Facebook has become a powerful tool for marketers to reach their target audience. The social media giant offers several tools for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. One such tool is Facebook Audience Insight.
What exactly is this tool, and how can you use the Facebook Audience Insights to grow a business or brand?
This article will help you answer these questions and give you all the information you need to know about how Facebook Audience Insights tool works.
You’ll also learn what steps you should take before using this tool, how to interpret the data that you get from Facebook Audience Insights tool into actionable insights, and why it is beneficial for business growth. We’ll also look at the transitioning from Audience Insights to Meta Business Suite Insights and what that means for your business.
And when you’re finished read our other Facebook guides:
- How to Embed Facebook Posts and Ways You Can Use Them
- How to Properly Set Up and Use Facebook Business Manager: A Step-by-Step Guide
- How to Create a Facebook Business Page?
Table of Contents
What Is Facebook Audience Insights Tool?
The Audience was a free tool for anyone who has an account with Facebook. This unique feature aims to show you how people engage with your business Page. It goes on to provide a huge amount of data about your audience as well as your competitors.
In a nutshell, Facebook Audience Insight allows businesses to see who sees their ads, where they live, and what devices they use. This information helps them improve their ad strategies and better serve their customers.
Audience Insights provides insights into your audience’s demographics, allowing you to create targeted ads. For example, you can target specific age groups or gender. It also lets you know whether your ads effectively reach your intended audience.
How to Get to Facebook Audience Insights
The first step in gaining access to Facebook Audience Insights tool is to log into your Facebook account. You’d want to navigate to the Facebook Ads Manager. Scroll down and click “Audience Insights” in the “Analyze and Report” section.
In the new Meta Business Suite, all you have to do is place your cursor anywhere on the menu on the left side of the screen to expand the column. Here you can select the specific page you want to gather insights on (if you have multiple Business Pages). Click “Insights” below the “Ads” icon to view your audience insights.
Ways You Can Use Facebook Audience Insights
If you’re looking for specific ways to use Facebook Audience Insight, here are some ideas:
View Ad Performance by Country/Geography
Who sees your page is important, but knowing which countries are seeing your content. With Facebook Audience Insights, you can view performance by country and find out who saw your ads across various geographies.
View Ad Performance by Gender
Another way to gain more insight into audience viewing habits would be to determine which genders see your ads. Using Facebook Audience Insight, you can view how males and females respond to your ad campaigns.
View Ad Performance Based on Device Type
Using Facebook Audience Insight, you can analyze how different device types use your ad units. This could include iOS users, Android users, tablet users, desktop computers.
See Who Likes Your Page
With Facebook Audience Insight, you’ll be able to see who likes your pages. If someone doesn’t like your page, does that mean he or she isn’t interested? Or perhaps, just because his or her friend liked your page, they don’t own any of your products.
Use Audience Insights to Improve Sales Conversions
If you’re promoting an online store (or even offline), then the chances are good that you want to increase sales conversions. When you enter the URL for your store onto Facebook Audience Insight, it shows you how visitors convert. Are more men clicking on your site than women? This may indicate that there’s something wrong with your website design. Or, maybe your product descriptions need work. You can easily make these improvements with the data you’ve gathered from Facebook Audience Insight.
The Facebook Social Graph
One of the best features of Facebook Audience Insight is the Facebook social graph. This means that you will see all other people who were friends with the person who viewed your ad.
How to Use Facebook Audience Insights?
The Facebook Audience Insight tool is easy to use. This user-friendly tool offers information that may help you enhance your entire Facebook marketing strategies, such as creating more attractive customer profiles, creating more compelling content, and doing more in-depth competition analysis. A pop-up will appear when you first access Audience Insights. This pop-up asks you to choose an audience for whom you want to collect data.
Everyone on Facebook: Everyone on Facebook sees your ads and posts. But if you’re trying to promote only specific audiences such as men or women, everyone else gets tripped up. For instance, if you have a new clothing line aimed at teen girls, your advertisement would target female teens. However, anyone else who comes across your ad will see it too.
People Connected to Your Page: If you want to share your business page content specifically with the people connected to your page, go ahead and select this option.
Facebook Audience Insights filters
Once you select the appropriate option, Facebook offers many useful filters to optimize your ad campaign. Depending on the filter, your targeting will change. You can adjust your targeting based on the demographics listed either below or on the left side of the screen.
Location
By default, Facebook sets the location to be the United States. However, you can set your audience to any country, region, or city, also you may exclude certain states in the United States. The filter is useful if your business is location-based. It allows you to view data solely relevant to the individuals who reside in the area of your choosing.
Interests
Using this filter, you can choose what category of people you want to show your products and services. For example, you could create campaigns for people interested in buying electronics, computers, or mobile phones.
Interests play a crucial role in uncovering valuable data in your target audience. Facebook uses data such as the sites people visit, likes, and real-world activities and behaviors to assign interests. If you run a coffee shop business, use this filter to find individuals interested in coffee shops in that location.
Age and Gender
This is another important step when it comes to advertising. Facebook uses demographic information, such as age and gender, to determine how they display ads in your newsfeed. The most effective approach is to ensure that your ad is displayed to the right group of people.
Using the gender filter will target the preferred gender for your advertisements. Make sure to pay attention to what these people like.
In addition to gender, Facebook also considers age when displaying your ads. Again, using Facebook’s age insights will give you a good idea of focusing your efforts.
Connections
You may use this filter to concentrate on people who like or don’t like your page. If you have numerous pages, you may choose each one individually and exclude those you don’t find fit.
Advanced filters
In addition to the filters above, Facebook provides additional filters to narrow down your audience. You can access these by clicking the “advanced filters” button. The filters you can find in this section include:
- Language: This filter allows you to target specific groups of users depending on the language they speak.
- Relationship status: Filters audience depending on their relationship statuses. These include single, engaged, or married.
- Education: Displays data specific to people’s educational levels. You could select from grad, college, and high school.
- Work. This filter shows data of individuals working in specific industries.
- Market Sentiment: Suppose you have a business based on a particular ethnicity or culture; In that case, you may use “multicultural affinity” to narrow your search. This feature is available to the US market only.
- Parent: This filter displays data relevant to parents. You can select from all parents/parents with kids with a specific age range.
- Politics: Just as Market Sentiment, this filter is also the US only. It reveals data specific to political stands, from very liberal to very conservative.
- Life events. Shows data on people at key events of their lives. For instance, moving to a particular city or when they got married.
How to Analyze Your Facebook Audience
Now you have a clear understanding of Facebook Audience Insights, let’s see how to analyze them and the vast benefits your business stands to enjoy. Suppose you have a coffee shop business in New York City; a good way to start is targeting people living in NYC interested in coffee.
Additionally, if your potential customers are likely employed parents with little kids younger than 12, you’d want to access the Advanced Filters to optimize your advertising campaign.
Across the top of the Audience Insights, you’ll find four tabs, including, Location, Activity, Page Likes, and Demographics. Let’s take a look at these in detail:
Demographics
Looking to build the perfect buyer persona? The demographics tab is a good place to start. This is where you find valuable data, including age and gender, relationship status, education level, and job title.
The demographic information is very important for businesses because it can help them target their seed audience better. Knowing the age group, gender, job title, etc., helps marketers create effective campaigns and advertisements.
Demographics play a vital role in the success of any business. Understanding the characteristics of the customers is essential for targeting the right audience. This will also help determine the type of advertising strategy that should be adopted.
Page Likes
Here you find insights on the top Facebook pages your seed audience relates with. What you’d want to do is study what content these pages post and incorporate them in your own ad campaign.
It does not necessarily mean that if you like a page too, you’ll buy its products/services, but looking closely at which brands your seed audience love could reveal some interesting patterns.
Location
Use location data to identify market opportunities or places where you should spend more money on advertising. Facebook provides data on the most populated cities, nations, and languages. If the area is unprofitable for your business, you may consider investing heavily in other areas.
Do some research on where your perfect audience resides and consider concentrating your marketing there if the possibility is viable.
Activity
This tap is the perfect place to start preparing an ad campaign. Your filtered audience’s activity uncovers how often they interact with posts and advertising, as well as what mobile devices they use to access Facebook.
Furthermore, the Activity tab tells you if you should optimize your adverts and content for desktop or mobile, as well as your odds of conversion success in a certain region.
Transitioning from Audience Insights to Meta Business Suite Insights
In June 2021, Facebook announced its transitioning of the Audience Insight to the Meta Business Suite Insights. As we all know, the Facebook company (owners of Instagram and Whatsapp) rebranded as Meta last October.
According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta name reflects the part of the industry he thinks will represent Facebook: the metaverse, a shared online 3D virtual environment that many companies are eager to construct as a type of future version of the internet we have now.
The Meta Business Suite
As an upgrade to the Audience Insights, the Meta Business Suites offers a unique feature that helps you gather Facebook and Instagram audience insights with ease.
The option to plan Stories is another amazing feature of Business Suite. This is a huge benefit for folks who don’t want to upload Stories every day manually.
The Meta Business Suite also comes with a new function that allows you to access and respond to Facebook and Instagram messages in one inbox.
All you have to do is open your Facebook page and click ‘Inbox,’ and you have all visitors’ messages from both Instagram and Facebook.
However, the competitor’s pages, where you can compare your data to that of your competitors, are missing from Business Suite Insights.
Conclusion
Audiences are essential for business on social media platforms such as Facebook, so knowing the exact nature of a targeted audience means success in growing your brand or business.
Keeping your analytical data up-to-date and having clear insights into your audience always pays off.
While the Meta Business Suite is new and gathering momentum, it is a powerful tool to help you gain insight into your audiences.
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