Not your average lookalike: How Faraday makes finding your next best customers easier

Imagine you’re launching a new kitchen product—a sleek, ergonomic veggie chopper. How could it not fly off the shelves? You know your current customers: suburban moms in their 30s and 40s. So you decide to build a lookalike audience of... suburban moms in their 30s and 40s.

Seems logical, right?

Well no. The campaign falls flat. But why did this happen?

Demographics alone don’t tell the whole story. What you really needed was a way to reach people who actually enjoy cooking—people with an affinity for trying new recipes, watching food content, or buying cookware online—not just the ones who check some of the same basic boxes as those who do.

Traditional lookalike audiences tend to mirror superficial traits. Faraday’s lookalikes go deeper—focusing on behaviors, affinities, and actions that actually drive engagement.

What is a lookalike audience?

But let’s take a step back to define some terms. In marketing, a lookalike audience is a group of people who share characteristics with an existing audience—usually one that’s performed well in a campaign. The goal is to find more people likely to convert based on their similarity to your known winners.

Meta (you know, the artist formerly known as Facebook) popularized the term with their Lookalike Audiences tool, which matches new users based on shared traits with a seed audience. As they define it:

“A Lookalike Audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they share similar characteristics with your existing customers.”
— Meta Business Help Center

But what exactly counts as a “similar characteristic”?

That’s where the quality of your data—and your modeling—really starts to matter, and that is exactly where Faraday can make a critical difference.

Out with the old, in with the smart

The old way of building lookalikes is all about surface-level demographics: age, gender, location, interests. That works... until it doesn’t. It can lead to broad audiences that seem right but don’t perform, or hyper-narrow audiences that limit scale.

Like in our veggie chopper example: targeting suburban moms might seem like a safe bet—but it only works if those moms actually cook. Without behavioral context, you end up advertising to people who might look like your best customers but have no interest in what you’re selling.

Smart lookalikes—like the ones Faraday builds—go deeper. Instead of focusing only on who people are, we focus on what they do. That means modeling on behavior, not just fixed traits.

We might start with a seed audience of loyal cookware buyers, and then build a lookalike based on behavioral signals like:

• Affinity for cooking content
• Purchase patterns across category types
• Life events like moving to a new home (hello, new kitchen)
• Household makeup (like number of people they cook for)

This kind of modeling doesn’t exclude demographic data—it uses it for context, not constraint. The result is smarter, scalable targeting that finds the people most likely to engage because of what they do, not just what boxes they check.

Powered by the Faraday Identity Graph

Faraday’s smarter lookalikes are powered by the Faraday Identity Graph (FIG)—our massive, privacy-safe third-party data asset that covers over 300 million U.S. adults. But it’s not just about having a lot of data. It’s about the kind of data we have—and what we do with it.

Most traditional lookalike tools lean heavily on deterministic data: fixed traits like age, gender, or location, and basic interest categories. That can give you surface-level matches—but it misses the deeper signals that actually drive intent.

FIG goes beyond that by integrating thousands of behavioral, demographic, and psychographic attributes. That includes things like:

• How often someone shops online, and in which categories
• What life events they may be experiencing (like moving, getting married, or having kids)
• Media consumption patterns, brand affinities, and spending behaviors
• Numerous other traits, visit this page for a full list

Using advanced modeling, we analyze these signals to surface probabilistic traits—things that aren’t explicitly declared, but strongly inferred from real-world behavior. For example, we don’t need someone to tell us they love cooking; their actions (recipe site visits, cookware purchases, grocery frequency) say it for them.

So instead of just identifying people who look like your best customers, we can find the ones most likely to engage in the same purchasing behaviors.

Smarter lookalikes aren’t just for digital ads—they’re transforming offline outreach too.

This smarter approach to lookalikes isn’t just changing digital campaigns—it’s reshaping how brands think about offline channels like direct mail too.

In fact, one of our favorite direct mail partners has been seeing some massive benefits by integrating behavioral modeling into their systems to bring precision and scale to their print outreach campaigns. Traditionally, direct mail strategies have focused on small, high-intent segments—like cart abandoners or loyalty members. These audiences convert well, but they’re also inherently limited.

When it’s time to expand reach, brands often assume they’re stuck building generic lists: same ZIP code, similar age range, same general profile. But with Faraday, they can go far beyond demographics—finding new households that act like their best customers, even if they’ve never visited the site or engaged with the brand before.

That means:

• Reaching new, high-propensity households—not just the usual suspects
• Scaling volume without sacrificing conversion rates
• Delivering campaigns to people whose real-world behavior signals true interest

It’s a smarter way to tap into the strengths of direct mail—tangibility, trust, high response rates—without relying on guesswork or outdated list strategies.

Because let’s face it: even the most beautiful mailer won’t work if it ends up in the wrong hands.

If you’d like to learn more about how our predictive lead targeting works, check out this recent customer story about our work with a different direct mail provider.

Smarter audiences. Smarter campaigns.

Lookalikes shouldn’t just look the part—they should work. Faraday makes that happen with behavior-based modeling, best-in-class data, and predictions that get smarter over time.

Whether you’re mailing coupons for kitchen gadgets or marketing mortgages, the smartest lookalike is the one that converts.

So ready to see the difference? Reach out and say hi!