Lookalike audience

A lookalike audience is an audience that a platform such as Meta automatically builds from people who closely resemble a group you supply, for example your best customers or your website visitors. The algorithm looks for new people with similar characteristics and behavior, so you expand your reach without losing relevance.

How is a lookalike created?

You always start from a source audience, usually a custom audience of customers or visitors built via the Meta pixel. The platform analyzes what those people have in common and looks for similarities. The stronger and purer your source audience, the better the lookalike. If you feed in a list of your actual customers rather than random visitors, the algorithm finds people who most closely resemble them.

Why it works

A lookalike lets you scale beyond the people you already know, while staying close to your target audience. It is therefore a logical next step once retargeting and custom audiences are exhausted, and generally more targeted than broad behavioral targeting.

The B2B nuance

In B2B, the quality of your source is everything. A lookalike based on everyone who ever visited your site yields a vague group. A lookalike based on your actual customers or qualified leads yields people who resemble your ideal customer. The goal remains an inquiry or contact, not a webshop sale. At Customer Impact we therefore feed lookalikes with data that is really about revenue, so that growth in reach also means growth in qualified leads and not just more cheap clicks.