A Lookalike Audience expands one of your existing audiences to reach other households that resemble it, using Vibe’s addressable graph. It is the answer to “show me more people like my best customers” — useful when a customer list or retargeting audience is too small to deliver the reach a campaign needs.

You create Lookalike Audiences from the Audience Manager, then select them in campaign targeting like any other audience.

Before you start

Your advertiser needs a Vibe pixel: the expansion uses your pixel data to seed the graph. If the advertiser has no pixel configured, Lookalike creation is blocked — even when the seed is a CRM or contact list. See Troubleshooting Your Vibe Pixel.
Your seeds need at least 5,000 reachable profiles in total: you can combine several seed audiences, and it is their combined reach that has to clear 5,000. Below that, the audience cannot be created.

Which audiences can be used as a seed

You can seed a Lookalike Audience from any of the following:

Contact lists — manual CSV uploads and API uploads
CRM integrations — Klaviyo, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Twilio Segment, Customer.io, mParticle, Tealium and Fivetran
Website retargeting audiences
Custom web traffic (URL-matching) audiences
Company lists and firmographic audiences

You can select more than one seed. A Lookalike Audience cannot be used as the seed of another Lookalike Audience.

Create a Lookalike Audience

Go to the Audience Manager and start creating a new Lookalike Audience.
Pick one or more seed audiences. Only eligible audiences appear in the list.
Choose an expansion level (see below). An estimated audience size is shown for each level before you save.
Optionally restrict the audience to specific states.
Give the audience a name and save it.

The audience is then built in the background. It becomes selectable in campaigns once its status is Active.

Expansion level

A single slider controls how far the expansion goes, from the profiles closest to your seed to the widest reach:

Narrowest — closest to your seed, smallest audience, highest expected similarity
Narrow
Balanced — the default
Broad
Broadest — widest reach, least similar to your seed

Moving the slider wider increases reach and reduces how closely the audience resembles your seed. The estimated size updates as you move between levels, so you can weigh reach against similarity before saving.

Your seed audience is never targeted

A Lookalike Audience always excludes the people and companies in its seed. If you build a Lookalike from a Klaviyo list, that Klaviyo list is not targeted by the Lookalike.

This means you can run a campaign on the seed and a campaign on its Lookalike at the same time without the two overlapping.

Audience statuses

Like other audiences, a Lookalike Audience shows a status badge in the Audience Manager:

Status	Badge	Meaning
Active	🟢 Green	The audience is built and ready to use for targeting.
Syncing	🔵 Blue	The audience has been created and its expansion has not started yet.
Populating	🔵 Blue	The expansion has run and the audience is being filled. This can take up to 24 hours.
No data	🟠 Orange	The build finished without finding any matching profiles. Try a broader expansion level, a larger seed, or a wider location.
Inactive	⚪ Grey	The audience is no longer active and cannot be targeted.

Note: if a Lookalike Audience is still empty after 24 hours, it moves from Populating to No data.

Using a Lookalike Audience in a campaign

Once a Lookalike Audience is Active, it appears in the audience picker of the campaign’s strategy step alongside your other audiences, and its final size is shown on its row in the Audience Manager.

Good to know

You cannot delete an audience while a Lookalike Audience is using it as a seed. Delete the Lookalike first.
Location targeting on a Lookalike Audience is currently limited to states.
The final audience size is confirmed once the build completes, and can differ from the estimate shown at creation.

Lookalike Audiences