Facebook Custom Audiences & Lookalike Audiences: How to Use, Create and Share Them Easily

Here’s a little secret: You can share specific custom and lookalike audiences on Facebook with others.

Here’s why you should care: Sharing audiences with other businesses saves time and money and helps optimize your Facebook ad campaigns by targeting a high-intent audience — that is more likely to become a customer. 

Facebook offers one of the most accurate ad targeting tools, but few know how to leverage them to get the most out of their ad campaigns.

This post will teach you about Facebook custom audiences & lookalikes, specific scenarios when sharing them makes sense, and how to do it correctly.

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The Difference Between Facebook's Custom Audience & Lookalike Audience 

To get the most out of Facebook custom audiences and lookalikes, you must first know what they are and how they work. 

Facebook custom audience and lookalike audience are two ad targeting options on the Meta (Facebook) Ads platform. Rather than advertising to a general audience (i.e., everyone), you define who you want to reach and where they will see your ads. 

Facebook Ads Manager allows you to create broad audiences or gives you various options to hyper-target your ideal customers. Being specific about who sees your ads may give you a higher return on investment (ROI) on your ad spend. The right approach depends on your goals and available resources.

These are the key differences between custom and lookalike audiences:

Ad targeting helps you reach existing and new customers to increase sales online, generate leads, build brand awareness, or drive in-store traffic. These benefits also apply to social media ads and social media channels.

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💡 Jump straight to: How to create a Custom Audience or How to create a Lookalike audience.

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What is Facebook Custom Audience?

Custom Audiences are a type of audience you create on Facebook, consisting of your existing and potential customers who have engaged with your business, online profiles, content, or website.

Using Facebook Custom Audiences allows you to:

• Connect with existing or past customers to upsell a product
• Nudge visitors who have used your app/product towards taking the next step
• Target people who have interacted with your profile or content
• Retarget website visitors to turn them into customers

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Types of Custom Audiences

Facebook allows you to create custom audiences based on 13 different sources of customer information:

1. Website: visitor information picked up by a Meta Pixel.
2. Customer list: upload a list of your past or current customers.
3. App activity: people who interacted with your app, such as making an in-app purchase.
4. Offline activity: people who interacted with your business offline, for example, phone calls, store visits, etc.
5. Catalogue: people who interacted with items on your product catalogue.
6. Video: people who have interacted with your videos (views, likes, comments, and shares.)
7. Instagram account: followers or those who've interacted with your business or creator Instagram account, posts, ads, or campaigns.
8. Lead form: people who opened or submitted a form on one of your lead generation ads.
9. Events: people who interacted with one of your Facebook Events.
10. Instant Experience: people who opened your Instant Experience on Facebook or Instagram.
11. Facebook page: create an audience of people who follow or have interacted with your page.
12. Shopping: people who viewed or shopped your products on Instagram or Facebook.
13. On-Facebook listings: people who interacted with your on-Facebook listings on the Catalogue.

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How Does Custom Audience work?

• You'll provide Meta with "identifiers" or information you've collected about your customers.
• Identifiers include email addresses, phone numbers, and street addresses.
• Meta Technologies then matches this information (hashed for privacy) to their existing audience (over 3+ billion profiles!) to find these people.
• You can now target ads specifically to your customers across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp!

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Example Custom Audience

Let's take an example of a footwear brand using custom audiences. Initially, it sold footwear to both men and women, but the newest launch is for only female audiences.

By creating a custom audience using website traffic as a specific source and setting targeting filters (e.g., female, between 25 and 60), the brand can only show targeted ads to highly interested audiences for better conversion rates.  
You can also leverage event targeting for more specific customization. 
For example, you can't target everyone if you're selling a high-ticket online program. In that case, you create a custom audience by using a specific trigger as an event, like "placed the order but didn't complete the purchase," to show your ads to people who stopped the purchase.

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💡 If you find Facebook custom audiences limiting your reach to too few people, you can create a Lookalike Audience to boost numbers.

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How to Create a Custom Audience on Facebook

Creating custom audiences is easy! We will explore the four main ways to build them. The first few steps are similar for each, so start by going to Meta Ads Manager and navigating to the "Audiences" home page.

Secondly, from the Audiences home page, click "Create a Custom Audience."

Thirdly, choose one of the thirteen sources to populate your Custom Audience.

💡  You can create up to 500 Custom Audiences per Ad Account.

We'll now separately cover the remaining steps for how to create a Custom Audience from a Website, Customer List, Video, and Instagram (separately!).

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Custom Audience from Website

You'll need an active Meta Pixel installed on your website to use this method.

1. Go to your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard, navigate to the "Audiences" tab, and click on "Create a Custom Audience" (see screenshots above).

2. Choose "Website" as the source.

3. Choose the Meta Pixel source, pick the maximum retention period (to capture a larger audience,) and name your audience. Add any other rules to include or exclude specific audiences as desired.

4. Click "Create Audience." That's it. You'll see the website custom audience you created in your dashboard.

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Custom Audience From a Customer List

1. Go to your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard, navigate to the "Audiences" tab, and click on "Create a Custom Audience" (see screenshots above).

2. To create a custom audience based on a list of your existing customers, select the "Customer list" option.

3. Upload a customer list from a CMS or internal records of your customers in a CSV or TXT file, or directly import this data from Mailchimp. 

💡 Unsure what your file should contain? Click "Download File template" or "See Formatting Guidelines" to stay on track.

4. You'll asked to identify columns and map the data to help Facebook extract information correctly. Review and resolve any notifications that need your attention (those with a yellow exclamation symbol).
5. Click "Create Audience" when the list is ready.

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Custom Audience from Video Engagement

If you want to create a custom audience of people who interacted with your videos:

1. Go to your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard, navigate to the "Audiences" tab, and click on "Create a Custom Audience" (see screenshots above).

2. Choose "Video."

3. Choose the Engagement option (how long the audience interacted), videos you'd like to track, and retention period. Then name your audience.

4. Click "Create Audience."

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Custom Audience from Instagram

You'll need an Instagram Professional account to use this method. Either an Instagram for Business account or an Instagram Creator account works.

1. Go to your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard, navigate to the "Audiences" tab, and click on "Create a Custom Audience" (see screenshots above).

2. Choose "Instagram account," then click "Next." 

3. Select the desired Instagram Professional account as a reference for creating the Custom Audience. Then select the Events you want to use as a qualifier.

4. Fill in a retention period and include or exclude other audiences. Optional: Name your audience and click "Create audience" when you're ready.

Similarly, you can create custom audiences from visitors to your Facebook page audiences and more.

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Ad Targeting Limitations

After you have created audiences, you can mark them as 'ready' and select them during ad set creation to reach the people in it with ads.

Remember: Earlier, your sources, like website visitors and customer lists, used to be highly effective because there weren't any restrictions on data tracking for Facebook. 

However, tracking audience data became limited after the new Apple privacy control options. According to the new policy, iPhone users can now turn off data sharing and reject cookies by Facebook.

And if they turn off data sharing, Facebook can't track their browser activity. It can only collect data when they're using Facebook or other Meta applications. Some Facebook users can also decline optional cookies when using a browser or other websites. 

Therefore, after the new privacy control settings and users controlling cookies with the browser, using Facebook engagement sources like video engagement, lead form, and Facebook and Instagram page activity is a much more effective method — as there's no restriction to collect audience data.

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What is Facebook Lookalike Audience?

A lookalike audience is a group of people who share similar characteristics with your existing custom audience. Custom audiences can sometimes be limiting, especially for businesses with a small customer base or traffic.

Rather than filtering and choosing audience demographics on your own, you leverage Meta's algorithm to identify other users most likely to be interested in your ads.

Since Meta's audience base is large (3 billion average as of June 2023) and analyzes Facebook audience activity using 200+ factors to understand user behavior, leveraging this audience to identify potential customers makes a lot of sense. It takes some guesswork out of figuring out who to target besides your current customers and followers.

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How to Use Lookalike Audiences

Suppose your goal is to increase the membership subscriptions of a music streaming app. Then, using your existing customer base as a custom audience, you can create a lookalike audience to identify new people based on your customer's favorite genre, artist, or music style.  

Once you set criteria, Facebook analyzes its audience base to identify people who share key characteristics, giving you a new audience you haven't advertised to yet. 

You can create multiple lookalikes from all primary custom audiences: website traffic, app signups, customer lists, video engagement, lead form interaction, Instagram account activity, Facebook page activity, and trigger-based events. 

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How to Create Facebook Lookalike Audience

Lookalike audiences are always based on your existing custom audiences.

1. Navigate to the "Audiences" tab in Facebook Ads Manager and click "Create a Custom Audience."

2. Select a custom audience source or create a new one.

3. Decide on the lookalike audience location (regions or countries).

4. Select audience size (keep it as high as possible when you're starting to increase your audience size.)

💡 The percentage slider for lookalike audiences adjusts the degree of similarity between your source audience and the new audience Facebook creates.

• 1% lookalike: The most similar to your source audience but with a smaller potential reach.
• 10% lookalike: Less identical to your source audience but with a larger potential reach.

You can increase/decrease the parameters to adjust the audience size.

5. Once you've set the filters, click "Create Audience." And that's how you create Facebook Lookalike Audiences.

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Benefits of Facebook Audiences

After you've built and created Custom or Lookalike Audiences, there are some situations where sharing them with your agency, freelancer, partner, or influencer can benefit both parties:

Benefit 1: Collaborations with influencers/content creators 

If a cosmetics brand wants to sell its new matte lipsticks, it can request access to an influencer's female audience. Most brands target influencer audiences for better conversions. Want to learn more about leveraging an influencer's audiences? Check out our post on influencer whitelisting here.

Benefit 2: Partnerships with complementary businesses 

Two complementary businesses (such as an interior design and a furniture company) can share audiences to reach the highest-value customers together.

Benefit 3: Event promotions

If a brand organizes a massive music event, it can request access to specific audiences from music brands like Shopify, Netflix, etc. 

Benefit 4: Agencies onboarding a new Meta client

After onboarding new clients, agencies need to request access to their client's assets, including Custom and Lookalike Audiences.

To get all audiences that exist in a Meta Ads account, the agency can get access to the ad account directly using Leadsie; it's super simple!

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Sharing Access to Facebook Custom & Lookalike Audiences

If you'd like to give access to your custom & lookalike audiences to a third party, you can do it in one of four ways:

1. Sharing one specific audience
2. Sharing all audiences by sharing access to an ad account
3. Sharing all audiences by giving access to a business manager account
4. Using Leadsie to automate access sharing with others

Let's discuss each in detail.

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Method 1: Sharing a specific audience

On the Audiences tab:

1. Click on a specific audience you want to share. Click “Actions” and then “Share.”

2. Enter the Ad Manager ID of the person you want to share the audience with and click share.

Remember: As mentioned above, the recipient account can’t share, edit, or create lookalikes of the audience they get access to. 

If you are the receiver and want access to a lookalike audience, ask your partner to create a lookalike of a custom audience you received and share access using the same process. 

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Method 2: Sharing all audiences by sharing access to an ad account

Another way to share all audiences is to share access to your entire ad account. 

By sharing access to your ad account, you also share access to other assets related to that ad account, such as creatives, audiences, campaigns, etc.

This method is perfect for business owners who outsourced ads management to an agency/freelancer and can be done in a few simple clicks with Leadsie. Your freelancer or agency sends you a Leadsie link, you log in to your Facebook account and boom, they have instant access! Tell your agency or freelancer to set up a Leadsie account today.

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Giving access to an ad account the manual (aka the slow) way

1. Go to your Business Manager account, navigate to “Ad accounts,” and click “Assign Partners.”

2. Enter their Business Manager ID, assign permissions, and click “Next.”

3. Review the permissions and confirm. 

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Requesting access to an ad account the manual way

If you’re an agency/freelancer requesting access to an ad account, go to your Business Manager dashboard and navigate to “Ad accounts.”

1. Click “Add” and “Request access to an ad account.”

2. Enter the ad account ID of the partner you’d like to request access to and click “Confirm.”

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Method 3: Give access to a Business Manager account

The third method is perfect if you’ve outsourced the entire Meta marketing to an agency or freelancer. If they look after your Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp marketing, ad account, audiences, and other assets, add them as a Partner to grant access to all (or select) assets.

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Giving access to a Meta Business Manager account

1. Go to your Business Manager account and navigate to Users > Partners.

2. Click “Add” and “Give a partner access to your assets.”

3. Enter your partner’s Business Manager ID, click "Next."

4. Assign assets and permissions. Choose the ad account too, if you want to share access to your custom and lookalike audiences. Click “Save Changes.”

5. Accept permissions, and it’s done. 

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Requesting access to a Business Manager account

If you’re a freelancer/agency who wants to request access to your client’s business assets, custom and lookalike audiences, go to your Business Manager dashboard. 

1. Navigate Users > Partners.

2. Click “Add” and “Ask a partner to share their assets.”

3. Add client’s details like name, Business Manager ID, and email. Choose your and your client’s role and click “Request Asset Types.”

4. Choose assets to request permissions. REMEMBER to select assets from the ad account if you want to request access to your client’s custom and lookalike audiences. 

5. Review everything and confirm send.

Your request will be emailed to your client and they'll also be notified on their Business Manager dashboard. You only need to wait until they accept your request and grant access. 

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Method 4: Automate with Leadsie

You can request access to ALL your client's Facebook, Instagram and Google assets with one link when you use Leadsie. It doesn’t have to be that painful!

You send your Leadsie link to your client, and we take care of everything in the backend. They log in and grant you the permissions you need. It is speedy, secure, and straightforward.

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Simplify Client Onboarding in 2-clicks with Leadsie

To have your client or partner start sharing their Facebook audiences: 

• Your partner must have a Business Manager account set up.
• You need to have their Business Manager ID.
• You need to have their Ad Manager ID. 
• You need their email address and full name.
• And when you share the assets, they must confirm the request by email to access them.

There are too many things to remember and too many back-and-forth emails and Slack messages!

Leadsie makes sharing and requesting Facebook assets painless and wows your customers. If you share or request access to a Facebook Ad account, you automatically share or get access to audiences — isn’t that amazing?

You simply create a Leadsie link based on “Manage” and “View-Only” based on the permissions, share it, and your client grants you access. Leadsie saves you the headache of back-and-forth emails to onboard new clients. 

It’s more secure for everyone and saves a ton of time! Give it a try with our 14-day free trial…just enter your email in the box below! 

Here’s a quick recap of how simple it is to use Leadsie: