How To Use Facebook Lookalike Audiences: A Guide for 2025

Meta Ads (Facebook Ads) have proven to be a powerhouse for marketers to reach their target audience across Meta technologies. These ads help them discover new audiences as well as re-engage existing customers. While the audience pool is vast & finding new customers can be a challenge, Meta helps you curate an audience whose characteristics match with your existing customer base; it’s called the Facebook Lookalike Audience.

These audiences contain customers who are more likely to convert to your Facebook ad campaigns, posts, etc., making selling on Facebook smooth. Meta Business Suite intelligently gathers data and displays your ad campaigns to potential customers who are more likely to click on your ad than someone who is not inclined towards your business’s niche.

We have created this guide to help you understand lookalike audiences, their creation process, and how you can use them. It explains Meta lookalike audiences in depth so that you can utilize them to your advantage. 

Let’s get cracking!

What Are Facebook Lookalike Audiences?

Lookalike audiences in a nutshell:

On Facebook, a lookalike audience has characteristics and interests similar to those of your existing customer base and is created to reach more customers who are potentially interested in your brand. 

This customer base is derived from your custom audiences, a group of customers who have interacted with your business through various mediums across Meta. 

Lookalike audiences help garner more traction. It’s an excellent opportunity to expand your reach beyond the existing customers, paving the way to increased ROAS and brand awareness. 

How Do Facebook Lookalike Audiences Work?

When a lookalike audience is created, a lot goes on the backend. Facebook utilizes an algorithm that tracks and understands the characteristics of your source audience and tries to generate a similar audience. The algorithm extracts data from the demographics, activities, behaviors, and interests of the source audience. 

This data comes from the following sources: 

1. Customers’ interactions with your ad campaigns, online store, product pages, video views, lead forms, accessing Shops, etc. 
2. Customer events generated by Facebook Pixel. These events include viewing a product, adding it to a cart, purchasing it, etc., on your e-commerce website.  
3. Followers on your Facebook Business Page who like, share, and comment on your posts. 

What’s A Source Audience?

A source audience is a compiled list of 1000 to 5000 customers of your best buyers/customers. This list is used as the primary list to create a lookalike audience 

To have the highest-quality lookalike audience, ensure that you add the highest-quality customers (your ideal customer base) to this list. 

Additionally, you should know that Facebook automatically updates Lookalike Audiences.

Automatic Updates For Facebook Lookalike Audiences:

Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences are designed to automatically update. When using Pixel data (data collected from Facebook Pixel), Facebook refreshes your Lookalike Audience based on events tracked over the past 180 days. This means that each time a user performs an action—such as visiting a page, adding an item to the cart, or making a purchase—Facebook adjusts the audience to reflect these recent behaviors. 

In the case of Value-Based Lookalike Audiences, audiences are continually refined based on recent customer activity, emphasizing the most valuable behaviors over the last 60 days.

As a Facebook seller, you might be interested in: A Beginner’s guide to how to sell on Facebook How to use Meta Business Suite

How Will Creating A Facebook Lookalike Audience Help?

Facebook lookalike audience is a gift to advertisers. It benefits them a great deal by offering the following benefits:

1. Creating Lookalike Audiences expands your reach by finding the right audience suitable for your brand. This boosts the conversion rates and enhances ad targeting.
   
2. Using this feature strategically will help you improve your return on investment (ROI) and ad spend (ROAS). This way, you easily evade spending on customers who may not fit the ideal customer category.
   
3. Generating this audience saves you time by eliminating the need to search for customers on your own. The algorithm doesn’t make assumptions about who the target audience is; instead, it creates the audience based on actual data from the existing targeting audience.
   
4. When creating your audience, you can choose the size of your Lookalike Audiences. Smaller audiences closely match your source audience, while larger ones increase your reach but are less similar. This flexibility lets you experiment with both your Lookalike Audiences and your ads.
   
5. Using lookalike audience list increases the chances of a conversion happening.
   

Facebook Lookalike Audiences Example

Suppose you own an e-commerce store that deals in vintage watches. You have a good base of 3,000 customers. Now, it is time to look for new individuals who may also be interested in buying vintage watches.  

This is where you can use Lookalike Audiences. Based on your source audience data of 3,000 customers, the algorithm will start searching for individuals who share similar interests in watches, and Facebook will curate the audience for you. 

This way, you can easily boost your reach and find the right audience, filled with potential leads who will engage with your brand and may even become customers.

What Do You Need To Create A Facebook Lookalike Audience? 

Here are the key terms and assets you should know before building your audience:

Source Audience

A source audience (also called a seed audience) is the group used to create a Lookalike Audience. You can generate up to 500 Lookalike Audiences from one source audience. While using a source audience, you must include at least 100 individuals from a single country.

A source audience is usually made from a custom audience. 

Custom Audiences

A custom audience comprises individuals who have engaged with your business, allowing you to direct ads specifically to them. You can build these custom audiences using information from:

• E-commerce website
• App activity
• Customer databases – email list & customer list
• Offline activity
• Lead forms
• Video views 
• Instagram account
• Facebook Page
• More.

You can create up to 500 custom audiences per ad account.

Using it, you can create ads tailored to specific groups, retarget Facebook ads to customers who have interacted with your business, and promote new products to your existing customers and email lists, enabling advertisers to create custom audiences by uploading customer data.

Custom Audiences play a key role in the creation of Meta Lookalike Audiences. 

Facebook (Meta) Pixel

Facebook Pixel must be set up when creating Lookalike Audiences. Pixel gathers information of the customers’ events (activities performed on your website, product page, adding items to cart, purchasing, etc). In terms of Facebook lookalike audiences, the pixel is used to find new customers based on the customer events of your existing customers. This helps in creating value-based source which creates lookalike audience based on pixel data.

An Understanding of iOS 14+ Block Restrictions

In April 2021, Apple’s initiative to protect user privacy put advertising on Meta in jeopardy. Facebook marketers had many questions, one of which included, ‘Are Facebook Lookalike Audiences going away?’ 

Here’s what they have to say about it in their help article: 

Now, keep in mind that these restrictions will only affect customer lists, email lists, and website conversions take place outside of Meta’s domain (these are discussed later).  

The custom audience created using Meta’s sources will not be affected by these. 

While these are seen as havoc for marketers, Facebook has provided solutions to fix this one right up: 

1. In addition to the customer list, email list, and website conversions, you can generate new leads using Meta’s sources: Video, Lead Forms, Instagram Account, Facebook Page, etc.
   
2. Use Aggregated Event Measurement for website conversions. In the case of website conversion campaigns, no setup is required. However, if you’re using it for app re-engagement campaigns, check if your app is eligible for it.
   
3. Use alternative targeting strategies such as using broad audiences or targeting expansion.
   
4. Use Conversion API (CAPI) to bypass iOS 14+ restrictions. CAPI helps send events to Facebook via a server rather than a browser pixel and offers more accurate conversion tracking than browser-based pixel tracking.
   
5. Expand your audience size while creating lookalike audiences. Choose the “2% or above” percentage range to track more customers (explained in detail later). 
6. Use first-party data (information collected directly from users) to create precise lookalike audiences. You can collect data from customer interactions on the website, purchase histories, and engagement metrics.  This practice results in improved personalization, and reduced dependency on third-party data.

How To Create A Lookalike Audience On Facebook?

Let’s learn how you can create a Lookalike Audience with the source audience. Follow the steps below:

Step 1: Keep Your Source Audience Ready

There are several ways you can create a custom audience source based on your requirement. Here’s a list of all the different ways you can create a custom audience source:

Your Sources	Meta Sources
1. Website 2. Customer List 3. App Activity 4. Offline Activity 5. Catalogue	1. Video 2. Instagram account 3. Lead form 4. Events 5. Instant Experience 6. Facebook Page 7. Shopping 8. On-Facebook listings

Note: We shall focus on the most important types of custom audiences in this blog that are best for creation and how certain settings play a major role in the tracking of customers to build a lookalike audience. Let’s begin: 

Customer List 

The most common and important way to create a custom audience is to use a customer list. A customer list is important because it contains the data of those customers who have made a purchase in the past, interacted with your ads and pages, and made successful conversions.

This is the main list of customers that can be uploaded through MailChimp, downloaded as a template, or used in a file format like .csv/.txt or CRM.

To create a customer list, do the following:

• Go to Ads Manager > Audiences > Create custom audience > Customer list.
  
• Then select the list type if your file contains customer values such as customers’ spending. If you have important values, choose yes; otherwise, choose no. Next, upload your customer file.
  
• Match the uploaded data with Meta’s identifiers. Check the dropdown if you want to change the identifier. When Meta is not able to map the data, it will alert you under ‘Action needed’ and ask you if the identifier is mapped correctly.
  
  Always provide accurate information to have a better match rate in order to advertise to the right audience. The more information you provide, the better Meta can analyze and display ads to the targeted customers.
  
• Click done, and your customer list will be ready!

Another important source audience is your customer email list. An email list also contains interested customers who have subscribed to your newsletters and engaged with your brand. This way, it gets easier to create segmented lookalike audiences. 

The process of creating an email list is similar, with a file containing your customers’ email details. Ensure the Meta identifier maps the email addresses to the ‘Email’ identifier. 

Pro Tip: As a good practice, ensure your primary customer list and email list are not in one file but are two separate files in order to avoid any confusion.

Website Conversion 

This tracks the number of visits to your online store. To create it, go to Custom Audiences, and under ‘Your sources,’ select ‘Website.’

• For this, you need to create and activate your Meta pixel to track the customer events (activities). 

• Add the longest audience retention, as it will be easier for Meta to accumulate customer data. The more customers you have in your source audience, the more accurate the tracking will be. Look at it this way: 
  
  – 5 Customers – Meta won’t be able to analyze sufficient data
  – 100 Customers – Medium tracking 
  – 10,000 Customers – More accurate tracking
  
• You can even focus on specific parts of your webpage to track audiences or the time they spend on your website.

Using this, you can customize the tracking and get the results you want. In the image below, notice how well you can help with filtering the process. – 

For specific webpages: 

For time spent –

This will tailor the tracking process and give you more accurate results from customers who have taken specific actions. Instead of tracking everyone’s events, it focuses on what pages they visited and how much time they spent.

Pro Tip: Choose a higher number of days for audience retention. Selecting shorter days (like a week) may not fetch optimal results, and your lookalike audiences may not contain high-value leads. Try to keep the retention time for more than a month.

These conversions take place outside of the platform. Next, we will see how to create a source audience using ‘Meta sources.’

Using Meta Sources

There are many ways you can use Meta’s sources to create a source audience. We will only cover the most prominent ones in this blog: 

• Video: A source audience can be created by utilizing video viewers’ data. This is done by tracking the time they spend watching your videos on Facebook. 

Notice the time and percentage allotted for viewing. Now, you need to strategically plan this. 

As a rule of thumb, if their retention is less than 10 seconds, they are probably skimming through or are not interested. Keep in mind:

• If your video is long (say, 15-20 minutes), you may want to select viewers who viewed it at least 25%. If it’s short (like 10-30 seconds long), you can opt for a shorter value like 5-10 seconds.
• If the video is an hour long, you may have to adjust the time accordingly and analyze whether the viewer will be able to cross the 25% mark.
• If their retention is above 25% (95% being the ideal rate), then they can be considered under the interested group.  

The time percentage depends on the length of the video–the higher the percentage, the more accurate the tracking of interested customers will be. 

Next, select the video on which you wish to record the tracking events and create a custom audience. 

• Lead Forms: These are instant forms that gather information based on the data filled in by the lead (customer). You can filter the custom audience based on the event type: 

Lead forms are another great way to find interested customers since they’ve interacted with these forms. 

• Instagram Account: If you have a professional Instagram account, tracking events on it will become smoother. Select your professional account and select the event you wish to choose: 

You can make it more specific by choosing a different event. In this case, you can opt for “Everyone who engaged” since this will help build a bigger source audience. Keep the retention for 365 days for maximum outcome. 

• Facebook Page: Customers who interact with your Facebook Page can be counted as a good source audience. It also offers various events that you can choose from for either broad or specific data collection. 

These are some of the ways to set custom audiences and select them as the source. In the next section, we shall see how to set the source audience on Ads Manager. 

Step 2: Choose Your Source Audience On Meta Ads Manager

A source audience must contain at least 100 people in order to create a lookalike audience. It comprises your custom audience and value-based source, which usually contains the different pixels you’ve created for event tracking. 

Note: You can create a value-based lookalike audience using sources like a mobile app, Meta pixel, SDK, catalog, or a custom audience with customer lifetime value. For example, using your Meta pixel as a source can automatically generate a lookalike audience based on your highest-value customers. A standard lookalike audience only finds people similar to your overall customer base. To create a value-based lookalike audience, ensure your source audience includes customer value data. Your audience will be listed under ‘All Audiences.’ In the Availability column, it will say Populating until ready.

Now, let’s delve into how to find the source audience: 

1. Go to Meta Ads Manager and locate Audiences on the left navigation panel.
   

1. Choose the list that you wish to use as your source audience. For this, ensure you have a custom audience or any other source like Pixel (as a value-based source) ready.

If you wish to form a new source audience, select ‘Create new source’ and generate a new custom audience. Follow the prompts, and your custom audience will be ready.

If you’re using a value-based source, you must select an event with value. Something like this: 

Note: When using pixels as the source, remember that some individuals may not be using iOS 14.5+ devices, which can affect your ad campaigns.

Step 3: Select Audience Location

Click on ‘Browse’ and select the countries or regions you want.  

You can also opt for regions based on different criteria:

• Free Trade Areas: It is a group of countries that have signed an agreement to reduce or eliminate trade barriers. These trade barriers include quotas and tariffs.
• App Store Regions: These are the different areas where you can buy apps based on the country or region set in your Apple ID. The App Store is available in 175 regions and 40 languages. 
• Emerging Markets: Countries that are emerging and moving from the development stage to the developed stage.
• Euro Area: Member countries that are part of the European Union (EU) and that use euros as their currency. 

Step 4: Select Audience Size

This is the most crucial part of setting up a Lookalike Audience. When you select the source audience, you’ll see a percentage range that determines how your Lookalike Audience will look like. 

This percentage range decides how closely the Lookalike Audience mirrors the traits of the source audience. Choosing a lower percentage (such as 1% or 2%) makes sure that the lookalike audience will be more like the original source audience. Larger percentages (such as 7% to 10%) will create bigger and broader audiences. 

In short, the percentage represents how closely the Lookalike Audience matches your source audience in terms of characteristics and behaviors. 

So, in order to choose the right percentage, understand what each percentage means.

1% Lookalike Audience

As mentioned earlier, it is the closest to your source audience. This one represents the 1% of the overall population in the chosen country or region. 

The size varies by country, but it usually ranges from a few 100,000 to a million.

2% to 10% Lookalike Audience

As the number increases, the audience capacity increases but becomes less similar to the source audience. For example, a 2% range will become less similar than a 1% range, but it will be more similar than a 10% range. 

The size of the lookalike audience increases with the increasing percentage range. A 10% range will encapsulate the maximum number of individuals, depending upon the country or region. 

Number of Individuals 

In the image above, we have selected Canada, Mexico, and the United States as the focus countries for our audience creation, totaling approximately 4.4 million. Remember, each country has different values. 

This is the number of people covered in these countries. When you select the next percentage range, the amount will double. 

So, if 1% amounts to 4.4 million, then 2% will be 8.8 million and so on.

Pro Tip: When picking the percentage, think about the balance between how closely your audience matches and how many customers you reach. A smaller percentage targets a more specific audience, while a larger percentage reaches more customers but may be less precise.

As you scroll down, you’ll notice a summary of your new lookalike audience. Note that in the image below, the ‘Test Audience’ is the name of the custom audience that we are using as our source audience. 

Now that you have set everything and decided on the percentage range, it’s time to save the changes and finally hit the ‘Create Audience’ button.

And your lookalike audience is ready!

Step 5: Add Lookalike Audiences To Ad Campaigns

You can add the lookalike audience while creating an ad set for Facebook ads. When you click ‘+Create’ in the Campaigns section of the Ads Manager, you will be asked to select a campaign objective. Click any objective to proceed to the ad set: 

When you reach the ad set, enter all the necessary information about your ad campaign. When you reach ‘Audience,’ scroll down a little and locate Create new audience. Then, find ‘Custom Audiences.’

Under ‘Custom Audiences,’ click on the search bar and select ‘Lookalike Audience.’

Select your audience, and you’re good to go!

Now, keep in mind that you do not want to modify the Age, Gender, and Detailed Targeting sections, as they can narrow down your search even more. If you wish to narrow it down, feel free to do so to make it more specific or if the source audience lacks a representative identifier. 

Otherwise, it’s best to leave it untouched, as your lookalike audience is already doing the job for you. 

Bonus: You can even use Advantage Lookalike from the Meta Advantage+ Suite. It will help you scale your reach and offer advanced marketing tools.

Proceed with finishing up your ad set and click publish to make it go live. This is how your ads will reach customers who match your existing audience’s interests and demographics and generate new leads. 

Manage your Facebook product feeds and use them for running ad campaigns with lookalike audiences.

Important Key Points About Meta Lookalike Audiences

Make a note of these points as you create your lookalike audience: 

• You can create multiple lookalike audiences, which is 500 lookalike audiences per source audience, based on your requirements. You can create it for different products, different ad campaigns, etc.
  
  However, you can only use one lookalike audience at the time of creating an ad set.
  
• Here’s how you should prioritize ‘Your sources’ and ‘Meta sources’ while choosing the ‘custom audience source.’ –

1. Customer List > 2. Email List > 3. Website Conversion > 4. Video > 5. Lead Forms > 6. Instagram account > 7. Facebook Page > the rest. 

• Facebook states that ‘Targeting options are limited for audiences that include people under the age of 18 in most countries, under 20 in Thailand, and under 21 in Indonesia.’
  
• The audiences you create are separate, so they won’t overlap. This means you don’t need to exclude similar audiences, making your targeting clearer and your ads more effective. Here’s how you can understand this – The most similar audience (0%-1%), the second most similar audience (1%-3%), and the least similar audience (3%-6%).

Further Reading: Understand how to sell on Facebook Marketplace & who should sell on it.

Bonus: Best Practices For Facebook Lookalike Audiences Bidding

Take your lookalike audience strategy to the next level with the help of advanced options: 

• For initial bids, focus on the same ads for each of the lookalike audiences.
  
• The more similar the lookalike audience is to the source audience, the better the results will be. However, this can change based on the quality of your source audience and the nature of the target audience.
  
• Check the performance of your ads based on revenue per conversion or the lifetime value of the people in every audience. 

• Adjust your bids for each audience according to your insights. Bid higher for more valuable audiences and lower for those that are less valuable.

Conclusion

To summarize, using lookalike audiences is a great way to find new customers who are likely to engage with your ads across Meta. By targeting individuals who share similar traits and behaviors with your existing customers, you can enhance your reach, improve ad performance, and increase conversion rates.

You may also like: Shopify Audiences for Meta campaigns.

FAQs

What is a Facebook Lookalike Audience? 

A Facebook Lookalike Audience (or Meta Lookalike Audience) helps you find new customers who are likely to be interested in your business because they share similar traits with your existing customers. Creating Lookalike Audiences increases your chances of attracting new customers to your online store.

Do Facebook lookalike audiences still work?

Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences remain a valuable tool for advertisers aiming to expand their reach by targeting users similar to their existing customer base. However, it is advisable to use other targeting methods to ensure your campaigns remain effective in reaching your desired audience.

What is a lookalike audience source on Facebook?

A Lookalike Audience source on Facebook, also known as a source audience or seed audience, is the foundational group from which you create a Lookalike Audience. This source consists of individuals who have interacted with your business.

What is the minimum Lookalike Audience size?

The minimum size for a Facebook Lookalike Audience is 100 people from your source audience, such as your customer list or website visitors. However, for optimal results, it’s recommended that at least 1,000 people in the source audience be included to ensure accuracy and effectiveness.

How do Facebook Lookalike Audiences work to enhance targeting for advertising purposes?

Facebook Lookalike Audiences enhance ad targeting by finding users who share similar traits, behaviors, and demographics with your existing customers or leads. Facebook analyzes data from your source audience (like email lists, website visitors, or app users) and identifies common patterns. It then creates a new audience of users who are likely to engage with your ads or convert, improving ad performance and driving more relevant traffic.

What does a 1% Lookalike Audience mean?

A 1% Lookalike Audience consists of the 1% of users in your target country that are most similar to your source audience. It is the smallest and most precise audience size option, designed to closely match your high-value customers. This typically results in a highly relevant audience that is more likely to engage with your ads or convert into customers.

Can you share Lookalike Audiences?

No, Lookalike Audiences cannot be directly shared across different ad accounts or with other businesses. However, if you are working within Facebook Business Manager, you can share the source audience (such as a customer list) that was used to create the Lookalike Audience. The receiving account can then use that source to create their own Lookalike Audience.

How do you select a Lookalike Audience?

To select a Lookalike Audience, start by defining your source audience, such as a customer email list, website visitors, or app users. Then, go to Facebook Ads Manager, choose “Audiences,” and select “Create a Lookalike Audience.” After choosing your source, specify the geographic region and audience size (1% to 10%).

 Can I use multiple Lookalike Audiences for different products? 

Yes, you can create multiple Lookalike Audiences (500 lookalike audiences per source audience) for different products based on different source audiences.

How often should I refresh my Lookalike Audiences on Facebook?

Facebook automatically updates lookalike audiences based on the pixel data, so the changes are reflected without manual interventions. However, some advertisers have observed that automatic updates may not always occur as expected. To ensure your Lookalike Audiences remain current, it’s advisable to periodically refresh them.

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