Amazon + Facebook PPC – Creating a Lookalike Audience on Facebook to Re-target Your Customers

With over 2 billion in active users, Facebook gives you the chance to put your product in front of a large number of people who might not otherwise find it.  It also gives you a chance to re-target to your Amazon customers.  If you are not using this opportunity, you can bet your competition is and that you are losing out on added revenue.

From your Facebook Business Page you can set up specialized landing pages for your products, create ads, and target those ads towards a custom or lookalike audience.  Doing these things can give you a competitive edge in an often crowded e-commerce marketplace.  But there is one more thing you can, and should, be doing to get ahead and that is create a lookalike audience for your ads.

What is a lookalike audience and how can it help?

A lookalike audience allows you to target your advertising to your current customers as well as prospective customers that are already interested in the sort of products you offer.  As the name suggests, a lookalike audience is one that has attributes that look similar to your current audience.

By using two pieces of information, namely source audience and location, a lookalike audience can deliver potential buyers much easier than traditional Facebook advertising.  This tool can help you target people more directly by using more specific demographic information than interest-based advertising.

When you establish a lookalike audience, the impact of your advertising is far more profound.   Now, your ads won’t just appear to your followers and previous customers, it will appear to people who closely match your previous customers and are likely to make purchases in your vertical.  Instead of taking a shot in the dark, a lookalike gives your ad campaigns better direction.

Lookalikes are great for attracting new customers but they can also help you launch new products.  People who have bought from you before, are already going to be interested in potentially buying other products from you whereas buyers who are unfamiliar with your brand are not likely to purchase anything at all.  But, because this particular audience resembles your current customers, they are more likely to be interested than straight up cold traffic.

And you aren’t limited to just one lookalike audience.  You can change the parameters so that your lookalike is based on different things, increasing your opportunities for a sale.

How to create a lookalike audience

Re-targeting ads posted on Facebook use a snippet of code, called a pixel, that is manually attached to your site. Unfortunately, you cannot add this code to your Amazon listing so creating a lookalike audience is the best way to re-target those customers and direct traffic back to your store.  Here’s a basic guide to setting up a lookalike audience.

Start by choosing a source audience.  To maximize the impact of your lookalike, create a custom source audience based on your current customer files.  Input the buyer names and location of the customers who have recently purchased items in your Amazon Store.  From here, select the location you wish to target.  This location should be the country where most of your orders come from.  Now choose your audience size.  It may be tempting to create a large audience but the larger the audience, the less it will have in common with your current customers.  This means your ads are exposed to a wider number of people who are less inclined to purchase your product.  When set at 1%, your audience will contain people who are most like your customers and therefore, the people most likely to buy your product.

There are other ways to establish a lookalike audience, and they are worth investigating as well, but for now, this is a good place to start.

Using a lookalike is an excellent way to increase brand awareness among people who are interested in products exactly like, or similar to, yours.  The more interested parties that see your products, the more sales you stand to make.  Creating ads that convert can feel like a complicated task.  But when you set up a lookalike audience of Facebook, you put ad, and your business, in a position to succeed.