Value based lookalike audience from your top customers
The short answer
A value based lookalike audience starts from a seed of your most valuable customers, ranked on gross margin over two years, in place of whoever bought most recently. Upload that seed to Meta or Google, and the platform finds new people who resemble customers worth having, which lifts the value of the customers you acquire.
Why it matters
Recency seeds teach ad platforms to find people like your latest buyers, who are often promotion-led one-time customers. A value seed points acquisition spend at prospects who resemble customers with high lifetime margin, so each new customer is worth more.
The question to ask
Copy this into Lexi as written.
What the answer looks like
Illustrative output on sample data
Illustrative example: how Lexi answers this for a beauty retailer building a lookalike seed from 260,000 customers active in the past two years.
- Includes the top 6% by 24-month gross margin, net of returns.
- Includes customers with two or more purchases.
- Excludes staff, wholesale and test accounts.
What the data shows
15,600 customers qualify, and about 11,000 match on Meta. Their average two-year margin is $410, against $48 for the recency seed used before.
What it means
A seed built on value points lookalike targeting at people who resemble your most profitable customers.
What to do
Swap the recency seed for this one and compare new customer margin after 90 days.
Want me to push the seed to Meta and Google Ads?
Frequently asked questions
How do I build a lookalike audience from a customer list?
Choose the customers you want more of, export their email and phone, and upload them to the ad platform as a custom audience. The platform hashes and matches them, then builds a lookalike from the matched profiles. Seed quality matters more than size, so start from your highest-value customers.
Why is a recent-buyer seed a weak starting point?
Recent buyers include many promotion-led and one-time customers, especially after a sale. A lookalike built on them finds more people likely to buy once on discount. Seeding on two-year margin teaches the platform what a valuable customer looks like for your business.
How big should a lookalike seed be?
Big enough for the platform to find patterns after matching, usually a few thousand matched people, and small enough to stay focused on genuinely valuable customers. If your top tier is too small, widen to the top 10% by margin before falling back on recency.