What Is A Lookalike Audience?

Lookalike Audience: The Modern Method of Advertising At Scale

Lookalike audiences are a modern method of advertising typically associated with Facebook and Google but are used by multiple different platforms, El Toro included. The process for generating lookalike audiences involves taking a list of previous customer data (known as your “base audience”), uploading it to the ad platform and selecting criteria or interests that audience has in common. Based upon the selected criteria, similar consumers are identified within the network of the ad platform.

Using this method allows companies to leverage their existing data to increase advertising effectiveness. The three primary advantages to utilizing lookalike audiences are building larger audiences for scaled reach, netting higher engagement and maintaining proven conversion rates at a higher frequency.

Lookalike Audience for Larger Scale

The first and most obvious advantage of lookalike audiences is more reach. Many companies have trouble identifying prospects to market to outside of their own respective CRMs. Reaching additional prospects in a scaled approach leads to more potential leads and conversions. By expanding your reach, marketers are widening their marketing funnel, leading to greater revenue generating opportunities.

Unlike many methods that increase audience size, this growth is based of an already successful base. Instead of trying to penetrate a new market that you believe to be a good idea, you can increase your market share by targeting high-value consumers.

Higher Engagement Rates

The second advantage of lookalike audiences is higher engagement rates. When you are referencing an audience that is similar to the one you know has proven engagement, your chance of seeing similar engagement in the new audience is much higher than if you were to blindly create a new segment. Higher engagement rates lead to a healthier marketing funnel and improved customer journey, ultimately netting better returns on your ad spend and profits.

If you are producing digital marketing campaigns at scale, lookalike audiences could be the major key to success. If you’re an agency or consulting firm, a client may only have a data list so big. Therefore, targeting similar audiences with the same creatives produces a statistically relevant sample.

For examples of El Toro’s targeting methods, checkout some of our Account Based Marketing techniques on B2B firms.

More Conversions

The third and most important advantage of using lookalike audiences is maintaining proven conversion rates. When utilizing a base audience that has a validated track record of converting, marketers can rest assured that an audience with a similar profile (the lookalike audience) will behave in essentially the same way. This advantage is the primary reason a lookalike audience is one of the most popular segments in marketing.

The idea of focusing on this type of audience capitalizes on marketing towards low hanging fruit. Spending advertising funds on lookalike audiences not only allows you to reach more consumers, it also allows companies to further refine their understanding of their audience.

Lookalike audiences offer a variety of advantages for marketers, the three primarily being scaled audiences, better engagement, and more proven conversion opportunities. When building lookalike audiences, be sure to apply similar content strategies to what you utilized with the base audience - you’ll be sure to have success.

About El Toro

El Toro's ad tech brings the location-specific accuracy of direct mail to digital advertising. Through our patented IP Targeting technology, we target digital ads to your customer by matching their IP address with their physical address, bringing a wide variety of banner and display ads to the sites the targeted customer visits on the Internet.