An advertising audience built by a platform (such as Meta or Google) to resemble an existing audience a business provides — for example, a list of current customers — used to reach new people with similar characteristics and behaviors.
Why it matters
Lookalike audiences let a business scale prospecting beyond people who've already engaged, using an existing high-value audience (like paying customers) as the seed for finding similar new people, often more efficiently than broad, undifferentiated targeting.
In a sentence
"We built a lookalike audience off our top 10% of customers by LTV, rather than our full customer list, to keep the seed audience as high-quality as possible."
Related terms
- Often confused with: Retargeting (a lookalike audience reaches new people who resemble an existing audience; retargeting reaches the existing audience itself, not new people similar to them).