A core targeting lever in Google Demand Gen campaigns is changing. Starting March 2026, Lookalike audiences will act as optimization signals — not hard constraints — potentially widening reach and ... A lookalike audience is a way your ads can reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they share similar characteristics to your existing customers.

Understanding the Context

A lookalike audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they're similar to your best existing customers. Lookalike audiences locates people on Facebook who share traits – like location, age, gender and interests — with your customers, so you can reach more people interested in your business. When you create an ad, you can choose to target it to people in any custom audiences or lookalike audiences you've created. You can also use exclusion targeting, which prevents a particular audience from seeing the ad.

Key Insights

For example, you can exclude an audience of your current customers if you're running a campaign to gain new customers. Lookalike audiences take several sets of people as "seeds" then Facebook builds an audience of similar people. You can use lookalikes for any business objective: Targeting people similar your customers for fan acquisition, site registration, off-Facebook purchases, coupon claims, or simply to drive awareness of a brand. Seed audiences can be: Create lookalike audience sets to optimize your bids Lookalike audiences are limited or unavailable for some ads about financial products and services, employment or housing opportunities. Learn more.

Final Thoughts

The audiences you create are non-overlapping, so you don't have to exclude other audiences that are more or less similar. CMS Wire: How to Balance Personalization and Privacy in Predictive Audience Segmentation