All advertisers can create and target Lookalike audiences from their eligible Matched audiences if their account and campaigns meet certain requirements. If you encounter or are blocked from creating, managing, or targeting a Lookalike audience, refer to these resources first:

Return to this article to address and resolve other issues that you may encounter related to Lookalike audiences.

You can duplicate Ready, Processing, or Failed Lookalike audiences; however, bulk duplication isn’t currently supported. Ensure that you select only one Lookalike audience at a time before attempting to duplicate those audiences.

You can edit Ready, Processing, or Failed Lookalike audiences; however, bulk edits aren’t currently supported. Ensure that you select only one Lookalike audience at a time before attempting to edit those audiences.

Note that selecting an audience will open its details, but won’t enable any fields for editing. Instead, follow the steps outlined in Edit a Lookalike audience to apply and save changes to the audience’s name. If you’d like to apply changes to another Lookalike audience element—such as its source Matched audiences, geo-expansion settings, or audience size and similarity details—you’ll need to Create a new Lookalike audience instead.

You can delete an audience when the audience isn’t assigned to any campaigns. The audience must be unassigned from all campaigns before you can delete it–and regardless of whether those campaigns are running.

Note that bulk deletion is supported for Lookalike audiences, but each selected audience must also be unassigned from all campaigns to enable the Delete button.

Deleted audiences are automatically removed from the Audiences app as soon as you complete this action. For this reason, none of the Lookalike audiences listed in the Audiences app will feature a Deleted status.

Audience reach details generate automatically once the audience progresses from a Processing status to a Ready status.

Refer to Lookalike audience statuses for more information.

Only eligible Matched audiences will appear in the campaign selection field as you build your new Lookalike audience. Refer to Lookalike audience eligibility requirements for additional support.

Your Lookalike audience’s Audience Size and Similarity settings are intended to help you strike the balance between scale and value. Keep in mind that the relationship between the audience’s size and similarity is inversely proportional. This means that a highly similar audience will be smaller in size, and a less similar audience will be larger in size.

Refer to Lookalike audience key terms and concepts - Audience Size and Similarity for additional support.

The more narrow your audience settings, the fewer users will be added to that audience. We recommend loosening the audience’s Size and Similarity settings and/or adding additional locations to its Geo Expansion settings to allow for greater reach.

Consider also using forecasting and reporting tools to determine your campaigns’ ability to scale based on the audience’s reach in combination with the campaign’s other parameters and settings. Learn more about these features below.

Each time you create a new campaign or edit an existing one, you can select Run Campaign Estimations to generate forecasts based on the targeting rules you add to the campaign. These include the approximate size of your targetable audience, estimated reach and impressions, and the number of impressions you can expect to win at different bid prices. Refer to Estimate reach, impression and audience size for a campaign for more information on generating campaign forecasts in the Campaigns app.

You can assess a campaign’s bid rate by generating a Campaign Bidding Insights report in the Insights app. The charts and figures included in the report highlight the following campaign details:

Refer to Generate and interpret a Campaign Bidding Insights report to assess a campaign’s bid rate, and pinpoint which targeting parameters are causing the biggest drop off in your campaign’s bid requests.

PG campaigns aren’t eligible for Lookalike audience targeting. When you create a new campaign that will target the Lookalike audience, the Advanced option is selected by default, and the PG option is disabled.

Only Advanced campaigns are eligible for targeting Lookalike audiences. For this reason, the Audiences section is intentionally excluded from PG campaigns.

Campaigns typically support targeting multiple audience types. Healthcare advertisers should note, however, that a single campaign can never target both NPI-based and non-NPI-based audiences. For example, a campaign can’t target a Retargeted audience consisting of your website’s past visitors if it’s already targeting an HCP Geofarmed audience.

If the campaign isn’t targeting conflicting audience types, confirm how many audiences it’s targeting instead. One campaign can target up to 20 audiences.

If you’re attempting to add the Lookalike audience to an existing campaign, and that campaign isn’t available in the Campaigns list, the campaign isn’t eligible for Lookalike audience targeting. Refer to Lookalike audience eligibility requirements for more details.

The Add To Campaign button becomes disabled when the audience(s) you selected aren’t currently eligible for targeting and/or none of your campaigns are currently eligible.

Confirm that each audience you selected features a Ready or Processing status, and refer to Lookalike audience eligibility requirements for more details.

The Create Campaign button becomes disabled when the audience(s) you selected aren’t currently eligible for targeting.

Confirm that each audience you selected features a Ready or Processing status, and refer to Lookalike audience eligibility requirements for more details.

Depending on a Lookalike audience’s Reach, you may need to target additional audiences to a campaign to help ensure that it has enough data to pace appropriately. Note that the actual addressable audience will also become smaller as you apply additional targeting rules and other settings to your campaign.

We recommend applying forecasting and reporting methods to determine whether a Lookalike campaign is expected to spend its budget in full. Refer to Other campaign targeting considerations to leverage your preferred tools in the Campaigns, Planner, Reports, and Insights app and right-size your Lookalike campaign strategy. You can also review Troubleshoot a campaign that’s pacing behind to rule out other facts that may impact the campaign’s pacing performance.