Bootstrapping an e-commerce audience on social media is hard, especially a niche one. Facebook self-serve advertising platform is a breakthrough for any business looking to bootstrap a paid audience, however, the targeting options to start with are very limited:

You can target your competitors’ audience if they’re big enough. Chances are if your competitors big enough for Facebook to let you target them, then you’re already far behind in sales. You can use your own sales data and email to create Custom Audiences and Lookalikes. While this may perform well, it requires you to have sufficient historical data, which we all lack at the bootstrap phase. You can guess your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) using Facebook demographics, interests and behaviors targeting. Such classifications however generally lack granularity and can easily be irrelevant (just check out your own Ad Preference to see for yourself).

Interest-based targeting is even more depreciated as Facebook Pages aren’t Facebook priority anymore, limiting its organic reach and therefore brands do not invest on it anymore. Brand communication is concentrated on Instagram and key targeting data is there, with thousands of highly targeted niche accounts matching any e-commerce segments. Most marketers would kill to be able to target an accounts Instagram’s followers if only Facebook would allow it in its Ads Manager.

There is a workaround to making that dream come true. Facebook lets you retarget people that interacted with your own Instagram Account. Using automation scripts, it is possible to generate account traffic from highly targeted accounts to your Instagram account which, you guessed it, we then retarget through paid advertising.

The following method will allow you to bootstrap your own Instagram based ICP leveraging Instagram scraped data. After a few weeks, Facebook will have enough engagement data for you to create a lucrative Lookalike of this audience, leading to a much broader reach corresponding to your niche’s interests.

Embark in our 8-weeks journey to creating a 59x ROAS e-commerce cold audience. We’ll use the example of an auction marketplace doing 150k€ GMV/month seeking to expand into a new niche: limited-inventory Urban Art auctions.

Step 1: Selecting your Source Accounts

The first step to creating your audience is to list all the Instagram accounts you believe have the right audience representing your niche (Source Accounts). In our example, we’ve targeted 77 accounts across different Urban Art artists’ personal accounts featured in the auction as well as well-known collectors, key opinion leaders, dealers, and galleries.

Tip: to make sure you are curating the right Source Accounts, pay attention to the level of engagement (average number of likes/number of followers) of their audience. Start with accounts that have above 5–10% engagement rate.

Step 2: Gathering data

Next, we collect every like on each identified Source Accounts into a single aggregated list. Using a custom script (note: reach out if interested in knowing more about the script) ran from your computer using Node.js or on the cloud using Phantombuster — thanks Guillaume and Martin for letting me use your great platform — we’re going to extract every single like in each post.

In our case, we’ve collected a little less than 21 million likes over 49,606 posts across the 77 targeted accounts.

Phantombuster executing the script

Aggregating all the likes across the Source Accounts will result in a highly precise list of your desired audience as shown below.

Damn Roonie, 7238 urban art posts liked! Get a life!

You’re half-way through! You now have the golden list of highly targeted accounts that love your niche. Let’s work in getting in touch with them!

Step 3: Generating traffic to your Instagram Account

Remember how Facebook lets you retarget people that interacted with your own Instagram Account? Let’s have these highly targeted accounts interact with you, by having them either consuming your content or visiting your profile. The minute they do one of the two, they’re hooked, and you’ll be able to retarget them.

To do so, we used another automation script run on Phantombuster that automatically follows/unfollows and likes some content of these accounts. People can’t help being curious about who wants to follow them. Them receiving several notifications from you will results in 60% them visiting your profile and 15%-30% following back (these metrics will depend on your account’s name, your content and successful targeting).

Phantombuster doing the groundwork

Tip: people with a high number of followings and/or followers are probably professionals and may be less receptive to your ads. If you’re looking to target individuals, try sorting for the following accounts:

No email in the description

Number of followers between 80–1200

Number followings between 80–800

Eliminating accounts below 80 followers/followings will single out fake bot accounts, while accounts above 1200 followers or 800 followings will probably be professional accounts.

If you are also aiming at growing your followers base, you will have a higher follow-back rate with this set-up.

Warning: Instagram is against automated actions on their platform. However, it is a widespread practice and Instagram seems to tolerate it (so far!) if you’re not pushing it too hard. On an aged account, a reasonable setting is to reproduce a human behavior. This means doing about 60 follow/unfollow per hour, with 3–5 likes per account, only during work hours (9am-7pm) and work-days (Monday to Friday), preferably from the same IP. Going above may risk your account.

If you do not feel comfortable using your official account, you can create a dummy account to retarget the traffic to, protecting your brand, but not leveraging the follow-back potential to increase your follower base and free brand awareness.

Step 4: Creating a Retargeting Audience

One week of automated interactions should result in 1500–2000 accounts in your audience that you can start retargeting to but I suggest you wait at least three weeks to cast a wider net before creating your retargeting audience and especially your Lookalike audience

To set-up your Retargeting Custom Audience, go to your Facebook Ads Manager > Audience:

Click on “Create Audience” => “Custom Audience”. Select “Engagement”, last option in the list => “Instagram business profile”. Select your account and set up to “Everyone who engaged with your business”. Adjust the number of days to the timeframe you started automated interactions.

Setting up your retargeted audience after 60 days of interactions.

To set-up your Lookalike Niche Audience, go to your Facebook Ads Manager > Audience:

Click on “Create Audience” => “Lookalike Audience”. Source: “Other Sources” => Select your Retargeting Custom Audience. Select Locations and 1% Audience Size.

Facebook will populate this Lookalike audience based on their social graph understanding of your source Retargeting Custom Audience. Remember, this is an audience we have identified as highly receptive to Urban Art, so the Lookalikes should be receptive to it too.

Setting up your Lookalike Audience

Step 5: Retargeting

To validate our method, we set out to create one creative, placed on Facebook Feed placement, duplicated across different test audiences:

Manual Artist Audiences: geolocalized audiences (France & United-Kingdom) created based on the interests of well-known Urban Artists. While this technique may sound good, Facebook only allows you to target artists with a big audience, increasing the possibility of noise in your targeting. Many of the artists represented during the auction weren’t available as interests.

Manual artist targeting

Instagram 60d Audience: Retargeting Custom Audience created in the previous steps.

Lookalike Audiences: Audience created based on the Retargeting Custom Audience.

As mentioned before, our tests were run on an auction website selling limited art editions. Inventory for the first test was constrained to 84 art pieces and each art piece is sold only to the highest bidder.

During our test, our goal was to maximize 1) ROAS and 2) Website Payment Info form fills.

The ROAS results speak for themselves: