#029 What is the difference between Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences?

Audio Block

Double-click here to upload or link to a .mp3. Learn more

Facebook advertising really paved the way for a lot of the social targeting, bidding, and optimizing tools available now. Investing in social ads is all about finding the people who will love your business. Custom audiences and lookalike audiences are some of the advanced audience selection tools widely used across platforms. In this episode, Kelsey, Bri, and Molly talk about using Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences to find people who are most likely to find your ads relevant. Buckle in for this one; these ladies are digging into the trenches of the differences between these two targeting tools and sneaky ways to use them.

Biggest Takeaways From This Episode

Remember, if you are targeting in the Credit, Employment, Housing or Politics/Causes of national intersts, you need to abide by Facebook's special ad category rules.

Custom Audiences

Get back in touch with people who have engaged with your business, online or off.

Define your source:

Website Traffic: Create an audience of your website visitors using a Facebook Pixel

Make sure your pixel is set up appropriately on your site. Put it on any page that you'd want to "retarget"
You can choose website behavior up to the past 365 days
Always look at users and not sessions when you're looking at your website analytics to ensure you have a quality size audience
You can add up to 5 total rule sections per audience
audience size suggestion: at least 1,000 users within time frame

Customer File: Create an audience using your existing customer information.

Format your customer lists appropriately. Here's a guide!
Use this template
Always try to get mobile phone numbers, they're the best matching info!
audience size suggestion: at least 1,000 people

Facebook Page: Create an audience of people who follow or have interacted with your Page. You can target these types

People who are already engaging with content
People who have liked your page
People who are sharing your content
Most active users

Video: Create an audience of people who watched one of your videos on Facebook or Instagram.

Kelsey's Favorite targeting!
Target people who have watched 75%-100% of one of your longer videos. These people are clearly interested in the value you're providing
Target people who have watched specific videos (you can choose multiple videos) - this is great to create content around a specific persona and target users who have consumed that content

App Activity: Create an audience of people who launched your app or game

Target people who are using different behaviors on the app
Generate a loyalty program to get people to engage and purchase more within the app

Not Mentioned: Events, Lead Form, Offline Activity, Instant Experience, Instagram Business Profile

2. Ideas for when you should use a Custom Audience:

Using Custom Audiences can help you reach people who have already interacted with your business in one of the sources above.

Send an offer to existing customers
Nurture leads
Send engaged users more information deeper into the funnel
Send people who have added products to cart and dropped off the purchasing

3. Good to know:

You don't get to know what % of people matched, you'll need to run a campaign to see how many you can reach
You can target and use smaller audiences, but you need to be willing to pay more. Determine what you're willing to pay for cost per conversion and test a list
Think about what would be relevant and a good user experience
The security of the customer information you use is critical. You have a personal responsibility for the protection of your customers' data.
It's ideal to have other advertising promoting your content to new users so that you're introducing your brand to new people.

4. What platforms have custom audiences:

LinkedIn
Pinterest
Twitter
TikTok
Snapchat
Google

Lookalike Audiences

Reach new people whose interests are similar to those of your best customers. The twinsies of your source!

1. What you’ll need:

Choose your source: Consider using a group of 1,000 to 50,000 of your best customers based on lifetime value, transaction value, total order size or engagement. Our suggestion is 1,000 - 2,500

Choose your country: Choose the country or countries where you'd like to find a similar set of people.

Choose your % match: Select which % of match is best to find the twins of your source. We suggest sticking to 1%.

2. When you should use a Lookalike Audience:

Target potential recruits based on your best employees
Target people who are like your best customers
Target people who are like your most engaged website visitors
Perfect for introducing your brand to new people who are likely to be interested (if you chose a quality source)

3. Good to know:

You need a source audience in order to find their twins
You're going to have to layer your local geographic on top of this list so make sure your original source size is large enough to find something in common.
You can see what % matched with website traffic and Facebook behaviors
Super important to set expectations on what you are willing to pay for your conversion or goal. If you want to narrow down your target audience, you may likely have to pay more.
Don't layer on too many other interests
Don't ONLY user lookalike audiences in your ad targeting across all your campaigns

4. What platforms have lookalike audiences:

LinkedIn
Pinterest (called Actalikes)
Twitter
TikTok
Snapchat
Google

Want your question to be answered on the generation social media podcast? Tell us what it is here!

Transcript

This text below is a straight up audio transcript of the episode. In our humble opinion, we think the audio podcast sounds much better in its original form. We have not edited the transcription below so there are indeed some grammar errors (some quite funny, in-fact).

You don't have to be a millennial to be socially savvy. We believe anyone can join generation social media. And your journey starts now. This is The Generation Social Media Podcast by Chatterkick.

Hey guys,

It is Kelsey Martin, and we're back with another episode of the podcast. Today I have collected the ad strategists , a couple of our ad strategists and premier nerds from our team to answer a question that was submitted. The question is what's the difference between lookalike audiences and custom audiences. So today I have Bri hay and Molly with me. Hi, we highly debated making Molly use a little bit of like a hulk ogre voice because those two, by those two, I mean Molly and Bri sound similar and get into the equal like frequencies when they get excited. So yes or no, like tweet us Instagram message us if next time we should do like choose your character. And everybody talks in that voice for at least the first five minutes? We debated it decided no. Yeah, I think we have to leave that up to the audience otherwise we're going to have a full like Hulk ogre for 20 minutes in people's ears, cars and video feeds. Fair.

Well, so speaking of audiences, the question is what is the difference between lookalike audiences and custom audiences? Bri, do you want to kind of give me the rundown on like, just what is a custom audience? Let's start with that. Yeah. A custom audience by Facebook's definition is an ad targeting option that lets you find your existing audiences among people who are on Facebook or from sources that you have imported like customer lists or web traffic or anything that has to do with like your engagement on Facebook. So basically you can, within the Facebook ads manager, choose from this beautiful box of options for custom audiences that has like your web traffic if you've got your pixel set up. That's important for that web traffic is you do need to have your pixel set up and then you can choose your Facebook followers. You can choose people who have watched the videos.

You can choose people who have visited your Facebook page, any of those kind of options. People moving engaged with your page or with some of your content before and turn those people into an audience based on the time period with which they have done it. You can choose how recently or how long the length of time as you want, because sometimes you want only people within a certain time range of the last 30 days, 60 days based on what your business has been doing with those specific instances on your page or on your website. So is it fair enough to just kind of call custom audiences remarketing? It's the remarketing version of social? Yeah, I think it is because you're usually putting something together, an audience put together based on something you've already created somewhere somehow that has gone through your marketing team has gone through your creative team.

And then you're specifically picking out the people who have already showed interest in that. So as much as we talk about retargeting audiences differently, I think you're spot on. Okay. I know Molly, Bri just kind of went through super quickly. Some of the, some of the ways that you can use custom audiences. Can you kind of talk through like, what are the differences between like your website custom audiences. And we're kind of assuming, like I probably should have gave more context when we started this, this question came out of an event that we had and they were specifically talking about ads. So in the paid spend side of things you get to do a little bit more advanced targeting and there are definitely like those interests and behaviors that you can target that Facebook gives you the option to, but lookalike audiences and custom audiences are kind of like next level on advertising where you get to provide data and use that data.

And so tell me a little bit, again, continuing on like the custom audience side, what are some of the types of custom audiences that you can create? Yeah. so the first ones that we typically think of are a list of existing customers or if you're on the recruiting side, existing employees, if you already have people's contact information, you can upload a file directly into Facebook and get one to one matching and know exactly who is in that audience. And then there's a template for that. Now isn't there guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a CSV that you can download specifically from Facebook that has like the first line is all the things that you can import that will be hashed over. Right. And then just like to preface that there are definitely best practices on what lists you should and should not submit. I mean the, the, just like general statement, if you are getting these emails or whatever, and people are opting in to marketing information, okay to use. It is not okay for you to just download all of our clients or customers

and plop them into Facebook. You could definitely get into some legal issues there, especially if you're in the healthcare field. Exactly. And just be extremely, extremely careful when you're working with lists. And then the question that we always get when you do the like importing your list, do you get the list of like who matched and who didn't. No, you don't get to know and you don't even get to know anymore what the number is, what the percentage is of your list that matched really. If, if that number, if you need to know what the number is of how many people match my best advice to you is I hope you're ready to spend money because you're not gonna know until you spend money to try and reach that audience and see how many people you can reach. You're not going to know how many people on the match on the list that you provided matched.

So it's always best to have a large list that you start with in the hopes that you match plenty of people in that list. So you still have a large audience for your ads. Okay. So uploading your list, that would be, if you want to send specific messages to a specific group of people. it can be like an offer. It could be lead nurturing, it could be exclusive or it could just be, we want our best customers to buy more or anything around that specific group. One way to do it. I found definitely, And Molly can tell me if she's had something different, but I've seen a lot higher like reach percentages when phone numbers are included. Because a lot of times, if people are filling out emails in a marketing way, it's not always the like 14 year old version of themselves' email that got used on Facebook when they created their Facebook for the first time.

But most people's phone numbers are more one to one than like an email or the different variations of their name or their location. Yeah. I have five different email addresses. I have one phone number. phone numbers are great. And what's really neat about the way that custom that upload works is that if you have phone numbers, for some people, you have email addresses for some people, some people you have a first name, but you don't have a last name put as much of that information into the file, the CSV file that you're going to upload as you can. And Facebook will take the puzzle pieces where they can find them to try and match those users. Cool. We'll actually link the template that Facebook has on our website the generationsocialmediapodcast.com so that come so that you can go straight to there to download the CSV that we're talking about. Yeah, it's super intuitive. So once you, you know, that's the first type that we typically think of for custom audiences is a custom

List of people that have been handpicked by the organization who's trying to advertise. That's kind of the most straightforward definition of a custom audience, but there are a lot of other ways to build them. The next most common is when you do have the pixel set up correctly on your website, using that to create a custom audience of people who have interacted with your website. And that could mean as broadly as they have been to your website at some point, but you can also use that information to build more narrow custom audiences of people who have visited specific pages or specific sections of your website. If you have a lot of different interest points and you're trying to segment, that's another way you can build a custom audience. One of my, you can also do it for things like add to cart. Like if you are looking as an eCommerce or you trying to sell something online,

You can pull out people who have added to cart and you can also, sometimes there's exclude people who have purchased. I know we're gonna get into exclusions later, so I might be jumping ahead, but you can, that way you can kind of go about doing a add to cart retargeting with custom audience list. Yeah. I think the most exciting part about leveraging the pixel and your website audience is that you can get extremely, extremely nerdy. I mean, you can get, they landed on this page and then they went to this page and they downloaded this thing. That means they're going to get this ad. I mean, you can really get into it, but I think there are just some basic best practices as far as like website size and traffic. And I know again, like Bri you have this in like multiple times coming up too.

So I don't know if you want to talk about it now or talk about it in more detail as we get kind of moving. But when you are planning and placing like the pixel on your site to use custom audiences based off of website traffic, you really need to look at the way that you have your site set up for people to really navigate your site and track and capture that behavior. And then also looking at like the analytics of how many people are actually going to your site and which pages they're going to. A couple of times, we've had somebody say, we want to retarget people who get to this specific project example on our site. But when we looked at the analytics, everybody was just going to like the basic project landing page and then like jumping off after that, they weren't actually going to the specific project.

So we didn't have any visitors there that were interested there. So we had to kind of like re set the whole site to make sure that it was a good experience. Definitely when you're doing lookalike or when you're doing custom audiences based off of web traffic, you want to look at your Google analytics and see what your web traffic is, where people are going before you kind of like get married to only targeting based off one landing page because of that reason. Cause you build a whole campaign based on people who have been to one area. And then if you're, when you're doing the targeting, you're doing a custom audience based on, well, they went to this product or this page. And then the audience isn't big enough.

It's really similar with, if you were using a list of customers, for example, you would want to make sure that your list size that you're starting with is nice and large. That Facebook has a lot of opportunities to match that audience. It's the same thing. But instead of having a list where, you know, one-to-one exactly who's on the list, what you're starting with, what you're giving to Facebook is that total traffic volume. And you want to make sure that Facebook doesn't have to work with, but what does that mean? Like size matters. So what are we talking about here? Cause we use like, make sure you have enough data. Like, is that 50 people? Like I know, I think it's custom audiences, a hundred people minimum. And then I think lookalike has a larger minimum. If I remember correctly, there's two different types and I can't, one of them is 100 of those 500, but lookalikes a hundred, a hundred people in your custom audience for lookalike to even go and try to find people who look like it.

We'll get into that one. So custom audiences, like give me a, give me a good, let's start with like the first one that you talked about, Molly. Like give me a good list, size, like minimum. It has to be this much for like uploading your customers. Give me like a good size that like you could do something with this, but don't give me the, like, it would be tough that you could do it like this, this should work. I wouldn't have any nerves. If someone came to me and said, I have a list with 5,000 people on it is kind of an easy number to go to in my head. Yeah. That would be like a confident like that, that we definitely will be able to work for that. I've done a thousand and I've tried 500 and it loaded, but super expensive to run.

Yeah, it's tough. But we could do it, but like if you're closing one of those is a hundred thousand dollars for you and you're willing to invest sure. But I would say like a thousand minimum and you need to have like very good expectations of it could cost a little bit more, especially in this Midwest region. These platforms are really not set up to be optimized like in these areas where our geographic area of the entire state is still less than some of these large Metro areas. So when we're like, we wouldn't even some of our clients, we wouldn't even be selling to somebody in Omaha, like that's a different organization or different franchise. Like we're really geographically locked in. And so some of these lists where it's like, you know, we don't, we would only have about 250, like actives,

You're getting into like really tough territory there on a custom list. Definitely. Yeah. The key for me there is knowing like exactly who your, what your goal is. Cause... What are you going to do with it? So then hopping to the other one that you were just talking about web traffic, like where would you say same numbers as a monthly visits or daily visits or like, give me a, give me some context. So first you would want to look at when you're building that custom audience, you can choose a date range. So you can say, I want people who have been to the site in the last 30 days you can say, but you can make it broader. You can say 60 days, 90 days, it goes up to 365. It's a good thing. Bri did her research before, these change all the time.

And I feel like the stats that I got locked in are a little outdated. It used to be 180. But I mean, you still want to think about, okay, what is going to be a relevant time period? So let's say 90 days, you're saying I'm willing to talk to people who have been into my site up to 90 days ago. Then I would put that date range into analytics. And you want to make sure that you look at users, not sessions because users is the number of people. And I would say it's similar. You want to make sure that for the pages that you're looking at, if you're trying to narrow this down by pages, make sure when you're looking at analytics, you filter to only the pages that you're interested in. So you get an accurate view of what you're giving to Facebook, but I think it should be really similar if you've got, if you've got 5,000 unique visitors to your specific site page, you're going to be fine.

If you've got a thousand, it'll probably work pretty well. And so long as you're not necessarily trying to like expect a 5,000 conversions in a month, then 1,000 works great. But then once you start getting below that it really is looking at, okay, what are my expectations for the campaign? What am I willing to pay for each result that I get out of the campaign? What is my potential audience size? All of those factors to see is this a feasible campaign plan and targeting plan? Yeah, I think really kind of just best practice while you're planning these things, whether it's building audiences or just building campaigns and you're using the tools that are given, you really need to take off your marketing hat in a lot of ways and put on like my customer hat or like what I would expect as a good experience for me as a user. So if I went to your site 180 days ago, if I get served your ad that's a while ago, I'm probably not going to be at the point where you're going to like slingshot

me into converting. But maybe if you started interesting me with content or offers, I'll do some research again, but you really need to think of, I feel like a lot of times as marketers, we're like, well, let's bump that a little bit longer. So we get more people in the pool. It's like 100%. I see what you're doing there to get to that thousand. And I like it, but you also need to think about the content that you're serving at this point, because it's a different experience and I'm in a completely different mindset on social for one, but on social 180 days since I've been to your website for two is like completely different thing. I have a question for both of you not to take the, my current... But with, with that 180 days. Cause I totally agree that most of the time you don't want it up that high, but what if it's more of like an actual education platform, like a politician or like a social issue or and you're trying to like bring it back to the surface. Do you move that? If you're trying to educate somebody on a specific thing that they've visited a few months ago and you want to bring it back to them or does your answer stay the same?

I would say it's fine to move it back. I would also say, okay, what is the time period that we want to educate? And then at what recency point do we decide, we're ready to ask for action. And then I would use, I would create like a 180 day audience. I would also create a 90 day audience. And I would exclude the 90 day audience from the one 80. So that only people who have, who have not been to my site in the last 90 days, they're the ones that I'm educating. And then I don't overlap my audiences. If I'm also asking my past 90 day audience for action, I'm not paying to also educate them or reengage them. Cause I, I heard from them recently enough. Right.

And we're kind of assuming that somebody has a budget to take different tactics and different actions here. If you are just doing brand awareness and trying to get people to know a cause and you have like $100, like get that message out there, girl, like, or a guy, do it in whatever way you can. And just be strategic about the message. If you are positioning it as like, did you know? And this is the first time I'm introducing this to you. Maybe targeting somebody who hasn't been on your site five times is probably not a good idea. Cause they clearly already know about the issue. But like you're saying like Molly, if you're, if it's we know plenty of people know about this, like I know change.org does a ton of ads and things like that. But if it's at the point where it's like, okay, we're, we're a hundred people away from getting the petition goal, you should be activating a different audience than like maybe introducing people for the first time. Maybe you should be like, they're engaging with the posts specifically about this. Like it's time to get them to click the buttons.

And I probably just jumped into a completely different custom audience-ish. But I think, I think it's like to your point, Molly, like you can absolutely change those, but that's a great segue. I think the next type of custom audience. So those are a couple of examples of sort of off Facebook interactions. And they get used much more frequently, I think, than the on Facebook interactions, which are options for targeting, which I really love because if you, if somebody has purchased from you and you have them as a customer, you kind of own that information about them. You have, you have talked to them, you know about them as the business. If somebody has been to your website, you at least know a little bit more about them through Google analytics and maybe a CRM if they fill out a form. But sometimes your audience members on Facebook that have not interacted with you in those ways and you don't know who they are.

And if something were to happen tomorrow, when your Facebook account get shut down, you have no way to reach them. It's not going to, don't worry. Don't nobody panic. Facebook's not like shutting down tomorrow. But you can use Facebook ad targeting to continue to deepen that relationship. So if somebody watches a video, if somebody engages with your posts on Facebook, if somebody likes your Facebook page or has gone to your Facebook page recently, if they filled out a lead form, hopefully you have their information. If they filled out a lead form, but if they opened a lead form and didn't fill it out, that is another way that you can re target those people. There are so many different ways they can interact with your brand on social that then you can start sending them more information. So. I love the we've done this with this a lot with a couple of clients, but I love the retargeting people or using engagement custom audiences for people who watched a specific video.

Like that's like one of my favorite if they've watched, if it's for example, a 20 minute video, sorry if there's like a 20 minute video and they've watched five minutes of it, or even like 20 minutes of it, like that is a highly engaged person. Like whatever that content was, like, get them that like they're trying to solve some problem at that point clearly. That's also one of my favorites and I think it's one of those things where I've said it so many times in the last 60 days about doing video views, getting that audience and then retargeting those people that it's starting to lose all meaning when it comes out of my mouth. But it is absolutely one of my favorite ways to use custom audiences. I agree. I think it's sometimes it can be difficult to understand that when we talk to clients and they're saying yes, but then I have to pay for two campaigns and like, yes, but it's good.

Trust me. But yeah, it's like mining the gold, like yeah. And when you look at like a video view campaign on its own, or if it's an engagement campaign or a reach campaign that has video creative and you're getting those video metrics coming back to you from Facebook. Sometimes when we talk about that in the context of like a larger engagement conversation, we'll be very upfront with people and say, Facebook, will count it as an engagement when they've seen maybe three seconds of your video and that's not necessarily, you know, maybe they cared for three seconds, but, and they continue to watch for the next five minutes, but maybe they didn't. And so it's, sometimes it's hard to value that three second video view as an engagement. But when you use the video views to create an audience, you can say, I want to target people

who've watched my videos to the 25% Mark. or I want to talk to people who have watched at least 10 seconds or more of a video and you can move how far into the video do I feel like they needed to get before I feel like that is an engaged person. Who's interested in hearing more from my business. So that is so much more valuable. And you can use videos to create that audience and then send them like, Hey, I heard you were interested in watching me talk about things. Get over to my site, I wrote a lot of stuff down there, like here's a free downloadable. I mean, you can kind of move people along in a different way. I think that when you have people who watch your videos to that point or whatever, what I call the meaty point is like they got to the beef. Is that like, that's the equivalent of getting like interesting coming from someone who doesn't eat meat.

So broccoli, may get to a certain point that that is as quality as a conversion. Like, you know, so much about that person that they got to that point. Definitely there is one more custom audience kind of group, but I'm not going to lie. I don't want to spend a ton of time on it because it's like the mobile app custom audience. And it's very similar to your website side, like where you can target and retarget different behaviors within the app. And there are some really cool things that you can do with there, with like loyalty programs on apps. But I don't think I have a ton of people who have apps, if you do have an app don't tell me, cause I'll start drooling with a number of things that you can do with custom audiences on that. But do tell me if you do want to know some of the ways that you can, that you can use custom audiences. So there is the ability, the same thing to do on your website. It's like you can do that same thing with yeah. I'll make you a separate video on your Oh yeah. So we talked so many details about custom audiences. It's a targeting option that you can use

either like an existing list or a web behavior or Facebook engagement behavior to let's just say like retarget with Facebook ads or Instagram ads or anything on the Facebook platform that we're talking about. I know later we can kind of talk about now what other platforms have this ability. But we're just using Facebook for context. Anything else you want to add to that before? Go Molly, go Molly.

Yeah, no, I mentioned that just a little bit and I wanted to reiterate so custom audiences are usually slightly higher quality because it's someone who has had some form of interaction with your brand. I will say though that the best practice for using them successfully in an ads setting is to have additional advertising happening where you are using non custom targeted. Essentially if somebody has to already have interacted with you in order to make it into the custom audience, if you're not using ad dollars to continue to grow the number of people that your brand is interacted with, you're not adding more people into the funnel for your custom audience. So basically say don't just create

a cycle of like this already exists. Keep sending this to the people that just already exist, like have some sort of advertising strategy that is introducing your brand to new people, whether that's web traffic, that you're, if you're using a web ad and Facebook engagement ad objective view, using an engagement audience, get more people into that

funnel definitely. Cause if your funnel is successful, people should be exiting the funnel as like customers and advocates and your potential audience is going to continue to shrink. So yeah, it should be a minimum, be like a dual objective strategy, one to two people into the qualified audience and another to make the people in the qualified audience want to talk to you more.

Okay. Well, honestly this could wrap one podcast episode right now, but we're going to keep going because we can not stop with the value. And the question was custom audiences first look alike. Actually, I think I originally said it look alike versus custom audience, but I feel like custom audience needed to come first. So Bri, tell me about the lookalike audience. Like what's the definition? Give me like the baseline. Lookalike audience is an audience that needs a source audience. So it needs a custom audience created with your, like your pixel or your mobile app or your website traffic or your engagement to function, otherwise it. But without that, it can't draw any of the common things between like demographics between people. So basically a look audience is identifying common qualities of people like their demographics, their interests. They're looking at anything from their location to their age range, to whether their parents have little children or not on the people who have done the engaging or the video views or the website traffic from your custom audience.

So your look like audience really builds off of your custom audience to find people who look like it's a fun name. Look like the people who took the action you wanted. So because the idea there is that those are the people who are more likely from the outside to also take that action. If somebody went to the website page that you wanted and they have X, Y, and Z markers in common, they are also probably more likely to do the action that you want. So the example I usually give is like, if your best friend goes to taco bell three times a week, you are more likely to go with them to taco bell three times a week. Same idea. You like the same thing as your friends, you watch the same TV shows, you drink the same types of wine, all those different kinds of interests and demographics factor into your things.

You're more likely to do. So you give Facebook like you choose the source, like choose your weapon. If it's your website, if it's people who purchase. I think like one of the best ways is like, if you want to find people like your best customers, you upload the list of your best customers. That's your custom audience. You could go run ads just to them. If you want, if you want to find twinsies of your best customers, this is where you want to use your lookalike audience. So you choose the source. You choose percentage of match, right? And 1% is the most unique that you can get. And can you also choose what are the other options now, Molly? You have to choose a country. Yeah. Okay. Fair. But you have to do the country, a source and your percentage, 1% name, the closest you can choose multiple percentages, but let's just say like, you want to, if you're doing this for the first time, just like choose 1%, choose the country of origin.

And then what Bri is talking about of like finding behaviors, like you don't get the option to select the behaviors that you find Facebook will like analyze the audience that you have and try to find like, what are the things that these people have in common. Now, most marketers have like some general idea of like general personas of if I'm in the energy drink space, like it's people who drink monster and people who drink red bull. And so they're likely gonna have those same similar behaviors. So Facebook is going to do that. You don't get to know what they say directly. Like it's not going to spit out a report of like, these are all the people that you like or the look like, and these are all the things that

they like of why they're in this list or why they got selected. But you will get to kind of see based off of the way that they engage and do some additional, I guess reporting and analyzing of like, who is in this group and, question, do they tell you how many people match them this side? Only if it's not an important list. Okay. Wait, so then give me the sources that it would tell you. Website traffic and Facebook behaviors, behaviors. Okay. But one thing that's important to know is the initial size of the list that it tells you. You're gonna be like, Oh my goodness. It's like a million, bajillion. People is such a big list. That's really great. And all but Kelsey, you were mentioning earlier that a lot of our clients have like a specific geographic area where they're interested in serving ads.

You will layer the geographic targeting on top of your lookalike audience, which will significantly narrow the size of your potential ad audience. Right? So Facebook assumes that you're going to run a national campaign because it's Facebook and they obviously want you to run like $1.2 million in 30 days. So then the lookalike audience, like in its essence is just that nation or that whatever, like that's where it starts. And then when you start adding, Geographic, like that's what we suggest is the first thing that you add on that will significantly change the size of that audience. Depending on what number that is. I would not add more things onto that again, unless same context as custom audiences, unless you are ready to like invest more for that more narrow person. Like not only do we just want their twins, but then we, we want twins of car buyers who like blue cars, because for some reason I have 50 blue cars on my lot. Like if you're willing to go that narrow, like go for it, but just have the expectation that you might actually be spending more like $250 for a blue car lead versus like $10, $15 for just a car lead.

Right? Yep. And lookalike audiences are the idea is to reach those twinsies, right? So people who haven't necessarily interacted with your brand before. And so a lot of the time we will test that against an interest based audience and which if you, if your lookalike audience performs better, that's awesome. But just keep in mind that it's not, you don't necessarily always have to put more people into that audience the way you would a custom audience, but if your custom audience is shrinking, then the number of factors that Facebook has to compare to find those similar shared traits changes. And

Like there is a little bit of a cyclical nature to it. Just to keep that in mind while you're building audiences always consider the source. So we, again, like if we were going to pick the same number of like 1,000 minimum, like your source needs to have 1,000 to it, it's I honestly think that it's better to keep it between 1,000 - 2,500 or 5,000. Like I would try honestly, keep your list between I really like that 1,000 to 2,500, because there's probably more narrow commonalities between them. Then there would be like a 5,000-10,000 list. Like when you're looking at lookalike audiences anyways. Bri, are there any like other, just like best practice, best practices from a like source number. You touched on it that we usually say around a thousand to 2,500, just to make sure that you're not going outside of that like high quality audience to find the actual twinsies the actual Facebook minimum is 100 and it just gives me a little bit of the heebie jeebies.

Like I'm just like a little uncomfortable that number, just because of like how I know how small a hundred people is when you're trying to match. But we've found that a lot of times that that 1% we talked about, which is when you increase that percentage, you're getting farther away from how closely twinsie, we're talking about like going from like identical twins at 1% to like fraternal twins. I feel like I should give my sister a shout out for that because she used to say twinsies and samesies all the time. And then like 3% is like Irish twins, which is two people who are two siblings were born in the same year. But like to the same parents, like the farther away you get, like thery're still related, but you're getting like farther and farther away. They're still gonna match.

But if you're trying to find like exact way who that person is, you want to stay as close to that 1% as you can. I usually try to, I know others have had success with getting farther out and, or making audiences for 1% and then making it audience for 2%. I wouldn't like just have the one if you're going to go out farther. But another thing I wanted us to all kind of maybe discuss was in an ad set, putting the custom audience and the lookalike in, in one, like targeting together. Are we a yes or are we a no on that? Real advanced layering these on yeah. Molly jump, jump in. It am a yes. Okay. Because I've seen it work for, especially when I have a custom. So sometimes so for services or like need based services or products where someone demographics or their

interests aren't a good indicator of whether or not they're a good potential fit for a company. That it just depends a lot on an event that happened to them in their life that we can't try. Like it's not the same as like, did they get engaged, cool. Show them wedding ads. Like it's not an event that Facebook will track for me. So I cannot use some of those interests targeting pieces, but at the same time, their website, traffic, where I would, or their Facebook engagement, what I would love to use as that custom audience to retarget, they don't have enough prior interactions to make that ad campaign work. I will add the lookalike layer onto that to give me a broader audience to start with. And then very little other than geographic targeting beyond that will I, I won't layer much on top of that, other than the geographics.

And then I let Facebook optimize that. And I've given the campaigns where I have done that. I've given Facebook a very specific conversion point to say, this is what I want. And it takes time to build momentum because Facebook now has a nice broad audience of people that may or may not be interested in the service or product that we're offering. And Facebook is going to take additional learning time to sort through and get enough information to say, okay, this is the commonality I want to follow. And I don't get to know what that commonality is. No one else was in the room when it happened. I don't get to see what happened, but I know that after giving Facebook the time to learn it has worked and it's worked consistently.

Does that make all of us Aaron Burr? I agree. I do it sometimes and sometimes I don't, but back to Kelsey's question, I think one of the big things that people do when they start using lookalike audiences is like, they're so fascinating to nerdy people, running ads that you kind of like go all in. And you go too far. You, you start throwing lookalike audiences at everything. I like. You can look at your audience, can't get a look like audience. You can Oprah of lookalike audiences. And you will forget that sometimes those custom audiences are still your, your best bet or building a saved audience based on interest and psychographics is still a really quality way to narrow down into a target audience. So don't listen to this and we're very excited because we love them. Do not go out and put a lookalike audience on every single one of your ad campaigns. Specifically lookalike audiences are for when you're trying to expand your audience based on positive interactions from your core audience already. If you're moving a location to a new area, and you want to specifically find people who are going to purchase in that area, most likely to purchase in that area, you use ones that you currently

already have. Those kinds of like high, like lower level in the funnel, high level funnel, low level funnel, where I think you need to pick one. Are we putting any, they want the middle one triangle slower or further is another word further, further down the funnel. I mean, this is really kind of what Molly was talking about. Like same concept with the custom audience is like, make sure that you were thinking about what else, what other things that you are running, like don't use custom audiences. You're not going to be generating new business or new leads. So think about that same concept. When you're using lookalikes, they are new leads. A lot of the times it's introduction. But like you said, a little bit further, they shouldn't be like completely unrelated to your business. We already know, based off of the whole concept of lookalike, that there's something that they have in common with people who are purchasing from you.

Lookalikes are really good at getting you higher engagement, more of everything, higher numbers, higher impressions and reach, but there's a time and a place for them. And it's not everywhere because all of the numbers going up is fantastic. We love it. We like when the numbers go up, but you also want to make sure that the quality metrics are going up as well as the quantity metrics that you're looking at for your, for your business. Are there any other, I really liked, like, just when you brought this up, but are there any other types of things that you feel like either custom audiences or lookalike audiences get like misused and abused? Like go ahead and Molly, like they get something and it's not the time for them to get like put in. Okay. So picture this recruitment campaigns. Now, they're not always bad, but like, so say for example, this would be a really, you have to have a really large national company where you need hiring needs that are national.

So say you're recruiting nationally and you have a custom list of your top employees. And so your HR team is listening to this thinking, okay, well, I want to hire. Your engineers, like just your one role. Right. And you say, okay, so I want, but like I, sorry, HR is thinking, I want people who are gonna stay. So maybe I'll use a list of people who have been here for five years. Yeah. Well, if you make a lookalike off of that, I'm willing to bet you that the people who have been there for five years have a tendency to be a little bit older than the people who like then when they joined, because they are there for five years. So the people that you're going to reach, you might find people who are similar to them. Who've spent five years in another company and are just happy, and that would be great.

But you also might reach people who have been in at their company in a similar role for five years and are very happy. And you're spending money to show ads to people who are just not interested instead of sticking with a custom audience, built off of people who have interacted with the company already, who've shown an interest, maybe in some of your other HR or opportunity style posts might be a better place to use custom audiences as opposed to a lookalike audience. Right? I think just to play devil's advocate, because this is a very comfortable spot for me, but like you could do it, right? But you need to change the messaging. If you're sending ads to people who are happy in their roles, your messaging, isn't like looking for a job because they're truly not. It's like you have to have some sort of incentive, like a signing bonus or a culture thing that like that copy is going to have to attract them when they're not looking for a job.

So I think that it can be done, but you really need to do your research. Go look at negative reviews from other places and find out what people don't like. Is it the culture or the hours, the requirements like go find those things and put those problems in your copy so that people see. And like, I recognize that you are not looking for a job. I recognize that you would need to be coerced to come onto this side. But I think it's way more extensive planning when you're talking about adding that other layer of lookalike totally. I also need to play devil's advocate very, very different way though, because we're talking about employment and special ad categories are a thing. So you can make lookalike audiences for special ad campaigns, but they are called "special ad audiences". They put a lot of creativity and they are the same as a lookalike audiences, except that they've gotten rid of any of the commonalities, which would violate hiring laws or nondiscriminatory hiring laws.

So for example, in this use case, I was talking about age would be one very different factor between who you thought you were targeting and who you were actually targeting in a special ad audience age, as a commonality gets thrown out, Facebook won't allow. So what you're saying is nothing but a number baby? What I'm saying is in a special ad audience, Facebook won't take age into account. Age is just a number that Facebook does not need to know. It also doesn't even know your gender or your ethnicity and location. So in, in lookalike audiences, location is a factor. If everybody that's on your custom list is from the same area that will factor in to what Facebook is noticing. And on special

ad audiences, that factor is reduced to a minimum of 15 miles. So it's less a factor than it has been for normal lookalike audiences. So that you can't target only the like affluent neighborhoods in that area. Right? And that will also apply. So that's for employment opportunities, but it will also apply for housing opportunities and for credit opportunities. And now for political/national issues of important issues of importance. And another episode we'll have to cover all of these special things that Facebook has put into these categories. And Facebook is being very broad with their definition of those categories. So if your business or organization comes close to touching any of those topics, you need to know, go, go look at Chatterkick's library of podcasts, because hopefully you'll find another one that we have some more information about that you need to know about.

I have done an episode with, on this podcasts, talking about that, but politics and social issues, weren't officially a part of it. Then they were a separate thing and now they are a part of it. They've lumped us all together and said, you can all play nice. Okay, fair. So, should we do like a crazy lightning round? Just kidding. Look at the list of the lightning round topics. I just wanted to try it, the pop culture thing. I'm a little bit of a worst delivery, but I think I thought about it for a second too long. A lot of the things on our lightening round, I feel like we already covered. So are there any lightning round questions, Bri that you want to breeze through as kind of like a wrap up of this episode? Ooh, it's gonna say I did, I did want everybody to pick whether they want, do you, if you had a favorite child, would it be custom or lookalike?

Kelsey: I'd say lookalike. I think the ability to find twins is a, is a tool that is only optional on digital marketing, but you can't find that in any other traditional spaces. That's true. But I, I mean, obviously the power of like using those data points is also a thing that you cannot do another, but I think like the extra layer of twins, like man, that you would have to invest whole level of like traditional marketing in order to find twins. That's that some work if that's already built in. Molly... Did I sway your opinion? Maybe I was going to say custom audiences because building them is more fun than it is to build a look, a lookalike audience. What it does is awesome, but like Facebook does it all for you in the background. Just so as a marketer, the doing of creating either of those audiences, it's more fun to build a custom audience and especially to build them in combination.

So you you're using them in fun ways. It makes me feel very knowledgeable and cool when I set up something beautiful with custom audiences. But you do have to build the source. So you could also include that. I see that's how I feel about saved audiences. Building saved audiences gives me so much joy because I'm like building that traditional more marketing persona that makes my marketing professors from college very happy that I'm still using almost 10 years later, you feel like, so you feel like when you build an audience and you're like, Ooh, like I choose you. Like I get this once Molly and I did this once we used somebody, a person at Chatterkick and build a target audience based off of them because we knew they were most like they would buy this product. Actually we knew they had bought a product from them in the past.

And that makes me very happy. So fair enough. Saved audience is a whole other topic that we didn't even talk about. So that is a another episode that we're going to have to record on new saved audience and targeting personas. I also think there's just so much more on the special category. Like ad categories. There's just not a lot of information out there. It's constantly changing. My next lightning round is pop quiz. What platforms do and do not have custom and lookalike audiences. How are you going to pop quiz us when you were researching this when we were setting this up? Because were you researching it when we set it up. No,I was setting this up. Okay. I'm going to just guess one, LinkedIn. Yes. Both has both lookalike and custom. Molly. What? Pinterest has both their lookalikes are called actalikes, correct? They are called act alikes.

I have the to guess more Twitter. Yes. They have both. Twitter has both extremely unique. And I think that, like, they're not a lot of, there are some things that carry over into so many other platforms, but I like, and I know we talk about Facebook lot, but they really set the tone for a lot of the advertising side on these social platforms. So it doesn't surprise me that some of these other platforms have this, but I mean, Facebook is the one who really like set it off with these like really amazing tools. In the research I was doing it specifically says, Facebook did this and these platforms have followed, followed suit. Right. So it's like, thanks. Facebook sets that bar always being creepy. Love it. I cannot tell you how many times I have to specify to people that I can't actually see individual users and audiences. Yeah. Because

of the privacy laws and even with the imported list, like all that stuff gets hashed out. So like you could never see an individual person because they feel like someone's listening to them. And it's like, we can't actually say individual people were, this is totally all based on your behavior in some way. Or like, we know that it's you when we're not 100% sure. We're just like really pretty sure. The next time you check out somewhere and they say, Oh, can I just get your phone number quick? Or can I just get your email quick for this? Ask them why more likely than not it's so that you will end up on a marketing list. And if you don't want to, don't complain about it. Don't give them your email address. Did we miss any more platforms that have these features. Snapchat and... you know, last time when I use the snap pixel, it was really in a beta format. So yeah, TikTok has it. TikTok did a really good job at, Molly and I have gone through their ads platform together in taking what we think is like all the best user experience pieces of all the other platforms and kind of putting them all together to make it look really, really easy to use. which is a whole separate podcast in and of itself. But are we counting Google ads as a social platform? Because they digital

We can put them in here it's digital. Definitely not

social, especially since RIP Google plus like they have so much data on us. Like the behaviors cross so many platforms, but sure we can add it in. Well, and Googles because they're not a social platform works a little differently and gives you like the fun, extra creepy layer of like they have customer match, which is like a custom audience of a list that you provide. But then they also have custom intent audiences where you can, you, you can re target people who have been to websites that are not your own. Yeah. Who is the creepy platform here. Like I feel like Facebook, Google, Google knows about us all. And also Amazon also knows everything about us. Those two platforms, what's the, there's a meme. That's like the difference between getting a package from USPS is it'll be here in like, like 10 to 14 business days. Fedex, it'll be here in two to three days, like Amazon prime it's in your house already. It's like, yeah, actually Amazon Prime, the new distribution center opens nearby. And so we see the vans going around all the time. And the difference between getting those alerts that say like your, your package will be delivered today versus like your package is 10 stops away. This link to watch the Amazon van come to your house, like you would watch an Uber driver come your way. You can watch them. It's really cool. Anybody wants to put

Molly in a custom list or an audience like it really should be Amazon because we know she's using these apps. They got. I'm In that list. They got me. Oh, I was looking at an ad earlier because I look at all ads. Cause I'm a sucker for them at this point where it was this man talking about digital marketing and all the comments were, I heard you on a podcast and now I'm getting your ad. And I'm like, I know how that happened. You ran it. All right. Well, I appreciate your guys' time. We talked a lot about custom audiences and lookalike audience. Custom audience kind of behaviors and targeting that you set using lists, website engagement. And lookalike audiences are really twinsies of whatever source you choose. So there's lot of cool things that you can do with both of these and we just listed off a couple of, well, all of the ones that we found that have these features other platforms, if you want a summary of this episode or any of the downloadables or links of things that we talked about in this episode, you can find that at generationsocialmediapodcasts.com.

If you have a topic you want us to talk about or a question you want us to answer, these three nerds are happy to do that at any time. So either email us directly or submit your question again, same website, and we look forward to the next episode. Thank you so much, Bri and Molly for the entertainment and facts of life, about custom audiences and lookalike audiences. Happy to be here. See you guys,

Digital Paid AdvertisingChatterkickSeptember 1, 2020targeting, advertising, strategy