Lookalike Targeting helps you grow your customer base by showing ads to new people who share characteristics with your best existing customers and site visitors.
AdRoll builds a lookalike model from your source audience, then finds fresh prospects who behave and look like the people already engaging with your brand-helping you expand your reach beyond retargeting.
Our smart bidding technology, BidIQ™, works behind the scenes to make sure your ads are shown to the right people, at the right time, with the right message. This means less wasted budget and better performance.
Launch a new Lookalike Targeting for Web
- Log in to AdRoll and go to Campaigns on the left-side navigation menu.
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Click Create and select Ad Campaign.
- Select Build Awareness as your objective and click Next.
- Choose a clear Campaign Name to easily identify it in AdRoll reports and dashboards. We recommend using a consistent naming convention.
- Under Campaign Settings > Channel confirm which channels you want to run your ads on and click Done to move to the next step.
Choose a Schedule
Choose your Schedule and click Done to move to the next step.
- Start immediately upon approval or select a future date/time.
- End on a specific date/time or run indefinitely.
- Campaigns must run for a minimum of 5 consecutive days.
- If selecting a specific time of the day, it will be set in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
- Upon campaign submission, there will be a review period of up to 48hrs before going live.
- We suggest skipping Advanced Options and launching your campaign with AdRoll's default settings. Click here to learn how to customize Day Parting.
Choose your Bidding Settings and Advanced Options
Choose your Bidding Settings and Advanced Options and click Done to move to the next step.
- You have the option to choose from Conversions, Clicks, and Impressions as Bid Strategy.
- We suggest skipping Advanced Options and launching your campaign with AdRoll's default settings. Click here to learn how to customize Frequency Capping and General Exclusions.
Configure your First AdGroup
By default your campaign will have one AdGroup called AdGroup 1. AdGroups are containers within your campaign to serve different ad sets to different audience segments with custom schedules. You can't set individual budgets for each AdGroup.
- Choose an AdGroup Name to easily identify it in different reports and dashboards.
- Optionally, Use custom ad group schedule if running multiple AdGroups at different times. If toggled off the AdGroup follows the general campaign schedule.
AdGroup Audience Target Options
Under Targeting, open the Audience section and select Lookalike:
- Lookalike - We find people similar to your existing customers.
- Third Party Audience - Target based on interests, demographics, or life events.
You can only select one audience type per ad group. If you need to run more than one, add a separate ad group for each.
Choose your Audience Location
Choose your Web Audience Location by including countries, states/regions, cities, or zip codes. You can also apply exclusions.
Target by Categories
Select specific content categories to show your ads on pages that match our curated categorization. Click here to view all available Content Categories for Web Contextual targeting.
Entering multiple categories uses OR logic, expanding your audience size.
Once you target by Categories in an AdGroup the option to enter Keywords will be greyed out. If you want to layer both Categories and Keywords, create a second Ad Group, for example:
- Ad Group 1: Category = Fashion & Beauty - Bridal
- Ad Group 2: Keyword = wedding
This approach uses OR logic, targeting both audiences within the same campaign.
Target by Keywords
Your ads are displayed on websites and apps that align with the content you've specified through targeted keywords, ensuring they appear in contexts that are relevant to your audience and complement your brand message.
Target keywords to ensure your ads appear next to relevant content, and exclude keywords to avoid placements that don’t align with your brand. AdRoll Contextual Keywords support multilingual targeting. English keywords automatically trigger translations in 53 other languages. For more details, see Contextual Keyword Targeting.
Select Environments
We recommend using the default setting Automatically to maximize your reach across Desktop, Mobile Web, and Mobile App and cover 100% of traffic.
Alternatively you can adjust your campaign to serve ads only on specific environments:
- Desktop: Larger screen real estate for more detailed ad content and different user behavior and intent compared to mobile platforms.
- Mobile Web: Broader reach across various websites and lower barrier to entry and often more budget-friendly. Excellent for brand awareness campaigns and contextual targeting.
- Mobile Apps: Immersive ad formats like interstitials.
Select your Ads
- You can choose existing ads from your Ad Library, create new Web ads and Native Ads on the spot, Upload Ads, or request a free ad set* from us.
- If you want to use multiple ad sets we recommend using different AdGroups.
- At a minimum add the 6 recommended Static Web Sizes. Adding more sizes boosts your reach.
- Expand your reach by adding Native ads that appear natively on a site or feed, or Video Web ads.
Choose your budget and Payment method
Enter your budget and billing information. For details on choosing between a daily and monthly budget, see Campaign Budget & Spend.
- Your budget will be automatically allocated among your AdGroups by BidIQ.
Once you're done setting your campaign, scroll up to the top of the page and click Submit. You can also click Finish Later to save your campaign as a draft.