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Lookalike Audience generally means ''an algorithmically-assembled group of social network members who resemble, in some way, another group of members. In digital advertising age, it refers to a new targeting tool of digital marketing, first initiated by Facebook, which helps to reach potential customers online who are likely to share similar interests and behaviors with existing customers.

Pros and Cons
Lookalike audiences anatomize existing customer's User profiles to find the commonalities with a target audience, which helps find qualified customers. These customers would have been otherwise difficult to reach. Also, it expands potential audience targets in different countries and meanwhile applies to differentiated audience segments; It both saves time and lowers advertising costs for the acquisition of new audience in period.

Lookalike audiences might have limited effects on small companies or startups because of the small sample size of their source audience. This would lead to insufficient data drawn from the audience and interference from outliers. Namely, there would be no high bounce rate with these companies' websites.

How It Works
Taking Facebook as example, basically it takes three steps to build a lookalike audience :


 * Choose the custom audience to build a lookalike audience from, which ranges amongst page fans, visitors to the website, and customer lists. A minimum of 100 people is basically needed in the customer group in order for Facebook to create a lookalike audience and a larger sample size with more data paints more accurate pictures of the audience, which equates to more efficient spend.


 * Customize the audience size. Larger audiences give wider reach, but along with less precise matching. This applies to situations when looking to reach the most people with a broad sweep but are less concerned about how closely they share similarities with current customers. A smaller lookalike audience is more targeted, which makes for the ads to be seen by fewer people, but be more closely aligned to the features of current customers.


 * Target specific demographics by using the drop-down menus of the Power Editor tool. Parameters including country, age, gendar are all available.

Technical Support
In case of Facebook, the science used behind creating a lookalike audience is called as Facebook Power Editor, a mass ad creation tool (different from ad manager). Via power editor a lookalike audience can be easily created by following steps. It is rather effective in reducing cost per action (CPA) for Facebook advertisers, but is also counterintuitive and complicated to use.

Progressive or unethical?
It has been proved by scholars that the tool of lookalike audience, to some degrees, does well in generally advertising results. And it is also listed as an important trend of pay-per-click (PPC) by Delhi School of Internet Marketing. 3rd party behavioral targeting used for digital marketing is aginst online privacy settings.