Quick: who’s your target audience? Where do they live? What do they look like? What sort of things do they enjoy?
These are probably things you thought about when building your business, but unless you’re planning a marketing or advertising campaign, how often are you refreshing your audience profile? Do you know what today’s customer is looking for, or is. the audience profile you have in your head severely out of date?
For many of us, our current target audience profile may be a bit of a mystery; fortunately, digital advertising platforms have given us a way to define and target our most likely future customers based on the characteristics of your past customers. This technique is known as a lookalike audience.
What Are Lookalike Audiences?
Lookalikes use customer lists, social followers, and/or other actions taken on or offline to build audiences with similar demographic, interest, and sociographic characteristics. Available in Meta, LinkedIn, and many of the popular programmatic DSPs, lookalike audiences leverage data from your past successes in order to find new users to target with advertising.
Lookalike audiences may go by different names (“predictive” is one often used), but in the end, their goal is to find potential new customers for your business, or donors for your nonprofit, depending on your digital advertising goal.
How Are Lookalike Audiences Developed?
Regardless of the digital ad platform, lookalike audiences require a source audience—email lists, social media followers work well for this—for the algorithm to learn off of. Many platforms have list size minimums, so plan on source audiences with over 1k in unique values to begin building your lookalike.
Media platforms such as Meta will provide you the option to adjust the similarity range of your output lookalike audience. A 1% similarity will give you the lowest number of matches, but they’ll be the most accurate reflection of your source audience, too. Larger values, i.e. 5-10%, will give you a larger audience, but one less true to the source.
Once your source audience has been uploaded into the respective media platform, machine learning will take over: breaking your audience down into demographic and sociographic segments based on their interests and any other information the platform possesses about the individual.
Lookalike Audience: When and Where
A lookalike audience is considered a cold target, which means it should be included as part of your prospecting strategy. If you’re planning your brand’s first digital advertising campaign, we would recommend running your more defined audience targeting first, and incorporating lookalike audiences once you have had some success.
For paid social campaigns, we recommend to include lookalikes of not only your existing customer list, but also of your existing social media following. On most media platforms, website visitor lookalikes are also possible (and recommended) if your website is pixeled.
With all lookalike tactics, building audiences off of people that have taken specific website actions (i.e. purchases or lead form submissions) is another recommended approach.
Why Lookalikes Are Recommended
Though we rarely suggest that lookalike audiences be your sole prospecting target, we do recommend them whenever possible for our digital advertising clients. In our experience, lookalike audiences tend to engage and convert more often than legacy demographic/interest-based targeting on social, and lean towards lower CPM rates than traditional third-party segments on banner advertising.
We have historically seen more first-time visitors convert from lookalike audience targeting than from demographic or interest targeting, though results will vary based on the quality of the source audience. Lookalike audiences, even those with a 1% similarity range, have the ability to scale beyond those created by selecting demographics and interest segments.
Ready to Try Lookalike Audience Targeting?
If you’re running ads on Meta, you can build lookalike audiences from the Audience screen in Business Manager. On LinkedIn, lookalike audiences are now called “predictive”, but function in a similar manner to those on Meta. Most major DSPs offer lookalike audience building as well.
Need help getting started? Count on the 20 years of experience at Screechy Cat Media for your digital advertising—contact us today!
