Social marketers around the world love marketing with Facebook, primarily because of the numerous social targeting options that the company provides to them. The company offers marketers far more than its targeting options, but it is through targeting that Facebook has really had the opportunity to shine among other social marketing platforms. Even though marketers are quite content with what Facebook offers to them now, the company is now announcing another new targeting option, before advertisers even get a chance to get used to the current options. The new option that Facebook has just announced is called “lookalike audiences,” and Facebook says it will help businesses, “helps businesses reach new customers and grow their businesses.”
The company began testing these new “lookalike audiences” just a few weeks ago, and it seems they are quite confident with the feature working out well, as they should be. The feature will allow advertisers not more reach, but a more focused and essentially relevant audience. The company reported in their announcement that the new feature performed quite well in both online and offline situations during the testing period.
How It Works
If you use Facebook’s targeting options, then you are probably familiar with the custom audiences feature that Facebook launched late last year. As a refresher, custom audiences is a feature that lets businesses use a list of current customers to target ads to specific Facebook users that have already shown enough interest in the business to actually become a customer. This feature has proven that it can only go so far in gaining more customers and it is for this reason that “lookalike audiences” were created. They serve as a new level to custom audiences, allowing advertisers to expand using their customer lists.
As the name suggests, the feature will allow marketers to target more Facebook users based on the information that current customers provide.
Now with lookalike audiences, Facebook can use attributes like interests or demographics and show ads to people who share common attributes as their existing customers. Advertisers can serve any type of Facebook ad to these new groups of people potential customers.
Facebook reports that for some direct response companies, success with “lookalike audiences” has been seen through things like lower cost per checkout, lower cost per acquisition, larger purchase sizes, and faster, larger ROIs. This is quite a step up from what custom audiences currently offer for advertisers, which is cause for a bit of excitement.
Facebook says that the new “lookalike audiences” feature will be available to advertisers in the power editor this week.
Interest based targeting is rapidly growing in popularity, especially with social marketers. It provides a way for marketers to show relevant ads to the right audiences, which is quite important. Consumers tend to only pay attention to ads when they are interested in the content, and the new feature will allow advertisers to give them just that. To see what the feature will look like in power editor, you can visit the company’s announcement page, or simply wait to try it our yourself.
