Lookalike audience

What is a lookalike audience?

A lookalike audience is created in Meta Ads Manager (Facebook/Instagram) by uploading a source list - typically your existing customers or website visitors. Meta's algorithm analyzes common traits of these people (demographics, interests, behavior) and finds new users who are similar to them but don't yet know your brand.

How to create a lookalike audience

1. Choose a source: Upload a customer list (emails), use Facebook Pixel data (website visitors, buyers) or choose a custom audience.
2. Select country/region: Specify which countries the new audience should come from.
3. Select size: From 1% (most similar to the source audience, smallest audience) to 10% (wider, less similar). 1-3% is typically most effective for conversion.
4. Use in campaign: Add it as a target audience in your ad campaigns.

Which sources provide the best lookalikes?

• Buyers (best): A list of customers who have actually bought. The algorithm finds more potential buyers.
• High-value customers: Customers with high order value or many repeat purchases. Provides lookalikes with higher expected value.
• Add-to-cart: Visitors who have shown purchase intent but not completed. Still a strong signal.
• All visitors: Broadest source, but least specific. Better than no data, but weaker than buyers.
• Newsletter subscribers: Engaged users who have shown interest in your brand.

Lookalike size and effectiveness

• 1% lookalike: The people who are most similar to your source. Small audience, high relevance, typically best conversion rate.
• 1-3% lookalike: Good balance between reach and relevance. Often the best choice for most webshops.
• 3-5% lookalike: Wider reach, but lower relevance. Good for TOF campaigns.
• 5-10% lookalike: Very broad. Primarily used for awareness campaigns or in countries with small populations.

Tips for better lookalike audiences

• Quality over quantity: A list of 500 good buyers yields better lookalikes than 10,000 random visitors.
• Update regularly: Customer behavior changes. Update your source audience at regular intervals.
• Test multiple sources: Run lookalikes based on buyers, high-value customers and add-to-basket in parallel to see what works best.
• Combine with interest targeting: Layer lookalike with relevant interests for even narrower targeting.
• Exclude existing customers: Create a custom audience of existing customers and exclude them so you only target new people.

Lookalike audiences and Shoporama

To use lookalike audiences with your Shoporama webshop, you need to have Facebook Pixel installed (supported directly in Shoporama) and optionally the Conversions API (CAPI) for better data quality. The pixel automatically collects data about visitors and buyers, which you can use to create custom audiences and thus lookalike audiences in Meta Ads Manager.