Digital marketing has really evolved more and more towards targeting audiences that you can customize to meet your marketing goals. The “magic” of this audience targeting is revealed when you use the “Similar” or “Lookalike”  audience functionality within Facebook or Google. By using machine learning algorithms, these advertising platforms discover additional prospects for your business. Just like magic.

To become a Lookalike audience magician, here is one workflow I use that may work for you.

Create a Great “Seed” Audience

With both Facebook and Google, their algorithms work best if you provide a high quality “seed audience.” A seed audience is a list of your best qualified customers, or potential customers, which the platforms use to find additional new prospects.  Some of the most common seed audiences come from your customer lists but also can be created from your website pixel data.

The following is an example of how you would create a list from your highest lifetime value customers.

• Create a csv file with 500-1,000 of your most valuable customers (highest lifetime value). Add as many fields of customer attributes as you can (name, phone number, DOB, gender, address, etc).
• Upload the list as a “custom audience”. The platforms will present the match rate within 15-30 minutes.
• Select “Create Similar Audience (“Lookalike Audience)
• Choose that Lookalike audience to make your ad campaign

Configure Included and Excluded Audiences

When you’re ready to use your similar audience, you need to make sure you understand the concept of “included audiences” and “excluded audiences”.  You’ll use your similar audience as an included audience but you’ll need to exclude certain types of audiences as well.

What I typically do is exclude users who’ve already made a purchase on the site, or users who are already customers.

Test and Optimize

Finally, you want to make sure that you’re monitoring your similar audiences campaign and making adjustments as needed. You can also take advantage of the “experiments” or “A/B test” features in the ad platforms to test different similar audiences at the same time to see which works the best.

Go ahead and try out the Lookalike audiences feature for your company’s digital marketing and maybe you will see the magic as well!