Create a lookalike audience
A lookalike is how you clone your best customers at scale. Meta studies a source audience you already own and finds users who behave like them in a country you choose, from a 1 percent tight match (smallest reach) to a 10 percent loose one (largest reach). The quality of the output is decided entirely by the quality of the source you feed it.
Source requirements
The source audience must contain at least 100 people from a single country to be usable as a seed. Meta recommends a source of 1,000 to 5,000; practitioners typically cite 5,000 to 50,000 as the practical sweet spot.
Above 50,000 source members, modeling sees diminishing returns. Segment by value tier instead (top-LTV customers, top-decile spenders).
Source quality matters more than size. A smaller list of high-LTV buyers outperforms a larger list of newsletter signups.
The 1 to 10 percent scale
1 percent equals the most similar match and the smallest reach. 10 percent equals the loosest match and the largest reach. The percentage is of the chosen country's Meta-eligible population, not your customer base.
A 1 percent lookalike in the US is still around 2.5 million people. Many advertisers confuse '1 percent' with a tightly targeted niche.
Every lookalike is country-specific. You must specify the target geography at creation time.
Advantage+ Lookalike
Advantage+ Lookalike lets Meta automatically expand beyond the set similarity percentage when it predicts better performance. It is now the default for most performance goals.
Meta is steering advertisers from manual lookalikes toward Advantage+ Audience, which does not require a manually defined source. Manual lookalikes still work; they are no longer the recommended path.
Restrictions
Special Ad Category campaigns cannot use standard lookalikes. The 'Special Ad Audiences' bias-stripped variant was retired in October 2022.
Customer-list lookalikes inherit your list's match rate. A 30 percent match on a 1,000-person list means modeling runs on 300 people, often below the quality threshold.
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