TikTok has been downloaded more than 4.1 billion times. TikTok, known for its raw and authentic short-form videos, witnessed a 1239.29% user growth rate between 2018 and 2023 in the U.S. alone.
This viral app surpassed all other social media platforms in terms of monthly users and has gone beyond just being an app for entertainment. It’s now an essential tool for marketers. This tool allows marketers to customize segmenting the target audience, thus making it a desirable platform for reaching new customers.
Speaking of reach, you can use TikTok Lookalike Audiences to target audiences with similar characteristics to your existing customers.
In this blog, we will explore TikTok’s lookalike audiences, the process of setting them up, and how to measure the success rate of lookalike audiences.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
Understanding Lookalike Audiences
TikTok Lookalike Audiences is a targeting option for finding audiences that share similar characteristics, interests, and demographics with your business’s existing customers. Creating lookalike audiences will help you reach an audience interested in your business.
To create lookalike audiences, you should have a custom audience. A custom audience is a targeting option for finding an audience that has interacted with your brand or visited the website. Basically, it is the audience that is familiar with your business.
You can create a custom audience through a customer file, app activity, engagement, website traffic, lead generation, and business account audiences.
NOTE🗒️: To target a custom audience, you must have a minimum audience size of 1000.
What is an example of a TikTok Lookalike Audience?
Let’s consider that you own an online electronics store. You’ve seen good results with your past ad campaigns, and hence, you wish to reach more potential customers interested in your products. You can use the lookalike audiences feature to increase conversions. Lookalike audiences resemble your source (or existing) audience. Thus, you can minimize the extra effort and easily filter audiences who are more likely to take action.
If you’re looking to increase sales through TikTok. Here’s a guide to start selling on TikTok.
Types of Lookalike Audiences
There are three types of lookalike audiences in terms of size.
- Broad: With broad lookalike audiences, you can reach more target audiences with moderate similarities between lookalike audiences and source audiences.
- Narrow: Narrow lookalike audiences help you find audiences that are most similar to your source audience. However, compared to Broad or Balanced, Narrow’s number of potential customers is relatively low.
- Balanced: This type helps you find an audience that has a balance between Broad and Narrow.
When to use TikTok Lookalike Audiences?
You can use TikTok lookalike audiences in three phases of your ad group:-
Cold Phase: In the initial phase of your ads when there’s barely any engagement.
Mature Phase: This is a phase where the company has figured out its target audience and customers.
Decline Phase: When the company struggles to make sales due to increased competition or changes in market trends.
You can also optimize TikTok lookalike audiences in these three phases. Moving on, let’s understand how the TikTok algorithm works in creating lookalike audiences.
How Do TikTok Lookalike Audiences Work?
A custom audience is the base for creating lookalike audiences. Ensure you have a custom audience before creating a lookalike audience. TikTok analyzes the custom audience list and examines its attributes, such as location, interests, demographics, and operating system.
Based on these attributes, TikTok automatically finds an audience with these similarities and suggests them to you.
NOTE🗒️: Ensure that the custom audience, which is the source audience for lookalike audiences, has valid and accurate data to produce optimal results.
Setting Up Your First TikTok Lookalike Audience
To create TikTok Lookalike audiences, you need TikTok Ads Manager and a source audience, i.e., a custom audience. Create an account in TikTok Ads Manager, and let’s begin the process.
Go to TikTok Ads Manager
Select “Assets” in the menu at the top. Go to audiences.
Source – Nestscale
Click Create Audience and then choose Lookalike Audience.
Source – Nestscale
You’ll find Source. Click on it, and you’ll see a drop-down menu. Here, you can upload a custom audience.
Source – TikTok
You can create one if you still need to upload a custom audience.
Source – TikTok
Within the “Contain Source” option, choose either “Omit” or “Contain.”
Selecting “Omit” ensures that your Lookalike Audience excludes the Custom Audience, targeting your ads solely to the Lookalike Audience, not the Custom Audience.
Choosing “Contain” incorporates the Custom Audience into your Lookalike Audience, meaning your ads reach both groups.
For “System” options, pick from “All,” “Android,” or “iOS.”
Tipđź’ˇ: To encourage app installs, create different lookalike audiences for each operating system (OS). For instance, if you want your audience to download your Android app, choose Android for your lookalike audience. You can select All for website conversions that are not specific to OS.
Choose your ad placement (options include TikTok and Pangle).
Tipđź’ˇ: Match the ad placement to the custom audience’s source. If your custom audience came from TikTok ads, select TikTok for your lookalike audience placement.
Specify the location to target a similar demographic.
Tipđź’ˇ: Match the Location to your custom audience’s origin for consistent targeting.
In “Audience Size,” opt for “Narrow,” “Balanced,” or “Broad.”
Tipđź’ˇ: A “Narrow” audience size closely matches your Custom Audience source.
Finally, name your audience and hit “Confirm” to finish setting up your Lookalike Audience.
Source – Nestscale
That’s all; you have created TikTok lookalike audiences.
Things To Remember:
- The minimum recommended size of the source audience must be 100.
- ​Creating lookalike audiences takes about 24-48 hours. Before creating lookalike audiences, it shows “Unavailable”.
- ​The Lookalike Audience is auto-refreshed twice weekly once added to the running ad group.
- ​To apply manual refresh, Click “Assets” and go to the “Audiences” section.
- ​You can create up to 400 lookalike audience groups using the same custom audience source.
- In any case, if you delete the source audience and create a lookalike audience from this deleted source, then you cannot refresh the audience.
- ​If the system notices that your lookalike audience is unavailable for refresh, TikTok recommends recreating your lookalike audience.
In this section, we’ve looked into the process of setting up lookalike audiences for your store and some practices to closely consider after creating lookalike audiences.
TikTok Lookalike Audiences Management Options
You have created lookalike audiences and applied them to ad groups. If you wish to change the lookalike audiences, you can manage them in TikTok Ads Manager. Go to Tools—> Audiences—> Actions.
You can manage the following:-
Edit
This tool lets you edit the audience name.
Refresh
There are two types of refresh: Auto and Manual.
- Auto-Refresh
Your Lookalike audiences will be automatically refreshed, and the latest update is in the Availability column in the Audiences section in TikTok Ads Manager.
- Manual Refresh
You can manually refresh the lookalike audience, but TikTok advises against doing so multiple times. If you do so, auto-refresh might not function properly.
Apply Audiences
You can add an audience to an ad group using the tool itself. To do so, visit the Audiences page and click Apply to Ad Group.
When adding an audience to the ad group, remember that you can connect one audience to multiple ad groups but not multiple audiences to multiple ad groups.
You cannot add an audience already in use; to do so, you must change the include and exclude status.
For example, you have added audience A in ad group 1 and ad group 2. If you want to remove audience A in ad groups 1 and 2, you will be prompted to confirm the change of include to exclude.
You can share the audience with your business account.
Omit
If you want to delete a lookalike audience, disconnect it from the ad group and then delete it.
Disconnect With Audience Groups
Suppose you wish to disconnect an unused audience ( not delete it). To do that, visit the Audience details page. On this page, click on the ad group for which you want to disconnect the audience.
Audience Details
Click on the lookalike audience name for details about the audience. This page has details such as audinece_id, name, and type.
Applied Details: This option displays the current connections between the audience and ad groups.
Audience History: This option displays the history of changes, such as creating and editing the audience.
These are the various ways you can manage your lookalike audiences. Now, let’s understand the metrics that define the success rate of implementing them.
Measure the Success Of Lookalike Audience
You can view ad performance in TikTok Analytics.
In the analytics section, you can view data in the dashboard and under the campaign page.
To get detailed insights, Go to TikTok Ads Manager → Analytics → Campaign.
On the campaign page, you can view data, apply filters, enable customizations, and more.
View Data
You can view the data for each ad campaign, ad group, and ad. You can change the date and time and select dimensions to gain insights into the data.
You can select dimensions such as total cost, impressions, clicks, conversions, click rate, conversion rate, Cost-Per-Click (CPC), Cost Per Mille (CPM), conversion cost, and more.
Apply Filters
Filter Option is available for TikTok Ads Manager Pro, and this feature enables users to narrow down based on criteria and combine multiple criteria. You can also save the custom filters for future purposes.
Enable Customizations
This customization option allows you to rearrange the columns according to appearance using drag-and-drop. This will help you get greater visibility over essential data.
Breakdown and Time Comparison
Users can further break down the data daily, hourly, or monthly. The compare option allows users to compare results between two time ranges.
With these key metrics, you can better understand your ad performance when you target an audience through a lookalike audience. Apart from this you can also install TikTok Pixel on your Shopify store to track data.
We’re now moving on to understanding the best practices for maximizing impact through TikTok Lookalike Audiences.
Best Practices for Maximizing Engagement
We have curated a list of best practices for you to follow to make the best use of TikTok Lookalike Audiences.
- Segment your custom audience by attributes such as demographics and interests or based on their purchase behavior. This will allow you to create a specific lookalike audience.
- Be open to experimenting with multiple lookalike audiences. For example, you can start with narrow lookalike audiences to gather the closest match to the source audience and gradually increase the size to broad to capture a larger audience.
- Remember to keep updating your lookalike audiences to stay current with the changing customer preferences.
- A/B Test your ad creatives, copies, and Call to Action(CTA) until you understand your audience’s choice.
- Optimize the Lookalike Audience throughout your ads campaign’s phases, such as cold, mature, and decline.
- Adjust the size and similarity settings to balance reach and precision. The smaller the audience, the higher the chances of engagement.
- Choose the best-performing source audience to create a lookalike audience.
Conclusion
If you already use TikTok for marketing, we urge you to try TikTok Lookalike Audience. Lookalike Audiences improve the effectiveness of your ad campaigns through specific and relevant targeting. Personalizing your targeting increases the chances of conversions by pushing ads to audiences more likely to buy your product.
This blog can be an excellent start for you to add TikTok Lookalike Audiences to your marketing strategy.
FAQs
What is a TikTok lookalike audience?
A TikTok lookalike audience resembles your existing audience regarding behaviors, interests, and demographics, helping you reach new people likely to be interested in your business.
How do TikTok lookalike audiences benefit marketers?
They allow marketers to expand their reach beyond their existing customer base, targeting users who share similar characteristics with their current audience, which can lead to higher engagement rates and conversions.
What do I need to create a TikTok lookalike audience?
You need a source audience and an account in TikTok Ads Manager.
How can I create a TikTok lookalike audience?
You can create TikTok lookalike audiences in TikTok Ads Manager. Below is the step-by-step process.
Go to the Assets section and click Audiences. Click Create Audience and select Lookalike Audience. Click on Source, and a drop-down menu will appear. Then, choose the Custom Audience. Select either Omit or Contain (omit: to exclude custom audience and contain: to include custom audience). Select one of the OS options: All, Android, or iOS. Select the Ad Placement. Select the Location to find a similar audience to the source audience. Under Audience Size, select either Narrow, Balanced, or Broad. Lastly, name your audience and click confirm to create your Lookalike Audience.
How long does it take for a TikTok lookalike audience to be created?
The creation process can vary, but TikTok typically takes 24-48 hours to generate a lookalike audience after you’ve set it up in the Ads Manager.
Can I use multiple source audiences to create a TikTok lookalike audience?
Yes, TikTok allows you to combine multiple source audiences to create a more comprehensive lookalike audience.
How do I measure the success of my TikTok lookalike audience campaigns?
Measure success through key performance indicators (KPIs) such as engagement rates, click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and return on ad spend (ROAS) to understand how effectively your lookalike audience is driving your marketing objectives.
What is a lookalike audience TikTok?
TikTok’s lookalike audience is the audience that shares similar interests, behaviors, and demographics with existing customers.
What is TikTok’s lookalike audience size?
The minimum size of the source audience is 100 to create TikTok lookalike audiences.
