Supercharge Audience Targeting with Resonate Look-Alike Models

Our clients can now supercharge their audience targeting strategies, maximizing the power of their first-party data and making it work harder, smarter, and faster. Resonate Look-Alike Models (LAM) empower you to expand top-performing audiences, uncover new high-potential prospects, and achieve stronger campaign outcomes.

This feature allows clients to slice first-party, tag, and engaged audiences with Resonate Elements and look-alike model them for more precise, scalable, and effective activation. That means smarter audience expansion, stronger targeting, and higher returns on your campaign spend.

Unlike legacy approaches that rely on outdated data, Resonate Look-Alike Models are powered by billions of daily signals and cutting-edge AI. That ensures the most accurate and up-to-date understanding of consumers’ changing behaviors, interests, and intent. With rAI, our proprietary AI technology, you get models built on the freshest signals available—scored on the fly to deliver the highest-quality output.

And the best part? Our Look-Alike Model is fully self-service in the Ignite platform. In just seconds, you can create multiple LAMs, fine-tune your scoring criteria to strike the perfect balance between reach and performance, then activate immediately.

We’ve added powerful new controls that give clients the ability to customize their LAM based on the results they want, whether it’s expanding reach, boosting conversions, or acquiring new customers.

Ready to apply it? Below are the LAM strategies to choose from, tailored to your business goals.

Look-Alike Strategies

A. Optimize = Balanced Strategy

Criteria for Use:

• When you want to maximize precision without needing to decide between including or excluding members of the seed audience.
• The model will decide which individuals to include in your LAM target audience based  on how similar they score to the seed audience.
• Especially useful when audience behavior is complex or outliers are present.

Value Provided:

• Automatically removes outliers or weak matches, even if they are in the seed audience, allowing you to maximize the precision of your LAM target audience.
• The precision chart helps you optimize for the best balance of precision and reach.

B.  Include Seed Audience = Retention or Upsell Campaigns

Criteria for Use:

• For retention marketing, repurchase cycles, or campaigns targeting known customers.
• Useful for onboarding customer data from previous quarters and re-engaging that base.
• The product has a short shelf life or frequent usage, e.g., consumables.
• The client lacks historical activation or wants to establish a baseline quickly.

Value Provided:

• Allows the model to reinforce strong customer behavior.
• Targets known buyers who may be ready for a repeat purchase.
• Increases media efficiency when the seed audience is too small alone.
• Maximize revenue through both retention and acquisition.

C. Exclude Seed Audience (Conversion-Based Exclusion)

Criteria for Use:

• When activating based on a conversion tag, particularly for direct response (DR) or performance marketing campaigns.
• Ideal when clients want net new customers, not previous converters, and want to avoid wasting media dollars on people who already converted.
• The product is a one-time purchase or has a long repurchase cycle.

Value Provided:

• Prevents retargeting and ensures marketing dollars are directed toward prospects, not existing customers.
• Enables fresh acquisition by focusing only on look-alike audiences who are behaviorally similar to the seed audience.

 Please note - our Look-Alike Modeling does not use any sensitive data in the training or scoring of the model. 

FAQs

• Has the Look-Alike Model changed?
  • Resonate continually improves our models to ensure our data is top in class. We have updated our Look-Alike Model to support greater options with the seed audience and to project a precision chart to give clients greater insight into their target audiences.
• How should we size our Look-Alike target audience?
  • Resonate recommends using the precision chart so you can optimize the target audience size while still maintaining a level of precision with how closely your look-alike target audience matches your seed audience. The Look-Alike Model precision analysis allows you to refine the exact size of your target audience accordingly. As your Look-Alike audience grows, the precision decreases since new additions resemble the seed audience less.
• What are the different Look-Alike strategies?
  • The Seed audience is the foundation of your Look-Alike Model. You can choose to include, exclude or optimize your seed audience into your LAM target audience. Optimize strategy selects the audience that looks most like your seed audience, regardless of whether the consumer belongs to the seed audience or not. Include or exclude strategies will force the seed audience in or out of the activation audience.
• I have an existing LAM delivery do I have to change anything?
  • No, all existing LAM deliveries will continue as usual until their scheduled end date. If you would like to take advantage of the new LAM features, like the precision chart or delivery strategy, we recommend you pause your existing LAM delivery, clone the audience, and start a new LAM delivery which unlocks the new features.
• How do I view the LAM precision chart if I’m accessing from the Active Deliveries list in Engagement Center?
  • If you're using the delivery list page, you won’t see the LAM precision chart for your audience unless you've already started an activation for that audience. Once the delivery has been initiated, you can view the LAM precision chart from the delivery details page or delivery confirmation page.
  • If you'd like to preview the LAM precision chart before starting a delivery, you'll need to access it from the Audience List page or click the direct link in the LAM precision analysis notification email. On the Audience List page simply click "Activate" on the relevant audience, and then select "Look-Alike Model"—you’ll see the precision chart if one exists for that seed audience..