How to Scale Using Lookalike Audiences on Facebook

4 min read

Steve Weiss •

September 26, 2018

For the bigger spenders on Facebook, the goal is to go from 100 sales per day to 1,000+.

One of the best ways to do that is through the use of lookalike audiences.

Whether your goal is to scale from 100 customers to 10,000 per day, or $1,000 in sales to $100,000 per day, you’re going to have to target large audiences to reach these numbers.

Tripling your ad budget for retargeting will only lower your CPA and ROAS as you’ll only end up serving your ads to the same people over and over again.

The secret to scaling is lookalike audiences and placing them at the top of your funnel and running conversion ads to them.

Here’s how to scale ads on Facebook using lookalikes.

Pick your strongest lookalike audience

You can create a lookalike audience from pretty much anything, from customer lists to people who liked your fan page.

When scaling on Facebook using lookalike audiences, always go with your strongest lookalikes, which are:

customer lists, and
purchases (from pixel)

The bigger these audiences are, the better your chances are to scale. For example, a customer list of 10,000 customers is going to perform much better than a customer list of 500 customers.

The more data you can provide Facebook to build your lookalike audience, the better it can do its job of finding you new customers.

If you don’t have a large customer list or purchase audience, it will become harder to use this method.

You can test weaker lookalikes such as:

add to carts,
website custom audiences,
video, and
fan pages.

Since the intent of these users is weaker, they may not perform as well as a customer list or audience of purchases, but you still must test them.

Pick your proven offers and copy

Running conversion ads to cold audiences is always going to be an uphill battle, and for that reason I strongly recommend you use ad creatives and offers that have proven themselves to work in the past.

The reason for this is simple: if you try new offers with new lookalike audiences and get very few sales, you won’t know if the problem is the offer or the audience.

By using a proven offer and copy, all you need to focus on is the lookalike audience. The upside is there will be less troubleshooting.

Tips to use ad the advert-set level

So you’ve created your lookalikes and found your best creatives and offers.

Now it’s time to run the ads. Here are a few tips to push you in the right direction.

What percentage of lookalike audience to use – Typically the bigger your dataset (customer list, purchase audience), the bigger you can make your lookalike audience.

For example, if you have a customer list of 100,000 buyers, Facebook has a lot of data to find you buyers and you could go as high as 10%.

If you only have a customer list of 1,000 buyers, you may want to go smaller.

Budget is another factor to take into account. Larger budgets need bigger lookalikes or else you won’t be able to scale effectively if you spend $10,000 per day and choose a 1% lookalike for the US, which is around 2.2 million before you narrow by age, gender, interest, or location.

Try various bidding options – Test auto biding with manual bidding at different amounts to see which brings you the better CPA. I personally like to start with auto placements to build up data and then I’ll change to manual bidding based on results.

Exclude customers from all advert-sets – Your customers may be part of your lookalike audience, so be sure to exclude customers from seeing all ads.

Use the overlap tool – If you’re using a number of lookalike audiences to scale, use Facebook’s free audience overlap tool to make sure each lookalike has enough unique users.

You don’t want more than 20% overlap for each lookalike, or you’ll end up serving users the same ads in multiple different ad-sets.