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by Marketing Guru (9.0k points)
When I try to create a lookalike audience based on value-based sources from the Meta Pixel, and select North America (since that’s the only region we sell in), I get an error that says: “Audience can’t be created. Your lookalike source must include at least 100 people in the same country as your selected audience location. Please choose a different audience location or source.” (Error #2654)

Anyone have any tips?

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by Marketing Guru (8.2k points)

Yes, that’s a pretty common issue — and the error you're seeing (Error #2654) is Meta’s way of telling you: “Your source audience doesn’t have enough people from the country you're targeting.”

Here’s what’s likely happening and how to fix it:

Meta requires a minimum of 100 people from the same country (in this case, somewhere in North America) in your source audience in order to generate a lookalike. If your Pixel-based value source includes fewer than 100 buyers (or high-value actions) from, say, the U.S. or Canada individually, the system throws this error.

How to Fix:

1. Double-Check Your Source Audience

  • Go to Audiences > Custom Audiences and view the source audience’s size by country.

  • Make sure you actually have 100+ users from a single country in North America — not a combined total across multiple countries.

2. Change the Lookalike Location to a Specific Country

  • Instead of selecting “North America”, try selecting just United States, Canada, or Mexico — whichever has the highest audience count in your data.

3. Use Broader or Different Source Data

  • Instead of a narrow Pixel event like “Purchases with value,” try a broader custom audience:

    • Example: People who visited product pages

    • Or people who added to cart

  • This increases the audience pool and often hits the 100-per-country minimum.

4. Combine Audiences If Needed

  • You can combine smaller custom audiences into a larger one (e.g., page views + adds to cart) using the "Include people who meet ANY of the following" rule when creating a new custom audience — then base your lookalike on that.

5. Upload a Value-Based Customer List

If you have customer emails + purchase values, consider uploading a CSV with value column and use that as your lookalike source. It’s more flexible and often more complete than relying purely on the Pixel.

Once you meet the 100-user-per-country rule with a solid source audience, the error will disappear. So the key is to either narrow your location or broaden your source.

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