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A lookalike audience is built by Meta from a seed: one of your Meta Custom Audiences. Meta looks for people in a chosen country who resemble the seed. Use a lookalike to reach new prospects who look like your best customers.
Lookalikes are available for Meta Ads only. Google Ads doesn’t offer lookalike audiences to third-party tools. Only Owners and Admins can create them.

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Before you start

  • Meta Ads is connected and the ad account has accepted Meta’s Custom Audience Terms.
  • You have a Meta audience that is linked to a segment or filled by a journey. See Sync audiences.
  • The seed has at least 100 people Meta has matched. Meta refuses smaller seeds, and its message is shown when you try to create the lookalike.

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Create a lookalike

1

Find the seed audience

Go to Advertising → Audiences and find the Meta audience to use as the seed.
2

Open the lookalike dialog

Click the sparkle icon (Create lookalike) on that row. It appears only on Meta audiences that aren’t lookalikes themselves.
3

Fill in the details

  • Audience name: the name shown in your Meta ad account.
  • Country: the population the lookalike is drawn from.
  • Size: 1% to 20% of that country’s population. 1% is the closest match, and larger sizes reach more people who resemble the seed less.
  • Optimise for: Similarity or Reach.
4

Create it

Click Create lookalike. You’ll see “Lookalike created — Meta is populating it”.

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Watch it populate

Meta takes about 1 to 6 hours to build a lookalike. In the audience table, a lookalike carries a Lookalike badge, the line “Seeded from …”, and its size, country and type. Its status reads: Click Check with the platform (the magnifier icon) to refresh the status and approximate size.

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What you can and can’t do with a lookalike

  • Nothing is uploaded to it. Meta decides who is in a lookalike, so it has no Sync now or Auto-sync. The tooltip reads “Lookalikes are modelled by the platform — there is nothing to sync”.
  • Use it in a campaign. Lookalikes appear under Include audiences and Exclude audiences on the Audience step of a Meta campaign, marked Lookalike. See Create an ad campaign.
  • The seed can be deleted. If you delete the seed audience’s mapping, the lookalike stays, and Meta keeps modelling it from what it already has. Its row then reads “Seeded from a deleted audience”.
  • Deleting the lookalike’s mapping removes it from InstantCampaign only. The audience stays in your Meta ad account.

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Troubleshooting