Per-Country vs. Combined Multi-Country Lookalike Audiences — which should I choose?

Country Classification decides whether your Lookalike Audience targets all your selected countries together, or creates a separate audience for each one.

When you create a Lookalike Audience in our app and select more than one country in Target Area, you'll need to choose a Country Classification. There are two options:

1. Combined Multi-Country Audience (the default) creates a single Lookalike Audience that spans all the countries you selected.

2. Per-Country Audiences creates a separate Lookalike Audience for each country you selected. If you select 2 countries, one click of Create will produce 2 separate Lookalike Audiences — one per country.

Audiences created with Per-Country Audiences are automatically named for you, in the format:

LOOKALIKE (<country code> - <audience size%>) - <source audience name>

For example, choosing the US at a 5% audience size from a Custom Audience called "Website Visitors" would create an audience named LOOKALIKE (US - 5%) - Website Visitors.

Which one should you choose?

• Choose Combined Multi-Country Audience if you want one simple audience to run ads to across all your selected countries at once — this keeps your Ads Manager setup lighter and is a good default for most stores.
• Choose Per-Country Audiences if you want to run separate ad campaigns per country, compare performance country by country, or set different budgets and creatives for each market.

3. Once you've picked your Country Classification, continue with the rest of the Lookalike Audience setup and click Create.

That's all — your audience (or audiences) will sync to your Meta ad account according to the classification you chose.

Updated on: 12/10/2026