Audience Insights: How to Find the Best Audiences on Facebook

Do you know where your clients live? Are they women or men? What do they like on Facebook? All speak Spanish?

Knowing these basic concepts about your audiences will be useful to be able to compare them, find similar ones, plan your campaigns and create relevant ads.

How do you know if your Facebook ad campaigns are meaningful to users? Read this article and start using Facebook Audience Insights to find answers.

Audience Insights is one of the most powerful (and free) tools that Facebook offers, to give each company the knowledge they need about their audiences and thus improve the results of their Facebook advertising campaigns.

Here you will find everything you need to use Facebook Audience Insights and narrow your audience perfectly, including a case study of AdEspresso, a digital marketing tool.

If we take a successful Facebook ad campaign and break it down into the core elements, the top three factors would be:

• Involve advertising creativity, that is, an image or a video, the title and the text of the ad.
• A good product and a compelling offer.
• Target the best audiences to show your ads to

So since the audience is one of the three pillars of success, how do we know who to target with our ads?

With 2.27 billion monthly active users on Facebook (and more than 1 billion on Instagram) there is great potential to narrow your audience and focus only on those people who are most interested in our offering.

The basic targeting options that we have available in the ad manager are:

• Custom and lookalike audiences
• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Idiom
• Demography
• Interests
• Behaviors
• Fans or friends of fans of a Facebook page.

Custom and lookalike audiences can be very useful, but new advertisers may not have enough information to create them, and established marketers may have used them so often that they have overwhelmed audiences.

That is where interests and demographic orientation come into play. But how do we know what interests to target?

Getting started with Audience Insights

 Login to your Business Account and click on the menu in the upper left corner, under the "Plan" section.

Here you can select Audience Insights:

You will then be presented with a pop-up window, allowing you to choose between a general audience or people connected to your Facebook page:

Please note that to protect user privacy, the option to select a custom audience was removed in 2018.

Once you have selected your initial audience, will take you to the main screen:

The left menu allows you to filter the audience and the available options are:

• Country, region or city
• Age: The minimum age that can be selected is 18 years, unlike the ads that can be targeted at those over 13 years old
• Gender
• Interests
• Fans of your Facebook page.
• Various advanced options: language, education, marital status, job, multicultural affinity, parents, politics (US only), and life events such as a new job or new relationship.

Remember:

The default location is the United States.

If you are targeting another country, make sure to change this.

If you can't get enough data for your chosen country and the sections are blank, go back to the United States.

Although this will not be as relevant, a larger audience will allow you to access more data to start exploring interests.

Insights can only be provided if there are at least 1,000 people in the audience.

To help, Facebook provides an audience estimate at the top of the page; If you notice that it becomes too small, you should remove a filter.

In the case shown in the image above, there are four tabs in Audience Insights:

1. Demography
2. "Likes" of pages, location and activity.

To demonstrate what each section does, we will use an audience of determined Facebook followers as a case study.

The first charts presented are for age and gender, marital status, and education level. The gray bars are the averages for all Facebook users in that demographic and the blue bars represent the chosen audience.

In this case, we can see that most of the users are between 25 and 54 years old.

The "fans" of this page are slightly more likely to be single and are highly educated.

The next step is the name of the positions, many of them are in Sales, Business or Technology.

What other Facebook pages do fans of this page like?

It turns out that other digital marketing companies like Marketo, Leadpages, and Infusionsoft are popular.

That gives us examples of "interests" to use in targeting our ads.

Now comes the best, the affinity score (affinity score).

Facebook defines this as "how likely your audience is to like a certain page compared to everyone on Facebook."

Uncovering specific interests like "Bing ads" can be much more useful, and less competitive, than targeting broader, more generic digital marketing interests.

Not all Facebook pages in the affinity scoring section can be found in the available "interests", so it is worth making a list of 10-20 so that you can find 5-10 at the time of creation. your campaigns.

Also, it takes some common sense to create the list.

For example, Old Dominion Freight Line is not aligned with digital marketing, so it can be discontinued.

The location section doesn't show any particularly strong trends; This is to be expected as those who work digital can generally work from anywhere that has Wi-Fi.

Finally, we can see that page fans are much more active on Facebook than the average person and unsurprisingly they tend to own a laptop and cell phone.

Using Audience Insights without Facebook fans

What can you do if you still don't have enough followers on your Facebook page or if you want to advertise a product or service that is not aligned with your core business?

The best place to start is to create a buyer persona and outline some interests.

Create and save new audiences

Don't let your work go to waste, be sure to save new audiences so you can use them in your Facebook ad campaigns later.

Now create your best ad and show it to the perfect audience

Once you've found the perfect audience, it's time to put it into action.

Simply press the green "Create Ad" button at the top right and you will be taken to the Ad Manager.

Choose a campaign type (engagement, traffic, conversions, etc.) and you will find the audience you created.

Final thoughts

Facebook Audience Insights is one of the most powerful tools available for audience research and it's free. It is something that every advertiser should be using.

It is worth blocking 20-30 minutes in your schedule to review all the data that Audience Insights offers and create a list of 10 interests.

When you go to research interests, keep in mind that you are trying to find a specific type of person, not just a list of interests directly related to your product.

For example, a real estate agent found that clients interested in luxury real estate were more interested in cruises and American Express than other real estate companies. Similarly, those who buy beard care cream may be fans of craft beer and vinyl records rather than personal care brands.

So, keep an open mind when creating an interest list and really think about your target market.

Even with millions of advertisers on Facebook, you can find a unique targeting angle where you will have a real advantage over your competitors.