Facebook’s Value-Based Lookalike Audiences: What they are and how to create them

Innovations / July 06, 2017

Imagine if you could find new audiences that closely resemble your highest value customers? Facebook’s new Value-Based Lookalike Audiences let you do exactly that: target your ads to people who are statistically more likely to buy. Here’s how.

Starting this month, you can further refine your Lookalike Audiences in Google Ads by targeting people based on their value as customers. In other words, you can ask Facebook Ads to find new audiences that resemble your highest value customers.

Ka-ching.

Lookalike Audiences: The basics

Let’s begin with a little refresher. Lookalike Audiences enable you to find new audiences with similar interests and demographics to people you are already targeting.

Facebook Ads enable you to choose one of your current audiences, for example fans of your page, and ask Facebook to come up with a new audience that has the same characteristics as your source audience.

Go deeper with Value-Based Lookalike Audiences

Value-Based Lookalike Audiences take things further. These are simply Lookalike Audiences that use a high customer lifetime value as one of their data sources. To do this successfully, you need to assign a customer lifetime value to your audiences.

Quantifying a customer’s lifetime value

Lifetime value takes into consideration multiple factors, such as how often a customer purchases, how much she spends, and how long she has been your customer. Adding lifetime value to an audience that you’re uploading to Facebook requires you to add an extra column of data that quantifies a customer’s value. Learn how to do this here.

Once you have the data, create the lookalike

Once you have created a custom Facebook audience with an additional column for customer value, head back to your Facebook Business Manager to create your lookalike audiences.

Here’s how it’s done:

Go to Audiences. Click Create Audience and choose Custom Audience.

Select Customer File to add your own data file.

Then select “Include LTV for better performing Lookalikes”

Accept the Value-based Lookalikes Terms and follow the steps in the wizard to select customer identifiers and upload your file. Make sure you select the column you want Facebook to use to define customer value.

Once your file is uploaded in Ads Manager, go back to your audience list, Click on Select Audience and select Lookalike Audience.

Click on the field next to Source to choose your original audience (the one with customer lifetime value). Select the countries or regions to target and use the slider to determine the size (and degree of resemblance) you want for your Lookalike Audience.

Voila!

You’re ready to add your Value-Based Lookalike Audience to your Facebook Ads campaigns. The key: If you know this audience resembles your high value customers, think about how you can craft your ad creative to speak to these higher value prospects.

We’d love to hear your stories about how Value-Based Lookalike Audiences have performed in your Facebook Ads campaigns. Drop us a line.