Facebook Lookalike Audiences are a powerful way to reach people who share characteristics with your existing customers and followers. These audiences allow you to expand your reach to entirely new potential customers who are highly likely to be interested in your business.
When creating a Lookalike Audience, you can select a size ranging from 1% to 10% of the total population in your target country. A 1% Lookalike Audience closely mirrors your source audience, while larger percentages increase your reach but reduce similarity.
Custom Audiences
Before you can create a Lookalike Audience, you need a Custom Audience. Custom Audiences are built using data from your existing customers, website visitors, app users, or engagement on your Facebook Page. These audiences allow you to re-engage people who have already interacted with your business.
Because a Custom Audience is based on people who already know your brand, Lookalike Audiences give you the opportunity to reach new people who haven’t heard of your business yet—but are very similar to your current customers. This combination of Custom and Lookalike Audiences is a core strategy for scaling online advertising effectively.
Create a Lookalike Audience
To create a Lookalike Audience, your Custom Audience needs to include at least 100 people. If you don’t have enough visitors for a product-specific Custom Audience, you can expand it to include visitors to all product pages or even your entire website.
Choose a source audience from your Custom Audience. This can include data from Data Enrichment, CRM, Facebook pixel, mobile app, or Page fans.
Facebook analyzes the common characteristics of your source audience, such as demographics, behaviors, and interests.
Facebook then generates a new audience of people who share similar qualities with your source audience.
Optimizing Lookalike Audiences
You can select the size of your Lookalike Audience during setup:
Smaller audiences (closer to 1%) have higher similarity to your source audience and often drive better conversion rates.
Larger audiences increase reach but may lower relevance.
For best results, use your highest-value customers as the source audience. Targeting a Lookalike Audience based on your top customers rather than all customers can lead to better engagement, higher conversion rates, and improved ROI.
Combining Custom and Lookalike Audiences
A smart Facebook strategy uses both Custom and Lookalike Audiences together:
Use Custom Audiences to re-engage existing prospects and customers with new offers, promotions, or content.
Use Lookalike Audiences to expand your reach to new, highly qualified prospects who are likely to become future customers.
By leveraging both, you create a scalable advertising approach that drives growth while staying highly targeted.