A lookalike audience is a targeting tool that finds new users who share similar characteristics with your existing high-value users, enabling scaled prospecting.
A lookalike audience is created by feeding a seed audience, typically your best existing users, highest-LTV customers, or completed-purchase customers, into a platform's audience modeling algorithm. The algorithm analyzes the characteristics of the seed audience and finds new users across its database who share similar behavioral and demographic profiles.
Meta's Lookalike Audiences are the most widely used: you provide a Custom Audience seed (e.g., top 1,000 payers from your MMP) and Meta builds a scaled audience of millions of similar users across Facebook and Instagram. Lookalike percentage controls size vs. similarity, 1% lookalike is the tightest match, 10% is the broadest.
Post-ATT, lookalike quality on iOS has degraded somewhat because the seed audiences have shrunk (fewer user-level signals available). Meta's Advantage+ Audiences increasingly supplement or replace manual lookalikes with AI-driven targeting that doesn't require explicit seed audience input.
Lookalike audiences are the most efficient prospecting targeting tool in paid social. They provide the algorithmic equivalent of reaching millions of users who 'look like your best customers', combining the scale of broad targeting with the efficiency of interest-based targeting. For mobile apps with meaningful user data, lookalikes built from high-LTV or high-ROAS user segments consistently outperform interest-based and demographic targeting.
Retargeting serves ads to users who have previously interacted with your app or website, re-engaging lapsed users or moving near-converters down the funnel.
Learn moreAd PlatformsMeta Ads is the advertising platform spanning Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network, representing the largest social advertising ecosystem for mobile app UA.
Learn moreAnalytics & StrategyUser acquisition is the process of attracting new users to a mobile app through paid advertising, organic marketing, and app store optimization.
Learn moreMobile User AcquisitionLTV is the total net revenue a user is expected to generate over the full course of their relationship with your app, used to determine how much you can profitably spend to acquire them.
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