Will Lookalike Audiences Make Your Music Meta Ads Better?

In this video, we're going to be talking about lookalike audiences, which are a type of audience you can create based on your actual data. Lookalike audiences are a way for you to basically tell Facebook or Meta like, "Here's my data. Find me people who look just like these people." So, let's go over what a lookike audience is and then also how to use it and when it might make sense and what to kind of expect as a result. All right, so let's start off with what a lookike audience actually is. If I dive into the back end of Ads Manager, I'm here in audiences specifically. And this is where we actually like make audiences. So, if you're usually hanging out in ads manager where you run campaigns, you want to get there, you can click these this all tools button and click audiences or often on the left, they've just been putting audiences here since it's so common to flip back and forth. But once you're in audiences, this is where you can make your lookalike. Now, the way lookalike audiences work is you first make what's called a custom audience, which is a retargeting audience. So, let's say you want to make a custom audience of everyone that follows you on Instagram. And then you give Meta that list of people that follow you on Instagram and say, "Hey, find me people that look just like them." And that's kind of a big distinction here. We have retargeting or custom audiences, people that have interacted with you in the past, and lookalike audiences, which are actually brand new people who have never interacted with you. They just look like people who have interacted with you. Not physically, although that might be the case too, but demographically, psychoraphically, like what are they into? So, you're giving metadata and they're making an algorithm to find new people who aren't in that audience, but are similar to them as closely as possible. And I have done a video somewhat recently talking about custom audiences and how to use them, when to use them. So, check out that up here to learn more about making custom audiences. but lookike audiences. So, I'm back in here in audience manager and let's say I have this asig engagement 90 days audience right here. I can actually just click on it, highlight it, and then click these three dots and do create lookalike. And now I'm making a lookalike off of this audience. So, I'm giving Meta this couple thousand person audience and I'm saying, "Hey, find me people that look just like them." Now, one annoying thing about look alikes is you have to specify what country they're from. Um, this can be quite tedious because you have to have at least 100 people per country and they don't tell you which ones you don't. So, you might have to make this country by country. You might be able to do a bunch if you if you guess right, but it can be kind of tedious. Some ad accounts don't have to add countries anymore, which is wonderful. But me and most people I know, you still have to type in countries here. But what it's doing is Meta is looking at, okay, we put in the US. Let's look at every person we have in the US and let's divide them by percentages. So they're looking at every American or every person who's in the US at least who has a Facebook or Instagram account and they're ranking them from one to 278 million. Why do I know it's 278 million? Well, if I zoom in, you can see we have these percentages down here. So right now we have a 1% lookalike and that gives us 2.78 million people. So that means 100% is 278 million people. So what they're doing is they're getting all 278 million people and ranking them from 1 to 278 million. And then a 1% lookalike is the top 1% who is most similar to ASIG engagement 90 days. We've gotten a giant group of people and we're getting the 1% most accurate, most similar to a group of people we know is valuable to us, people who follow us on interact with us on Instagram in the last 90 days. And so what you choose up here for your lookalike source is obviously very important, right? If you're trying to find people to join your email list or become customers, using a lookalike source of customers is going to be the best option to find customers. Look, if you're trying to get more Instagram followers, using a lookike source of Instagram followers is probably going to be the best one. So, you want to choose your lookike source accordingly. Um, but keep in mind there is a balancing game between is it better to have accuracy of data or more data. Sometimes you you're you're fine having less accurate data in exchange of having more data. For example, if you had 100,000 15-second video views versus 1,000 95% video views, I'd probably pick the 100,000 15-second video views most likely. But you can make both of those audiences and test them. And so I'm getting ahead of myself here, but the point of the matter is that the the lookalike source matters greatly for the quality of the ending lookalike because what it's doing is it's just ranking all the people in a country by how similar they are to that source. So if the source sucks, the lookalike sucks. Or if the source is not relevant to the campaign you're running, the look alike is not going to be relevant to the campaign you're running. And so you can also make multiple look alikes in one fell swoop, you can also make wider spread. So, if you want a less accurate look alike, but that has a bigger population. Most of the time, I'm just doing 1%. And then you just you enter all your countries in and click create. And now we're going to have a lookalike audience of that Instagram engagement audience. And it'll take a couple days to populate, but once it is, it'll have an audience size just like anything else. And that's how you actually make your lookalike and what it actually is. So, now we get to how do you actually use the lookalike? Well, we're going to go into a random campaign here. Let's go into this forget streaming campaign. And um I treat it just like any other audience. So you might have a let's say metal core, new metal, alt metal audiences, but I can come in and clone this audience. I'm going to quick duplicate. Duplicate original setup to not turn on meta's annoying recommendations. And now we have a new adset. So I'm going to scroll down and I'll zoom in so you can see better to the audience section. And in here we'll have a custom audience section. They're always moving it, but now it's down here. It used to be above the countries. Now it's below the countries when you're using. Now technically a look like a lookike and a custom audience is a different thing, but they put the looks and the custom audiences for some reason. Even though when we were in here, you can see that uh they're two distinct things by Meta's definition. But in here, they're they're all thrown in this this area. So in here, what I can do is I can go to lookalike audiences and I can choose to do a lookalike, right? And that's when I can add it. And since it's a lookalike, your lookalike is your targeting. Like you don't need to have the Spotify thing or the metal core thing anymore because like this essentially the lookalike is your audience. this lookalike has all the data to like know what type of person we're looking for. So, you want to kind of vaguely define the ages. You don't want to have like 65 plus in here. You want to have the countries still though, but you don't need to have like the interest and what people are interested in because that's exactly what your lookalike is. Now, if you're wondering why I'm getting these errors, that's actually unrelated. That's just because this campaign's old and it includes um Singapore which is now like a special market that you have to treat differently. Um now in the same my lookike audience is too small. When your lookike audience is either new or old it might throw this warning. So in this case it's old. It's like expired or whatever. Often what I do is I when you make a new one, it'll say your lookalike audience is zero and it'll kind of grow as it populates. I try to make the look alikes and I don't use the lookalike or I try not to use the look alike until it gives me a number in audiences. So, in audience manager, when you get like an estimated audience size, that's when I try to start using the lookalike and not before because if it starts running when the lookike audience is 100,000 people, it might get like some false data and mess up the start of the adset. Um, and I'd rather just wait, you know, and have it start from a clean slate in my opinion. But once you add it here, then you just name this. And I usually write LL for lookalike. You could also write look alike, but that's up to you. And now just treat it like any other audience, okay? Like you you just compare it to your alt medal and your metal cord, your new metal, whatever targets you're doing. So the the purpose of doing it this way is your lookalike is just an audience of millions of new people that don't know who you are. And it might do great and it might not. So I've had plenty of times where look alikes have literally saved the day, where it's cut my cost per conversion in half. I have had times where look al likes are more expensive than a lot of other things and times where it just makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. So when you're first doing this, if you have some audiences that might make sense like a streaming conversion data thing, a email list customer thing that's that's really good, you can make a couple looks and throw them into different audiences and just see what happens. And if they're bad, turn them off. And if they're good, keep them on. Consider using them next time. But as your custom audiences get bigger and better over time, your lookalike audiences are going to get more and more useful because more high quality data means better algorithmic models or better lookike data of your audience. So try them, see if it helps you, and if it doesn't, just try it again later, right? It's always an audience you can you can leave it on for five bucks and then kill it if it's bad. If it's good, keep it running and it might save the day. And keep in mind, if you're trying to run a campaign to grow your email list, use a lookalike of email leads. If you're trying to run a campaign to sell stuff, use a lookalike audience off of sales data. If you're trying to run an ad for streaming conversions, use a lookike audience based off of people who have converted on your landing page. So try to match the lookike sources, but also feel free to cross-pollinate, right? Sometimes it's better to have more data than accurate data. So if you don't have a ton of sales data, maybe using your Instagram follower lookalike is is a worthy experiment. or maybe using your email list data that's not all paying customers is a worthy experiment. Um, now if you want to see how you can run a campaign like the ones I showed in this video, check out this playlist right here to see a bunch of like tactical specific examples of how to run ads promote your music [music] and all that jazz. And if you want to see what YouTube thinks you should watch, check out this video right here. Anyways, thanks for watching and I'll see you next video. Bye.