An attorney recently asked me the best budget is for building a lookalike audience for his law firm on Facebook. There are a couple of factors at play here, so let’s take a look.
What is a lookalike audience?
What’s The Best Budget For Building a Lookalike Audience For Your Law Firm on Facebook?
Let’s say you are running (or have run) a cheat sheet. Maybe you are offering a free guide for something. You can set up the Facebook Pixel to track the people that have already downloaded and opted into the cheat sheet, and then, after a certain number of conversions or a certain number of opted in and downloaded your free cheat sheet you can create what they call a “lookalike audience.” A lookalike audience is basically where Facebook looks at the people that have downloaded and says: “What do they all have in common?” and then it goes and it finds more people that are like them. I believe you can technically do this after one conversion, but really, you need a few hundred conversions for it really to work effectively. So, how do you do that?
Steps
Before you assign a budget to any project you have to identify the steps involved and determine how much the steps will cost to run efficiently. Sometimes it is wise to start with a low budget and to increase it once you know that you are on the right track.
● Get an ad that works,
○ Use an ad and measure it. You need an ad that works. That means it gets conversions. You can start with a low budget. I usually start with a $30-$40 dollar a day budget. Run the ads and see what your conversion rate is. When you see them growing, you have a good number of conversions getting in on your cheat sheet or guide offer. Test your ads. Run them until you get the conversions.
● Determine your costs
○ I’ll run the ads and I’ll see what my conversions are and depending on what it is, I’ll see what the cost is. If it’s just a cheat sheet download, if I can get like five-dollar opt-ins or less, so people that download — you know, people who convert at less than $5
Building your conversion numbers
At this point, you have your plan of action in place and it is time to start scaling up your ads. The goal is to get 100, 200, 300 conversions. This is absolutely within your immediate reach. However, it will cost you. Say it is costing you (or it will cost you) $5.00 per download now and you want to get to 200 downloads before you create your lookalike audience, this means you will spend $1,000.
At what pace?
How you choose to spend the $1,000 is up to you. You can run your ads for ten days at $100 per day or one-hundred days at $10 dollars per day. It is up to you how you want your numbers to work for you.
I am not a patient man. When I have my numbers in my mind, I want to move fast and get my data. That is the way I work. There are times that I will just spend $500 just to get the data in order to see if my data is going to work and what happens. If my goal is to get 1000 people on my homepage, I want to get them there just to see what is going to happen. I do not want to pace myself. I want to go all-in and get ready to make my move now.
You may be a person who paces himself. You are willing to wait for your numbers. You will invest slowly and patiently watch your numbers climb. You will be okay with waiting to get your conversions. This is your call. However, I urge you not to move too slowly. If you want to build a lookalike audience, the wait could cost you. Your ad can begin to look like old news to some of your early people. By the time you get to the next phase, you may have lost some of your people.
Once you get some ads that work, kick them up a bit and you will get the results you are looking for.