Facebook Audience Insights as defined by Facebook itself is “a new tool designed to help marketers learn more about their target audiences, including aggregate information about geography, demographics, purchase behavior and more”. To put it in a layman’s language, it is a tool which helps advertisers to know the details about the audience they wish to target for promoting their products. Apart from helping you in knowing the details of the target audience, this tool also helps in knowing your audience, even without posting advertisements for them. This data helps you in building strong buyer personas, uncovering gems for competitive research and creating compelling content.
The data mainly comes from two sources:
- Self-reported data – This data is given by the users themselves when they fill their profile details such as gender, age, job title, location, relationship status, Page likes and so on.
- External data – This includes data collection of Information like purchasing behavior, home value and household income. This data is then matched with the data of Facebook user ID’s.
Next comes how to use this tool. If you are a beginner, don’t worry, here is a complete guide for you on how to use Facebook Audience Insights.
To get started, first go to Ads Manager option, in the left pane look for Audience Insights and click on it.
Step 1: Choose your target audience:
When you first select Audience Insights, Facebook will prompt you to choose a group of audience, to begin with. (Note: Your answer can be changed later)
The options are as follows:
- Everyone on Facebook – This gives you an analysis of Facebook in totality. (Note: Although U.S is set as default, it can be changed later on). If you wish to analyze data depending on competitor Pages and broad interests, you should select this option.
- People connected to your Page – This option lets you select your Facebook page, it helps in understanding your present audience.
- A Custom Audience – In case you have been using this option, you can choose an already existing audience. In case you don’t use this option, first upload one list of email addresses. Facebook then matches these email IDs with their user accounts. The longer your list is, the easier it becomes to understand behavior and demographics of people, who are using your product.
Here we will explain the whole process by focusing on the first option. However, the other two options will also follow the same process.
After selecting “Everyone on Facebook”, a new screen will open for you which is explained in the second step.
Beginners Guide to Facebook Audience Insights –
An Infographic
Infographic Source: salesforce
Step 2: Select parameters of your segment:
In this section, you can select the specific characteristics of your target audience.
As you have already seen that U.S. was set as a default location, now here you can change the location to any other country. You have to select the ‘location box’ and choose the name of your desired country from the drop-down menu. In case you don’t want U.S. in your analysis, take your cursor over it, select X and it will be removed from the screen. You can add names of several countries to get country wise analysis. If no country is selected, then you will get to know about the Facebook demographics all over the world.
On the left side of the menu, you can select your audience by different parameters like gender, age, interests and other advanced data like language, work, education etc.
The ‘Interests’ option helps you uncover industry or competitor information. You can either search for specific Pages or interest groups. However, all pages will not appear here. So it is better to enter the interests and Pages (you should make your own list) manually in the box and see if they are being displayed. Do remember to omit the dots and symbols present in the name of the Page, before entering it in the box.
For instance, you want to look at the audience of Amazon for India Page, so the page name is Amazon.in. If you enter amazonin in the box, it will appear in the drop-down menu for you to select it. So now we have created an audience who like Amazon.in and are based in India.
Step 3: Exploring the data:
Now let’s see how to explore the extracted data. There are a total of 6 tabs available that mainly cover several aspects of the data. They are:
- Demographics – It includes information such as gender, age, educational qualification, relationship status etc. This data is valuable while planning content and creating personas to engage your target audience. Further, you can segment each of these options also.
- Page Likes – It is divided into 2 sections. The 1st section displays the “top categories” and top pages within these categories that your selected audience likes. The 2nd section displays specific pages that your chosen audience likes more than the average FB users.
- Location – It includes options such as “Top Languages”, “Top Countries” and “Top Cities.” This data is helpful for people having regional businesses because it tells them whether their Pages are reaching their respective audiences.
- Activity – It has two sections.
1. Frequency of Activities – This shows all the activities of users for last 30 days such as Pages Likes and other engagements (such as Likes, Comments, Shares etc.) This information helps you to decide whether you should target this audience for your product.
2. Device users – This shows details about kind of devices that have been used to log onto Facebook such as desktop or mobiles. This is helpful when you are creating content for sharing on Facebook; if the audience is using more of iPhones, your content must be compatible with that device.
- Household – This data is based on the survey responses, Census, purchase activity etc. This includes 5 data sets: Household income, Home ownership, Household size, Home Market value and spending methods.
- Purchase – This data reflects the purchasing behavior of your audience and is collected by Epsilon, Acxiom and Datalogix. This data is segmented into 4 categories: Retail spending, Online purchases, Purchase behavior and In market for a vehicle.
The last 2 tabs are only available for U.S. audiences.
Step 4: Save your target audience:
After analyzing the data, you can save it. You will find the ‘save’ option on the top of your Page. Provide a name to your audience and save it. Now this data is available on Power Editor and can be used in your campaigns.
Make use of Facebook Audience Insights and serve your ads to the target audience.