One of my favorite tools within Facebook Business Manager is the lookalike audiences tool. When created from strong custom audiences, lookalike audiences are one of the most successful targeting strategies for higher education marketers to reach more prospective students on Facebook.

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Past Leads

What better way to reach more prospective students than building a lookalike audience based on users who have already converted? According to Facebook, this is the most effective lookalike audience. When utilizing this option, Facebook is able to use demographic information from users who have previously converted through your Facebook advertising efforts. However, there’s a minimum of 200 leads with this strategy, so it’s important to run campaigns for a few months to build a strong history of leads.

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Custom Audiences

Custom audiences can be built in two different ways. The first is using a student list. To utilize a student list, 200 email addresses or phone numbers must match with those of actual Facebook users. These audiences can be built from a prospective student list, current student list or even a past student list. Lookalike audiences based on a student list can be very effective because they allow Facebook to find users similar to students who have already shown interest or enrolled in your program.

The second way to utilize custom audiences is building a lookalike audience based on the audience that previously visited your institution’s program pages or landing pages. This audience is built by placing Facebook’s pixel on these specific pages. Once this audience has been built from at least 200 users, the option to create a lookalike audience from these users becomes available.

Page Likes

Building a lookalike audience based on page likes means that Facebook finds users similar to the users who already “like” your page and are interested in your institution. This is a great strategy to take advantage of at the launch of a campaign. You can reach new prospective students while growing large enough audiences to use the other lookalike audience options.

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