With Lookalike Audiences, you can find potential users that are similar to one of your existing Custom Audiences. This is extremely useful when you want to scale your campaigns. With the value-based Lookalike Audiences, things are getting even more interesting. Facebook will find users that are similar to your clients based on their lifetime value.
This article explains how to use PixelYourSite to implement Facebook’s own value-based strategy. We also have our own automatic customer lifetime value feature that you can use simultaneously.
This strategy involves two distinct steps:
- Create a Custom Audience by uploading a customer file that includes customer lifetime value.
- Create a Lookalike audience based on it.
Facebook has a long help page about how to configure a customer file and how to calculate your customers’ lifetime value. It’s kind of a complicated process if you want to generate it by yourself, so that’s why we implemented an easy to use PixelYourSite Pro feature that will do it for you. It will work with WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads Clients.
Custom Audience File with Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
The first thing you need is to generate your customers file with all the details Facebook needs to make a match with a real Facebook user. Here’s what identifiers you can use:
- Phone Number
- Mobile Advertiser ID
- First Name
- Last Name
- ZIP/Postal Code
- City
- State/Province
- Country
- Date of Birth
- Year of Birth
- Gender
- Age
- Facebook App User ID
- Facebook Page User ID
Additionally, you have to give each one of your customers a lifetime value (LTV) that will have its own distinct column with the header “value”.
a. Generate your lifetime value customers file with PixelYourSite Pro
If you use WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads, we made it easier for you to get this file. Simply open PixelYourSite Facebook Pixel, go on the correct tab (WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads) and scroll down. You will find the file export option there right under the events:
By default, the user’s lifetime value for WooCommerce will include pending payment, processing, on hold and completed orders, but you can change that if you want.
For Easy Digital Downloads only completed orders will be included by default.
NOTE: don’t confuse this with the Purchase Event lifetime value parameter option.
b. Create your LTV file-based Custom Audiences
Open your Audiences click on “Create Audience”, select “Custom Audience” and click on “Customer file”. Click on “Include LTV for better performing lookalike”.
If this is your first time here, you’ll be asked to accept some terms before being able to proceed. Once you do, you can upload your customer file and create the LTV custom audience. Give your audience a meaningful name and click Next.
Click Upload File and select your customers files that you just generated with PixelYourSite. Name your audience and click next. You will be asked to choose your customer value column:
Select the value column and click next. You will preview and map your identifiers:
Click Upload & Create. Once the data is uploaded, you will get a small report with any errors and tips to improve it. If there are only minor things, it can be ignored:
Click on Create Lookalike and select your desired location. You can select multiple countries or regions. Select your audience size (percent of the total population) and click Create audience:
At first, you will see something like this:
Give Facebook some time to populate your newly created audiences.
That’s it, now you have a Value-Based Lookalike audience that will be populated with people that have similar profiles to your most valuable customers.
Additional recommended strategy: Make a Lookalike audience based on the Purchase Event lifetime value parameter
5 Responses
hi pixelyoursite,
I just tried and LOVE IT, But will this be possible:
1. In my country, 50% of my customer do guest checkout
2. In guest checkout they don’t fill in their email (but fill all other data like phone number, first name, etc, EXCEPT email)
3. I just realized that in the CSV files, that the plugin only export customer who HAS email
4. So will that be possible to export all customer who DON’T put their email also? (but they put their phone number)
because as I said before, 50% of my list don’t fill in their email 🙁
Hope you reply christian, thank you!
It’s an idea we might try to implement.
Hi Chris, thanks for supporting the LTV feature. I have a problem
When I export file I realize that the phone number is not match with facebook format.
My customer always input number like this 0818xxxxxxx but facebook wants 62818xxxxxxx
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/606443329504150
Is this possible that phone country code automatically appears in the csv file?
Thanks
I don’t have a solution for now and it can’t be an easy fix (we have no idea how the numbers will be stored in various shops). The good part is that name and email work really well too according to my testing, the matching is usually 75% or more.
Can we add the number of orders placed & date of last order as columns? More so for identifying segments and stages on the lifetime journey. Bit more advanced than assuming everyone is active for same amount of time.