A group of brand-new people that an ad platform finds because they share the same traits and behaviours as your existing best customers.
A lookalike audience is the ad platform's way of saying, "Show me a list of your favourite customers, and I'll go find thousands more people just like them." You hand Meta, Google, or LinkedIn a "seed" list — for example, the people who already bought from you — and the platform studies what those people have in common. It then targets your ads at strangers who match that profile but have never heard of you.
The quality of the result depends entirely on the quality of the seed list. Feed it a list of high-value buyers and you get more high-value buyers. Feed it a list of random newsletter signups and you get more random signups.
Imagine a B2B accounting software company. They upload a seed list of their 500 best customers — businesses that each pay €4,000 a year. Meta finds 1.2 million people who "look like" those buyers and shows them ads. Because the seed was strong, the campaign brings in trials that convert at twice the rate of their old broad targeting, dropping their cost per new customer from €600 to €310. The same ad budget now produces nearly twice the customers.
Lookalikes are one of the cheapest ways to reach new people who are genuinely likely to buy, instead of paying to reach everyone. But the platform can only copy what you give it. If you feed it your full customer list, it copies your average customer. If you feed it only your high-value customers — and tell the platform how much each one is worth — it hunts for more of your most profitable buyers. That single change quietly raises your return on every euro of ad spend.
Retargeting · First-party data · Customer lifetime value (LTV) · Conversion value · Lead scoring
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