Meta is one of the most powerful platforms available for brand awareness campaigns. And when you pair a smart audience strategy with Meta’s AI-driven delivery system, you can do two things at once: Introduce your brand to people who have never heard of you and stay top of mind with people who already have. The key is knowing how to build your audience the right way.
There are two primary approaches campaign managers can take to achieve these goals: lookalike campaigns and broad campaigns.
Lookalike Brand Awareness Campaigns
Lookalike audiences start with what Meta calls a custom audience. These are people who have already engaged with your brand in some way. Think customers, high-intent site visitors, video viewers who stuck around past the first few seconds, and the like. Meta takes that “source” audience, analyzes it, and identifies new users who look a lot like them. It is one of the smartest tools in the brand awareness playbook.
However, here’s where a lack of experience can be the downfall: Your lookalike is only as good as your source data. A source audience built on surface-level interactions, like someone who bounced off your homepage in three seconds, won’t give Meta much to work with. Instead, focus on the good stuff. People who watched the majority of your video content, form leads, and people who made a purchase, for starters. The higher the intent in your source audience, the better Meta can model from it.
When setting up a lookalike, you choose an audience size between 1% and 10% of the selected country’s population. While smaller percentages keep you closer to your existing customers, larger percentages cast a wider net but introduce more variation. For brand awareness, a range between 3–5% tends to hit the sweet spot between scale and relevance. However, you can always test different sizes as you grow rather than choosing one setting and calling it a day.
Broad Brand Awareness Campaigns
There once was a time when conventional wisdom said to narrow your targeting as much as possible. The idea was that more specificity equals more control. That thinking has largely shifted. Thanks to Andromeda (Meta’s AI engine) and Advantage+ Sales, Meta is genuinely good at finding the right people without a lot of hand-holding, especially when you set up your pixel and conversion tracking properly. When it can see who converts, it uses those signals to sharpen delivery even in campaigns focused on reach and awareness.
For broad awareness, bigger is usually better. Start with the guardrails that actually matter: location, language, and age minimums, if relevant. Then take a step back, and resist the urge to pile on all those interest categories or behavioral qualifiers. If your target audience is women across the continental U.S., for example, just select those two qualifiers, and let Meta’s AI do the rest. Overbuilding your targeting can often backfire.
Another area that can derail your campaign is excluding exclusions (try saying that five times fast). Meaning, you should focus your brand awareness budget on attracting new eyes, not recapping your brand to someone who just bought from you last week. Exclude your existing email list and recent converters. Keep those audiences in separate retention or upsell campaigns, where the objective differs from pure awareness.
Not Sure Which Approach Fits? Test Both
There isn’t necessarily a universal answer here. The right mix of lookalike and broad targeting depends on your goals, budget, and the quality of your existing data. A good starting point would be to A/B test by running one campaign using a lookalike audience built from your highest-intent customers, alongside a broad campaign with smart exclusions in place, and then compare. Look at reach, frequency, cost per 1,000 impressions, and any downstream metrics like site visits or leads.
Data tells the story better than assumptions ever will. The numbers don’t lie.
If you need a hand planning or managing Meta brand awareness campaigns, our Ads Team is ready to dig in. From audience strategy to creative and measurement, we help you get the most out of every dollar you spend. Send us a message for a no-obligation conversation.
