How can you use lookalike targeting to find new customers in SEM campaigns?

1 What is lookalike targeting?

Lookalike targeting is a type of audience segmentation and targeting that uses data from your existing customers or leads to find new prospects who share similar characteristics, behaviors, or interests. You can create lookalike audiences based on various sources, such as your website visitors, email subscribers, app users, or CRM data. Lookalike targeting is available on most SEM platforms, such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or Bing Ads.

2 Why use lookalike targeting?

Lookalike targeting can provide several advantages for your SEM campaigns, such as expanding your reach by discovering new customers who are likely to be interested in your brand, product, or service. Additionally, you can increase conversions by delivering relevant and personalized ads to new prospects. Furthermore, lookalike targeting can help you optimize your budget by focusing on high-quality leads with a higher lifetime value. This can reduce your cost per acquisition and improve your return on ad spend.

3 How to create lookalike audiences?

To create lookalike audiences, you need to have a source audience that you want to replicate. This source audience should be based on your best customers or leads who have performed a desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up, or downloading. The source audience should also be large enough and representative of your target market. The size and quality of your source audience will affect the accuracy and performance of your lookalike audiences.

Depending on the SEM platform you use, you can create lookalike audiences in different ways. For example, in Google Ads, you can use the Audience Manager tool to create similar audiences based on your remarketing lists, customer match lists, or app analytics data. In Facebook Ads, you can use the Audiences tool to create lookalike audiences based on your custom audiences, pixel data, or app events data. In Bing Ads, you can use the Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag to create remarketing lists and then create similar audiences based on them.

4 How to use lookalike audiences?

Once you have created your lookalike audiences, you can use them in your SEM campaigns to target new prospects who are similar to your source audience. You can combine lookalike audiences with other targeting options, such as keywords, locations, or demographics, or exclude existing customers or leads from your campaigns. To use lookalike audiences effectively, you should test different lookalike audiences based on different sources, sizes, or platforms and segment them based on their similarity to your source audience. Additionally, you should optimize your lookalike audiences by updating your source audience regularly and adding negative keywords or exclusions. Lookalike targeting is a powerful strategy to find new customers in SEM campaigns and can help you boost your results. Try it today!

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?