Facebook pages are incredible marketing tools for a lot of businesses, but it’s fair to say most are not using them to their fullest potential.
The potential here is all the data your page can show you in terms of who your audience is, what they like, and more. This data isn’t just there as a nice trivia into your target audience – you can use it to perfect your Facebook ads, run better-targeted campaigns that convert and boost your revenue.
In this article, we’ll discuss the Facebook Audience Insights, and why you should look into it a lot more often than you likely are at the moment.
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Why Facebook Audience Insights Are Essential
When it comes to running ads on any platform, social media, or otherwise, the target audience is essential. You can have the best copy, most visually-pleasing pictures, and perfect landing page, and still not make one sale if you’re targeting the wrong person.
Getting your target audience defined would mostly be a guessing game if not for the many tools available to marketers, such as the Audience Insights. It’s a way for you to research a potential audience, with all its characteristics, and use that information if your Facebook ads.
For instance, if you need to target people who like organic coffee, that’s an estimated audience of 1-1.5 million Facebook users. Now, that’s a big audience, and you may think that is a great base audience, but it’s not. That number simply refers to all the people who like organic coffee on Facebook.
When we add some more criteria we need, such as the fact that we’re only interested in Australian Facebook users who like organic coffee, our audience is an estimated 15K – 20K people.
Good, so we know roughly how many people in Australia are interested in organic coffee. So what?
Well, Facebook actually gives you a lot of information on these 15K – 20K users, such as:
- Age and gender
- Relationship status
- Education level
- Job title
- The pages they like
- The city or area they are in
- And information about what they do on the platform, such as ad clicks or what device they use.
How to Leverage the Audience Insights Tool
The tool is great both for discovering who your new target audience is and find out more about the people who already follow you.
On the Audience Insights page, you’ll see many tabs that allow you to establish different criteria you want your target audience to ideally have, including the option to exclude those connected to your page. Let’s take a look at the different tabs available in the tool and how you can use them to create better Facebook ads.
1. Create Audience
First thing’s first, you need to create the audience you want. For that, Facebook gives you a bunch of different criteria to choose from:
- Location
- Age and gender
- Interests
- Connections (if you want to include or exclude people connected to your page)
- Advanced criteria, where you can include Facebook user’s language, relationship status, work, education, and more.
Select everything you want your audience to have, and for those items, you’re unsure of, just leave them blank. Facebook will provide more details about that after.
This is the first step to see if your audience is, indeed, an audience. If based on the criteria Facebook estimates your target at only 1,000 people, then you narrowed it too much, meaning your ad campaigns may not be as effective.
2. Demographics
The demographics tab tells you more about who your audience is in terms of:
- Age and gender
- Relationship status
- Education levels
- Their job titles
When you know all of this about your audience, running an ad campaign can prove a lot more fruitful because you can create offers, visuals, and copy specifically designed with that audience. The more relevant to your audience your campaign offer is, the more likely they are to convert.
People like to come across personalised offers that feel made just for them. This would be nearly impossible if you don’t have a good audience description, which this tool can provide.
3. Page likes
The page likes tab offers you information on:
- Top categories – meaning the general top interest they have, as well as the pages they’ve liked.
- Page likes – what other pages they’ve liked that match your interest.
When you know more and more about the interests of your audience, you can provide them with better ads that may speak to more of their same interest. An organic coffee lover that also loves football may be interested in that football-shaped coffee cup, but you won’t know if that’s really a market to be leveraged unless you look at the data.
The real perk of the page likes tab is that you can see which of your competitors the Facebook users follow. Look at what they have on their Facebook page compared to what you offer. Is theirs more enticing, more engaging? By analysing their page and content, you can ultimately perfect yours.
4. Location
This tab shows you:
- Top cities
- Top countries
- Top languages
Knowing where your audience is and what language they speak is great when you want to run local ad campaigns. For example, you may not reduce your audience to Australia, but want to include other countries such as the United States. With this information, you can the exact areas where your audience is located.
As for the language, well if most of your audience speaks French but you’re writing the copy in English, you are likely missing out on some conversion opportunities.
5. Activity
Lastly, the activity tab shows you:
- Frequency of activities – how often they perform certain actions on the app, such as click on ads;
- Device users – what do they use to look at their news feeds.
The most important here is the device. Knowing what your audience uses to access Facebook is essential because it dictates how you should be creating your ads and landing page. If most people use a mobile phone, you should have a mobile-first design on your landing page.
What Do You Do with All This?
You can actually save audiences you’ve established on the tool, which will then be available in the Audience section of your Ads Manager. You can then select the audience for a Facebook ad to test it later, or you can create an ad right there on the Audience Insights Page.
You can also use this information to perfect the target audience for the ads you’re already running, or optimise ad copy or landing pages to improve conversions.
Over to You
Running effective Facebook ads is a lot more complex than what lies on the surface, but the key to success often lies in the targeting. If you want to run better-targeted campaigns, AIA can help. We are a Facebook Marketing Agency with decades of combined experience creating successful Facebook campaigns. Get in touch with us now!
