The answer is always... It Depends.
But there is a thoughtful and actionable way to do this in 2024 with the highest valued signals.
Did you know that you can build Lookalikes for Meta based on who's Viewed, Added to Cart, or Purchased products from your Meta Catalogs?
There's a secondary version of this that is equally as valuable and that is Lookalikes made from your SHOPs (FB and IG).
Check it out...
Step 1: Head to audiences and slap that catalog as a source.
Step 2: From there, you're going to select your product feed.
That's going to then present you with the option to filter by Product Set.
This is INCREDIBLY valuable for multi-sku DTC brands as you can now build audiences off of intent by Product Line.
If it's apparel, for example, we're making audiences for each product set for, let's say: Hats, Socks, The White T-Shirts, The Red T-Shirts, The Shoes, etc.
Once those audiences are created (We do 9day, 21day, 60day, and 180day) you can then build 1-3% Lookalikes off of them.
You can also use these in your Advantage+ Shopping campaigns as signals and audiences for Engaged OR Existing Customers (more about that later).
What if we are not multi-sku DTC?
No worries, you can use this process and create sets by deals. Let's say you have one product. You would still create product sets based on offers ;) Now you get Meta-specific source data on those offers.
We've even taken that as far as creating Product Sets for single products to test Landing Page Headlines, Hooks, and Themes.
Want to take it a step further? If you advertise on Meta you know that SHOPs are a massive deal right now. That's where all of the data is getting captured (from the Accounts Center accounts).
Knowing that... If you want to use Lookalikes (or build a better retarget funnel), you should be building them off your highest signaled sources.
In this case in 2024, Catalogs and SHOPs.
To build SHOPs Lookalikes, is super simple and the same process, just with more data to choose from.
Under Audiences, select Shopping.
From there you are going to choose your FB or IG Shop (both are connected, we default to IG).
You'll then build custom audiences for each of these EVENTS.
Anything before Add to Cart, we call that Engaged.
Add to Cart & Initiate Checkout, we call that Intent.
Of course, the best here is building Lookalikes off of the SHOPs Purchase event.
BUT we still want the custom audiences for the Engaged and Intent buckets as well.
So why build custom audiences for all of the other Events?
Because you want these in your Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns as Audiences to Retarget
(or even exclude -- yes, you can use these as Existing Customer audiences in Advantage+ as well).
Meta even tells you, it provides more accurate insights:
This means you can now run Advantage+ Shopping campaigns for Engaged Shoppers and Shoppers who have shown the highest Intent EVEN before they have gone to your website.
The power of Meta has always been the leverage you get with their owned user data. This is just the next evolution.
Yes, for TOF, creative is doing 90% of targeting but peppering in intent Lookalikes gets that even closer to actuals.
Then for retargeting the engaged and intent-based, you've now got a full funnel built off of the best data that Meta is offering right now.
If you haven't succumbed to just blanket BROAD on everything or wasting dollars on open targets, then you know the value of hyper-targeting, especially in DTC where every single dollar matters.
What results are we seeing?
We've seen on average, we can get a 15% reduction in CPAs by layering in more engaged and warm intent-based audiences via SHOPs or Catalog Product Set Audiences.
The Lookalikes built from the highest-value Events here, see a dramatic decrease in TOF CPAs as well.
We're talking over 20% CPA reductions when using these Lookalikes vs. anything else.
