Creating Lead Based Custom Audiences & Lookalike Audiences [Walkthrough]

Building a sizable list of leads expands your targeting options within Facebook Ads. You can show ads directly to your list of leads. You can also create a lookalike audience to show ads to other people who are similar to your leads. In this article, we will show you how to create lead based audiences in Facebook – both custom audiences and lookalike audiences.

Creating a Lead Based Custom Audience From a List

If you’ve been using LandingCube (or another tool) to collect emails, you can upload that list directly into Facebook to create a custom audience.

To do so, navigate to the ‘Customers’ tab, and click ‘Download CSV.’

You can format your list to only include leads for a certain product or promotion. Or you can keep a master lead list.

Then, go to Facebook and navigate to the ‘Audiences’ section.

Then click ‘Create Audience’ and choose ‘Custom Audience.’

Choose ‘Customer file’ and then ‘Add customers from your own file or copy and paste data.’

Next, upload the CSV file you just downloaded.

Make sure to map out email, first name & last name to have the best chance of matching leads with their Facebook profiles.

Finally hit ‘Upload & Create’ and that’s it. Your audience has been created. Now you can choose this audience to target when setting up ads.

Creating a Custom Audience From Lead Events in Facebook

The other way to create a lead based audience in Facebook is to do it based on the lead event within Facebook. To do this, you need to have been running Facebook Ads and tracking lead collection with the Facebook Pixel.

Here’s how you do it:

After hitting ‘Create Audience’ and choosing ‘Custom Audience’ (just as shown above), click ‘Website Traffic’ rather than ‘Customer File.’

When the ‘Create a Custom Audience’ box pops-up, change ‘All website visitors’ to Lead, and adjust your time frame to your choosing.

Name your audience so you can easily identify it when creating an ad. Finally, click ‘Create Audience’ and you’re done.

Creating a Lookalike Audience Based on Leads

Having created the custom audience based on leads, you can also create a lookalike audience. This is best for finding new people who are similar to your existing leads. These people will be very likely to also be interested in your products.

Here’s how you create the lookalike audience.

First, Click ‘Create Audience’ (like shown above), but choose ‘Lookalike Audience’ rather than ‘Custom Audience.’

In the ‘Source’ field, click from ‘Value-Based Sources’ over to ‘Other Sources’ and choose the Custom Audience you just created.

Then choose the location(s) you wish to target.

For audience size, you can choose from 1% to 10%. To target an audience that most closely matches your source leads, choose 1%. For a wider, but less closely-matching, audience choose a higher percentage.

It might even be worth creating multiple lookalike audiences that vary in audience size. Then you can test the audiences against each other.

Acquire New Leads At Lower Cost

Now with your new custom audience & lookalike audience, you can get conversions at lower costs. Showing ads for another product to the custom audience typically results in the lowest cost conversions of all. And targeting the lookalike audience will allow you to acquire new leads at lower costs.