{"id":17403,"date":"2019-10-02T20:13:17","date_gmt":"2019-10-02T20:13:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/directiveconsulting.com\/ca\/?p=17403"},"modified":"2024-05-23T07:42:13","modified_gmt":"2024-05-23T11:42:13","slug":"lookalike-audiences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/directiveconsulting.com\/ca\/blog\/lookalike-audiences\/","title":{"rendered":"Untapped Opportunity – Lookalike Audiences for LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Ads"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the significant challenges within paid advertising<\/a>\u00a0is prospecting while staying within your cost-per-lead (CPL) or cost-per-action(CPA) target. Your total addressable market is not always searching for what you offer through search engines, and they may have never visited your site, leaving remarketing<\/a>\u00a0out of the question.<\/p>\n

Waiting for your ideal customer to discover you is not a powerful position to be in, nor a successful one. It is a daunting question that many digital marketers face: how can you reach your total addressable market efficiently without wasting your paid ad platform budgets?<\/p>\n

Most platforms have a multitude of demographic and interest-based targeting options to reach new users. While you can layer various options together to build an audience you think<\/em> may respond well, you can remove the guesswork and use your actual data from ad platforms to learn from through the use of lookalike audiences.<\/p>\n

This effectively allows your department to market to prospects who are the right fit for the products or services you offer through the use of lookalike audiences.<\/p>\n

Maximizing Potential on Key Audiences<\/h2>\n

Lookalike audiences can be a viable option to find new individuals that closely match users who have previously purchased, signed-up, or converted on your offerings. This can depend on your advertising goal.<\/p>\n

Lookalike audiences are based on your curated audiences that exist\/can be built within the various ad platforms. These audiences are referred to as source audiences.<\/p>\n

Source audiences are most commonly site visitors or manually uploaded lists (customer emails, companies, etc.). Because you provide the source list, you can build different types of lookalike audiences that accomplish a variety of advertising goals.<\/p>\n

These goals include awareness, lead generation, and engagement. This takes the guesswork out of the targeting options available, leaving more control in your hands and\u00a0mitigating wasted ad spend.<\/p>\n

Let’s look at a few examples and how much we can efficiently increase our reach by:<\/p>\n

In the screenshot below, you can see the original list of marketing qualified leads that were uploaded into Facebook was below 1,000. Through the use of the lookalike audience functionality, the audience size increased by +2,100%, translating to over 2,100,000 people to advertise to.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

Similar results can be seen in the example below.<\/p>\n

On LinkedIn, an account-based marketing list was uploaded, and through the use of lookalikes, the total audience with similar characteristics increased by 436%. This allows the team to efficiently continue to focus on their ABM accounts and market to an audience similar to our ideal customer profile. This combination helps us to hit our MQL goal.<\/p>\n

\"LinkedIn<\/p>\n

While the name is a bit different on Google (similar audiences), the concept is the same as a lookalike. Below, we can see that Google generated a list of 300,000 – 500,000 users similar to those converting on our website.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a pool 417% larger than the original<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

With a larger potential to efficiently scale your campaigns, using these features is a no-brainer. Let\u2019s take a look at a few strategies you can utilize through the use of lookalike audiences.<\/p>\n

Setting Yourself Up For Success<\/h2>\n

The key to lookalike audience success is ensuring you have a high-quality source audience. If you are confident in the quality of your source audience, your lookalike should work efficiently, as your new audience will be similar to your existing ones.<\/p>\n

Outlined below are various methods to leverage to build your lookalike audiences.<\/p>\n

Customer Lists<\/h3>\n

No matter the vertical you are marketing in, chances are, you have a list of customer email addresses. By using a customer list as a source audience, you\u2019ll be able to reach new people who have similarities to your current customers. These people are likely to become new customers.<\/p>\n

Google, Linkedin, and Facebook allow you to upload customer email lists. A common concern with custom lists is privacy. However, this is not an issue as their data is kept private and is only used by the platform to discover new users.<\/p>\n

This is a useful tactic, as you are essentially building a copy of your existing customer base to scale your campaigns efficiently. For the highest ROI opportunity, segment your source list to high-value customers, to reach people likely to buy more often, spend more money, have a larger contract size, etc.<\/p>\n

Customer Lists Are Effective For:<\/p>\n