With Lookalike Expansion, you can expand the audience of your campaign to include people who have high potential to convert in this particular campaign. This feature creates a lookalike audience based on all the people who have converted across all ad sets in the campaign and adds a new ad set to the campaign targeting the created Lookalike audience. This Lookalike audience is updated automatically when the campaign gets more conversions, making it a self-improving loop.

Note: you need at least 100 conversions per country within the last 180 days to be able to create the Lookalike audience.

How to set up Lookalike Expansion in Smartly.io

1. Go to the campaign which audience you want to expand and select Lookalike Expansion.

2. Select if you want to create new creatives for this audience or if you want to use existing creatives from the ad sets.

3. Edit creatives if necessary.

4. Choose the budget and the bid for this new ad set.

Targeting

If there are multiple countries in the original audience, one ad set with the conversion lookalike will be automatically created for each country. Note that each country has to have at least 100 conversions within the last 180 days in order for Facebook to be able to create the Lookalike Audience. Ages targeted will be all ages targeted in any of the original ad sets. Targeted placements, positions, languages, devices and any audience or connection exclusions you have defined in the original ad sets are copied to this new ad set. 

Limitations: 

• Lookalike expansion works only with regular campaigns that have been created in Smartly. Other campaigns are ignored.
• Lookalike expansion does not work if the campaign uses Creative Split Testing.
• At least one ad set in the campaign needs to target a country (and no ad set should target multiple countries). We combine the targeted countries from the existing ad sets, and create a new Conversion Lookalike Audience for each country.
• Bids are based on those used at the time of campaign creation
• The ad sets' optimization goals should be similar for optimal performance, as the seed audience will be those people that took the action defined by the optimization goal
• At the minimum, you need to have >100 conversions in total for your campaign, and optimally >100 per country. For countries that might not have >100, Facebook will use other countries' converters as the seed audience.
• The generated Lookalike audience will always be based on conversions from all ad sets in the campaign that were there at the time of creation

Lookalike Expansion FAQ

How are the conversions counted? Conversions are based on the campaign's Facebook Objective and the bid Optimization Goal. For example, if you’re bidding for the Purchase event of the Pixel, the conversions lookalike will be generated based on the people who have made a purchase attributed to this campaign. Lookalike Expansion uses the Facebook default Attribution Window, i.e. 28-day click-through and 1-day view-through.

Which ad sets are used to create the audience? All ad sets that have conversions in the campaign are used to create the new audience.

What should I do with the old ad sets? Keep them running, as then they will feed more data for the Lookalike audience.

What about the overlap with the old ad sets? Based on our tests, the Lookalike audience generally does not overlap much with the original ad set targeting. However, if you wish you can manually exclude the created Lookalike from current ad sets’ targeting.

What if I have different Optimization Goals for different ad sets? You can still use the feature normally. Your seed audience for the Lookalike will be all the people who have converted in each ad set so if the optimization goal is different then your seed audience will just be a bit more mixed than when you would only have one optimization goal for all ad sets. For best performance, we recommend that the Optimization Goals be similar across ad sets.

Can I create a Conversion Lookalike Audience from a subset of the ad sets? Yes, you can also create Conversion Lookalike Audiences from individual ad sets or subset of the campaign's ad sets but you need to do that manually, creating Conversion Lookalike audiences and using those in ad sets you create manually.

Do I need to update the Lookalikes periodically? No, the Lookalikes are updated automatically once a week. When there are new people converting in the original ad sets, the Conversion Lookalikes will improve as the seed audience grows.

Can I create a Lookalike Expansion audiences automatically? Yes, you can use triggers to create a Lookalike Expansion when predefined rules are met. Read more: https://support.smartly.io/hc/en-us/articles/360003581454