Is a Facebook lookalike audience a good idea when audience requires a necessary characteristic

[Gavo]

We are running a social media campaign for a point of sales system for restaurants and retail stores. We have had quite a bit of traffic to our website from Adwords and SEO.

We have thought of the idea of creating a new look-alike audience based off the people who have come to our website already.

However, we only really want to only build a Facebook audience consisting of business owners, managers or decision makers of restaurants and retail stores that would be interested in a point of sales system at some point. We know that most of the people who have come to our website (from SEO and Adwords) have been interested, in some degree, in our point of sales system. My reservation though is that if we create a look-alike audience, Facebook will not be able to replicate the type of audience that really fits this profile - that it will create an audience possibly of similar personalties, interests etc to that of those that have visited our site, but not one that consists predominately or entirely of owners, managers or decision makers of restaurants and retail stores. This is the necessary characteristic we are wanting for our audience members.

Is it fair to assume that in this situation Facebook won't be effective in its creation of a look-alike audience to fulfil what we are really needing as stated? Or am I underestimating Facebook's abilities?

You thoughts here would be greatly appreciated.

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Base on my experience is very hard to create that kind of segmentation on facebook. Facebook is a great source of information but has some disadvantages, google collect information based on people's search terms in other hands facebook collect information based on people's behavior.

A good funnel in your case is create an audience using your emails campaings and google adswords campaigns in the first line and then use the facebook retargeting to reach just the people that you want

A good option for that is Adroll

[TrentonGreener]

Gavo,

I think in this scenario, I would encourage you to just test it out and see how it works for you. The lookalike audiences can be a great way to reach those that you may not have any option to target normally. And since Facebook cpcs are generally much lower than AdWords, it's worth setting aside a testing budget and running a few different tests.

Another idea would be to instead of creating a lookalike audience, to create a target that does match your criteria. Facebook has a large selection of criteria and you can preview the audience size before running a campaign.

Do keep in mind that Facebook doesn't have the same intent as SEM marketing. You'll need to give them a strong reason to take action.

Best of luck! Let me know if you have any further followup questions!

Trenton