audience set who are highly receptive to your product is highly recommended. Laser-targeting niche theme pages which have your desired audience ready can be a way to go. The more narrower the interests, the more targeted your audience will be, the more the rate of conversion into sales.

Create Custom Audience

You should not feel discouraged if you don’t achieve a high success rate right away. It is estimated that 98% of the first-time visits do not result in purchases. But now that you know who can convert into potential customers, you can start by assimilating them into your “Custom Audience”.

Retargeting people who have viewed your merchandise can increase your customer base significantly. In order to lure them in, offer discounts on their first-time purchase. Add and target people who are potential customers rather than existing customers.

Create Lookalike Audience

The reason why specificity is very important to create a custom audience is because your lookalike audience will then have a much higher degree of similarity with your source audience, resulting in greater sales productivity.

Bringing Up the Rear…

After having gone through all the basics of such a powerful tool that can create marketing prospects in masses, it is most vital to figure out if this strategy is ideal for you.

If you have found an unexplored demographic that you wish to experiment with or you are in search of a boost campaign to bring in new faces to your depleting list of customers, such a targeting option is what you have been missing until now.

In addition, this can be a very clever choice of strategy if you wish to compare and contrast responses and participation of two source audiences for two different ads. The logic here goes as different ads in different regions create different intensities of prospects.

Facebook lookalike audience posits as a much wide-reaching targeting option which excels in a number of invaluable factors such as time efficiency, proven collection of an audience sharing similar interests, and multiple audience engagement.

Irrespective of how your ads perform, this option can teach you invaluable lessons. If the ad campaign works in your favour, you are golden. Reversibly, do not be heartbroken either because the unwelcoming result can give you very important insights regarding your target audience, information about demographic trends, etc.

In closing, this detailed information on Facebook lookalike audiences can help you make your decision. If you feel you meet the credentials for such a marketing venture, implement your knowledge right away!

For B2B and B2C businesses , the same logic behind lookalike audiences applies. Instead of blindly targeting your ads, you can target your ads to your niche who have shown an affinity towards the line of products you are offering.

Get a Free Stategy Session For Your Facebook Ads

SIMBAA is a digital agency that provides a 360 degree digital growth services in Australia. With an experience of over fifteen years, we can thoroughly upscale your sales by providing ad marketing strategies and framework that we’ve developed over years. Their approach towards state-of-the-art strategy to boost your best interest has rendered many successful businesses & reduced the learning curve. Get in touch with us and get your money’s worth!