How to use Facebook Ads 'Lookalike Audiences' to promote your clinic

Facebook ads are amazing, in a couple of different ways. They can be amazing at filling your clinic with new clients, or they can be amazing at blowing your budget and maxing out your credit card!

One of the best ways to both keep your budget under control, and ensure you are targeting the most likely people to use your services, is to ensure you have appropriate audiences in place.

The simplest way to define an audience is by using simple demographic and sociographic parameters (eg. age, location radius, interests, job titles, etc).

To utilise the hidden powers of Facebook, it is ideal of you find ways to create Lookalike Audiences - these are cold audiences (cold means they haven't engaged with your website or Facebook page previously) that share the same characteristics of an existing sample of your clients.

This existing sample may be an audience that has visited your website (and you captured them using the Facebook Pixel) or a client list that you have shared with Facebook (via Cliniq Apps or Mailchimp, for example).

A Lookalike Audience essentially allows Facebook to crawl your list, define the common traits and characteristics, and go and find 1,000’s more people who share those commonalities!This targeting capacity means your ads will be served to your ideal potential clients, your spends will be lower and your conversions will be higher.

How to set up your own Lookalike Audience

Before you begin

• To create a Facebook Lookalike Audience, you must be the admin of the Page or pixel you're creating it from.
• If you're making a Lookalike Audience from a Custom Audience, you need to have the role of Admin, Advertiser or Analysis on the Ad account.

Creating your Facebook Lookalike Audience

1. 1.Go to your Facebook page
2. 2.Select Ad Centre
3. 3.On the left hand side of your page, select 'Audiences'
4. 4.Click the Create Audience dropdown and choose Lookalike Audience
5. 5.Choose your source
   1. 1.A source can be a Custom Audience not created with your pixel data, your mobile app data or fans of your Page
   2. 2.Consider using a group of 1,000 to 50,000 of your best customers based on lifetime value, transaction value, total order size or engagement.
6. 6.Choose the country/countries/suburbs where you'd like to find a similar set of people
7. 7.Choose your desired audience size with the slider.
8. 8.Click Create Audience.

You can also create a Lookalike Audience during Ad Creation in Ads Manager.

Keep in mind

• It may take 6 to 24 hours for your Lookalike Audience to be created. After that, it'll refresh every 3 to 7 days as long as you're still actively targeting ads to it .
• You don’t need to wait for your Lookalike Audience to update to use it for ad targeting.
• You can see when your Lookalike Audience was updated by visiting your Audience Manager page and looking at the date under the Availability colum.