Stop running generic look-alike campaigns

Your lookalike audience is only as good as the data behind it. Most of that data is wrong.

I’ve sat through three pitches this month where the strategy deck included the phrase “lookalike audiences.” Three. Different agencies, different clients, same slide. A funnel graphic. Top: awareness. Middle: consideration. Bottom: conversion. And somewhere in the middle, a bullet point that says “deploy lookalike audiences to scale efficiently.”

Every time I see this slide, I want to ask one question: lookalike of what?

Because here’s what nobody says out loud. A lookalike audience is only as good as the seed audience it’s built from, and most seed audiences are garbage. They’re built from email lists that haven’t been cleaned since 2014. They’re built from website visitors who bounced after three seconds. They’re built from people who clicked a Facebook ad because the image was bright and then never came back.

You’re scaling a guess. That’s not strategy. That’s volume.

The platforms love lookalike audiences because lookalike audiences spend money. Facebook’s algorithm takes your seed list, finds people who share demographic and behavioural traits, and expands your reach. Sounds smart. In practice, it means you’re paying to show ads to people who vaguely resemble the people who vaguely engaged with your brand once.

I ran the numbers on a campaign last quarter. The client had a seed audience of 12,000 email subscribers. We built a 1% lookalike on Facebook — roughly 200,000 people. The CPM was competitive. The click-through rate was fine. The conversion rate was 0.03%. That’s three conversions per ten thousand impressions.

We killed the lookalike. Instead, we built audiences from people who’d watched 75% of a video ad, people who’d added to cart but not purchased, and people who’d engaged with the page more than twice in 30 days. Three smaller audiences. Combined reach was maybe 40,000. The conversion rate jumped to 1.2%.

Smaller audience. Better results. The opposite of what the funnel slide says should happen.

Here’s the thing nobody puts in the pitch deck. Lookalike audiences are a commodity product. Every agency uses them. Every brand uses them. Your competitor is building lookalikes from the same demographic data, targeting the same age range, in the same cities, with the same creative that has a stock photo of a diverse group of people laughing around a laptop.

If everyone is running the same playbook, nobody has an advantage. You’re just bidding against each other for the same attention, driving up your own costs, and calling it a media plan.

The agencies don’t care because they charge on spend. The platforms don’t care because they charge on impressions. The only person who should care is you, because you’re the one paying for it.

I watched a brand spend £80,000 on Facebook lookalike campaigns in Q1. Their CPA was £45. Their product sells for £29. Do the maths. They were losing money on every conversion and the agency was reporting “strong reach” as if reach pays salaries.

What works instead isn’t complicated. It’s just harder to put in a slide.

Build audiences from behaviour, not demographics. Someone who spent four minutes on your pricing page is worth more than someone who matches your customer’s age and postcode. Someone who opened three emails in a week is worth more than a thousand lookalikes who share her browsing habits.

Use your own data first. Your CRM. Your purchase history. Your email engagement. Your app usage. These are signals that Facebook and Google don’t have and can’t replicate. When you build audiences from these signals, you’re not competing on the same commodity data as everyone else. You’re working with something proprietary.

Then layer. Don’t build one audience and scale it. Build three or four specific audiences and test them against each other. One from purchasers in the last 90 days. One from email subscribers who clicked a link in the last 30 days. One from people who visited your site more than three times but never bought. Each one tells you something different about who your actual customers are.

The lookalike can come later. Once you know who converts, once you have a seed audience built from real behaviour, then a lookalike has something to work with. But start with data you own, not data the platform guesses at.

The other problem with generic campaigns is creative. If your ad looks like every other ad in the feed, it’s wallpaper. Nobody stops scrolling for wallpaper.

I see the same mistakes every week. Headlines that say “Introducing our new range.” Nobody cares about your new range. They care about whether your product solves their problem. Body copy that says “Shop now and save 20%.” Every brand is offering 20% off. That’s not a message. That’s noise.

The ads that work are specific. They name the problem. They use language the customer actually uses, not language the brand guidelines dictate. They look like they were made by a person, not assembled by a template.

One of the best-performing ads I’ve seen this year was a photo of a product on a kitchen counter. No studio lighting. No lifestyle model. Just the product, on a counter, with a caption that said “This is the one that actually works.” It outperformed a £5,000 studio shoot by 4x on conversion rate.

The creative team hated it. It wasn’t on-brand. It didn’t follow the visual guidelines. It didn’t have the approved colour palette. But it sold product, which is the job.

I’m not saying lookalike audiences are useless. I’m saying they’re a tool, not a strategy. Deploying lookalikes without understanding your seed data is like buying a billboard without checking which road it’s on. You might reach people. They might not be the people you need.

The agencies will keep pitching the funnel slide. The platforms will keep recommending lookalikes. The dashboards will keep showing “reach” and “impressions” as if those are outcomes.

Your job is to ask the question nobody wants to answer. Who are we actually reaching? And are they buying?

If the answer is “we don’t know,” you don’t have a campaign. You have an expense.