what is a lookalike audience?

Lookalike audience in paid media will raise your campaigns performances.

A lookalike audience is a term used in digital advertising to describe a targeted group of consumers that are similar to your existing customers. While the two groups are not exactly identical, they resemble each other on many levels.

As you may know, big advertising companies collect user’s data while they are visiting their platforms. They can also collect data while users visit other websites where there is a tracking system in place. They collect data about visitor’s behaviours, their demographics, the content they read, what they engage with, their purchases and much more.

Using these datasets enable advertising platforms to create target audiences through different algorithms, using models such as correlation. 

Advertising platforms such as Facebook, Google and Linkedin have built such datasets over times, allowing this functionality on their self-service advertising platforms. 

There are many ways to collect the data of users visiting your website. For example, when a customer performs a specific action on your website such as filling in a form, or purchasing your products or services, the platform’s system will be able to track the customer’s journey. 

Once you have built a big enough audience of users which have completed a specific action you are tracking, you can define these custom audience groups as a base to create a lookalike campaign.

The advertising platform will look at audiences with a high level of correlation in the data sets (behaviours, patterns, demographics) and will show your advertising to them, therefore expanding your reach to a qualified audience with a higher chance of behaving the same way as the custom audience which you have created.

By targeting your advertisements to a more qualified audience, Lookalike campaigns are a more cost-effective way to reach the right consumers. You will most likely benefit from higher click through rates on your advertising (clicks divided by the advertising impressions), and a higher conversion rate from visits through to the desired action you want your audience to take. This will reduce you clients acquisitions costs and allow you to use your budget on the advertising platforms more effectively by targeting conversions happening most often. This way both you and the advertising platforms are happy.

If you would like to know more about paid media you can visit this page.

If you would like to discuss in more detail how to set-up lookalike campaigns, then let’s have a discussion.