Meta Ads
Lookalike Audiences
A lookalike audience is a Meta targeting segment of people who share characteristics with a source audience you provide, such as purchasers, high-value customers, or engaged website visitors.
In practice
You give Meta a seed, ideally a few thousand people who did the thing you want more of, and Meta finds the percentage of a country's population most similar to them: 1 percent is the tightest, 10 percent the broadest. The quality of the seed sets the ceiling. A lookalike of all website visitors is a lookalike of curiosity; a lookalike of customers with above-average order value is a lookalike of profit.
Lookalikes have lost some importance as Advantage+ audience expansion and broad targeting improved, and Meta now treats them as suggestions in many campaign types. They still matter as inputs: a value-based lookalike built from purchase events with revenue is one of the better signals you can hand Advantage+.
On Google the equivalent is similar segments in Demand Gen, built from customer match and remarketing lists.
Why it matters
They are how you scale from a known good audience to people who behave like it.
RELATED TERMS
Custom Audiences
Custom audiences are Meta targeting segments built from your own data, including customer lists, website visitors, app users, video viewers, and people who engaged with your Page or Instagram profile.
Advantage+
Advantage+ is Meta's family of automated campaign and ad features, including Advantage+ Shopping and Advantage+ audience, that use machine learning to handle targeting, placements, budget allocation, and creative optimization.
Customer Match
Customer Match is a Google Ads feature that lets you upload hashed first-party customer data (emails, phone numbers, addresses) to build audiences for targeting, exclusion, bid adjustment, and as signals for automated campaigns.
Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder, Live PPC Ads. Part of the PPC Glossary.
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