This week saw Facebook unveil its ‘Lookalike Audiences’ tool, offering advertisers with similar user targets to the ones they already have. Steve Pole, CTO at Alchemy Social discusses some of the challenges to the new tool.
Custom audiences have been providing great results for advertisers but many have been struggling to get the reach that they need. This new system helps expand the reach potential which should help advertisers scale out their performance.
The only drawback for advertisers is a lack of clarity around how the lookalike group is formed; an advertiser may target a certain audience group because of their spending behaviour on an e-commerce website, while Facebook may create a lookalike group based on their movie and music preferences.
The advertiser currently has no way to tell Facebook why they chose that group, and to direct Facebook to find other users based on similar criteria.
This presents an opportunity for Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers (SPMDs) to build expanded audiences using directly related 3rd party data.
By Steve Pole
CTO
Alchemy Social