Expand your reach: How to create a lookalike audience from an audience segment

Lookalike (LAL) audiences simplify ad targeting on platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter, giving you the ability to target a group of people who look like your existing customer base or following. 

The algorithms ad platforms use to build lookalike audiences are trained to find common attributes and behaviors in your existing audience. These data points are then used to build a net-new audience of people who ‘look’ similar to your original audience.

This is far more accurate and less time-consuming than having a human do the work themselves, and generally leads to an increase in conversions, higher-quality leads, and less ad wastage.  

In this article, we’ll share five examples of custom audiences that can be built in Ortto, synced with your ad platforms and used to lookalike audiences that make sense for your goals. 

5 goals-based lookalike audiences worth testing 

Lookalike audiences can be used for any campaign type. As long as you are feeding your advertising platform the right first-party data, the algorithm will have everything it needs to build an audience worth targeting.

With Ortto’s robust filtering capabilities, there are infinite possibilities available when it comes to building segments. Success lies in articulating your goal and identifying the filters that will give you a relevant audience.

Below, we’ve outlined some examples of custom audiences based on specific campaign goals that can be used as source data for your lookalike campaigns. We’ve also provided examples of how these audiences could be built in Ortto and some tips for creative and messaging.

These should be viewed as a starting point — you’ll be able to layer additional data points according to your business and soon enough you’ll find new opportunities to use lookalikes to grow. 

1. Expanding your footprint

If you’re expanding your footprint to a new region, using lookalike targeting can be a great way to build awareness with customers who look similar to your existing top-performing customers but reside in a different country or region. 

Your existing audience will need to be large enough (minimum 1,000 people) to support this effort, so play around with filters like MRR or engagement scores to ensure you have a sizable audience the algorithm can work with. 

If you don’t already have a segment of your top-performing customers, head over to your Ortto account and select some filters that represent high-performance to your business. This could be:

• Active users

• MRR is above $X

• Product engagement score is 4+

• Customer for X years

Make sure to select the button to sync this audience with your ad platforms of choice. Once that’s done you’ll find the synced audience in your ad platform, and can then add additional targeting for the relevant geographic region/s. 

Tips for creative and messaging: When you’re expanding your footprint, you’ll be reaching a lot of people who have never heard of your brand before. Use your creative and messaging to educate them on who you are, and call out things like free and fast shipping to their region or customer support availability in their timezone to overcome any hesitations.  

If you need to translate your advertising copy to another language, bring a translator on board to translate from scratch or check the work of automatic online translations. This will help ensure your message matches your intention. 

2. Increasing customer lifetime value 

Increasing customer lifetime value (CLV) is top of mind for many marketers in 2023, especially in the B2B/SaaS space. If that’s you, rather than thinking ‘as many leads as possible’ focus on ‘the best leads possible.’ 

In this instance, you want to create an audience segment of your high-CLV customers to use as source data for a lookalike campaign. To do this, use filters like: 

• Total orders are greater than 10 

• Engagement score is 4 stars or above

• Lifetime value is greater than $1,000 

• Average order is greater than $100 

Select to sync this audience to Facebook, Google, and/or Twitter, save, and you’ll be ready to use it when building lookalike audiences in the platform. 

Tips for creative and messaging: Loyal, high-value customers are less swayed by discount-driven creative and messaging, and more focused on quality, an incredible customer experience, and a strong brand story. 

3. Growing your email list

Most brands today have a newsletter or other regular email send out. Growing this list of subscribers could become a critical part of bringing more leads into the funnel. 

Bringing in any old subscriber with tempting offers or sweepstakes may work in the short term, but long term you want to ensure you are building an audience of people who are actively engaged with your sends. Otherwise, you risk harming your email deliverability or creating a leaky funnel. 

Instead, you could use lookalike targeting to reach people who look similar to your existing subscriber base. 

In this example, there are two options:

1. If the subscriber database is on the smaller size, use your entire ‘Newsletter subscribers’ audience segment to target people who are similar to your subscribers.

2. If your subscriber database is large, create an ‘Engaged newsletter subscriber’ audience by using the filters ‘Subscribed to newsletter’ and ‘Opened newsletter in the last 90 days’ and/or ‘Clicked newsletter in the last 90 days’ to create an audience of engaged subscribers. This will help you narrow in on an audience that is more likely to both subscribe and engage with your emails. 

Tips for creative and messaging: Reach out to a few highly-engaged subscribers and ask them for a short quote on why they love your newsletter, you can use this social proof to convince more subscribers to sign up. 

If you don’t have social proof available, focus on what your newsletter subscribers will get from their subscription and be specific. Rather than, ‘trend predictions’ say ‘We accurately predicted 12 of the biggest social media trends in 2022. Don’t miss out on our predictions for 2023.’ 

4. Moving a specific product

Maybe you’re a DTC food company and you have a product that is nearing its expiration date. Or you’re a clothing retailer and you’ve still got large numbers of bikinis in stock when winter is just a month away. 

Whatever product you’re looking to move, creating an audience of repeat customers who purchased (for example) a bikini and using it as the custom audience for a lookalike campaign will help you get it out the door. 

Your filters could look something like this: 

• Ordered product has occurred where the URL starts with www.example.com/bikinis

• # total orders is greater than 2 

Tips for creative and messaging: This campaign is all about moving product, while bringing in new customers who may be more likely to repeat purchases. In other words, your primary goal is conversions. 

Offer a discount and shout about things like free shipping and returns to help nudge this audience to purchase, and focus on what makes this one product superior. Once they convert, then you can do the work of nurturing and retargeting to entice them to buy again. 

Playbook

Shopify nudge to second order

Use this template

5. Releasing a new product or feature

Naturally, you will want to advertise your new product to your existing customers using, initially, organic tactics like email and social media announcements and, later, retargeting campaigns.

But your new product release is also an opportunity to reach an entirely new audience. You’ve got something to shout about and you’ve probably invested in some creative to explain the product or feature. It’s the perfect opportunity to get in front of a new audience. 

For example, if a SaaS project management tool has just launched a new feature that helps customers find freelance creative talent and they want to use it to attract new customers they could create an audience segment with filters like: 

• Engaged user

• Industry is creative agency or marketing 

• AND Has viewed page www.example.com/freelance-finder

• OR Has participated in beta test

• OR Clicked announcement email 

Now you have a segment of existing customers who are more likely to be interested in the new offering, and you can use it to target a net new audience set with similar attributes.

Tips for creative and messaging: Unlike your existing audience, your lookalikes will not be familiar with your brand or product, so you will need to add some context about who you are. 

A testimonial from a beta tester will go a long way to demonstrate the value of the new feature. The added benefit here is your beta tester will have experience with the rest of your product and can hint at the power of the full suite. 

Creating and syncing audience segments for lookalike audiences with Ortto 

The first step is to make sure your Facebook, Google, and Twitter business accounts are integrated with your Ortto account.

Next, create your desired audience by filtering your audience in the People section of the platform, or from the audiences page. Follow the instructions below to create your audience, using the five examples above as inspiration for your filtering: 

1. Use filters to find the segment of people you want to save as an audience. People who meet these criteria now are added immediately, and anyone who matches in the future will also automatically enter. 

2. Click next. Give the audience a name and select an icon, then scroll down and check the boxes to sync the audience with Facebook ads and/or Google ads. 

3. Click Create to complete the audience setup

Your source audience will need to include at least 100 people from a single country, and it is recommended that it contains at least 1,000 people. It can include up to 50,000 people. You can create up to 500 lookalike audiences from a single source audience, so this effort will not be wasted. 

In Facebook, Google, and Twitter ad accounts, the Ortto audience will show with ‘Synced with Ortto audience’ sub-text so you can quickly and easily identify your audience segments in the platform.

On Facebook your audience will be viewable in the audience section of your ads account (look under the ‘all tools’ hamburger menu). 

On Google, navigate to Google Ads account, go to tools, then settings and you will see your audience manager where your Ortto synced audiences live. 

On Twitter, go to your Ads and head to the Audiences tab to view details about the audience, you’ll see the ‘Synced with Ortto audience’ text on all of your Ortto audiences.

Now, you can set up your lookalike audiences by following the instructions below.

Setting up a lookalike audience in Facebook

Open up Meta Business Suite and follow these steps:

1. Go to Create Audience and select Lookalike Audience

2. Select the custom audience you would like to base your lookalike audience on by choosing the synced audience from your Ortto platform

3. Choose the country or countries you’d like to target

4. Select your audience size by dragging the lever. A 1% audience size range will target people who are very similar to your lookalike source. As you increase the percentage, you increase the audience size, but the matching details become less precise. Different audiences will have different specificity requirements, it’s all about finding a large enough audience size without going too far from your source data

5. Click Create Audience and wait for your lookalike audience to be created. This could take up to a day, but it will refresh every 3-7 days if you are continuously running ads targeting your lookalike audience. 

Setting up a lookalike audience in Google

In Google, lookalike audiences are called Similar Audiences and they can be used across the display network, search network, YouTube, Gmail, App and Discovery ads. To set up your campaign, sign in to your Google Ads account and follow the instructions below: 

1. From the navigation bar on the left, click on any campaign you want to add Similar Audience targeting to

2. From the page menu to the right, click Audiences

3. Click the pencil icon

4. In the Edit audiences section, click Select an ad group or the pencil icon 

5. In the All audiences box, click Remarketing and similar audiences

6. Find the Ortto synced audience segment you wish to base your lookalike audience on

7. Click save 

Once this is set up, you can select to use smart bidding (tCPA or tROAS) to show your ads to the likeliest buyers. 

Setting up a lookalike audience in Twitter

Open your Twitter ads account and follow these steps: 

1. Go to Create campaign

2. Choose your objective and click Next 

3. Name your campaign, choose your funding source, and set any other advanced campaign details and click next

4. Complete your ad group details as required

5. When you get to the Custom audiences section, look under List for your Ortto synced lists and select the relevant list 

6. Check the box ‘Include look-alikes of your selected custom audience’

7. Finishing setting up your campaign, click next and you’ll be ready to start your campaign 

The final word 

Lookalike audiences take the hassle out of building audiences to target, but feeding the algorithm the right source data is crucial for success. 

Ortto’s simple filtering and segmentation capabilities make building custom audience segments simple, and our no-code integrations with ad platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google ensure the source audience you’re working with is always up to date

Sign up to Ortto for free today to start building more powerful audience segments.