Knowing how to use the Facebook audience insights tool is a surefire way to break into the Facebook user base and find potential customers for your brand.
No matter what products you sell, there are billions of users on Facebook who need your products right away.
So, if catching up with your potential customers on Facebook is an issue, using this tool will solve all the problems.
Facebook invented this tool so marketers can use it to optimize their Facebook ads and see results in real time.
But because most people don’t know about it, they waste a lot of money on their ad campaigns and still see no results.
In essence,
Let’s start with a simple puzzle!
How many Facebook users do you set out to reach?
Your answer depends on what best engagement tactics you put in place to optimize your Facebook business page.
According to Forbes, you can gain 250,000 real Facebook Followers in less than a month. Even if you don’t have up to that, what matters is knowing how to use Facebook audience insights for better targeting.
Table of Contents
- What is the Facebook audience insights tool?
- How the audience insights work
- How to use the Facebook Audience Insights tool
- Launch the audience insights tool
- Select the audience you want to analyze
- Target your audience by their demographics
- Audience targeting by location
- Audience targeting by age and gender
- Audience targeting by interests
- Audience targeting by advanced
What is the Facebook audience insights tool?
Facebook audience insights tool is a very powerful tool that you can use to collect a ton of data on Facebook users for sales and marketing purposes.
Since there is no point in presenting your business to those who don’t need it, the data provided in this tool can help you discover who might be interested in your business.
One thing is to know who needs your product, and the other is to know how to target them.
None of these two is possible if you don’t have the right information about your audiences on Facebook.
Meanwhile, you can know which users to target based on the following parameters available in the tool:
- Demographics
- Locations
- Gender
- Interests
- Device
- The time they’re active on Facebook, and so on.
The more of these criteria you use to filter and refine your audience when you’re processing your Facebook ads, the better your targeting.
Ordinarily, creating an ad without targeting is like going to a public space and talking to a crowd.
The attention you are going to get will be insignificant except if you select and talk to only a few people who have the potential to benefit from your campaign.
Meanwhile, creating an ad without targeting will make your budget go high since the ad will be open to all and sundries.
Although, the budget is not mainly the issue, how the conversion rates of non-optimized ads will turn out to be very low.
So, what is the point in spending so much on ads that reach thousands of audiences but which engage a ridiculous amount of people?
Using this tool effectively can reduce your cost of ads by 64.83%.
This implies that…
If you’re experiencing a low engagement rate, the problem is not the number of people you set to reach but not reaching the right people.
So, how do you know who to target or how to reach the best audience on Facebook?
The answer is in this Facebook audience insights tutorial.
But before we start discussing how to use Facebook audience insights for better and more effective targeting, let’s critically look at how the tool works.
How the audience insights work
Your ads or campaign is more effective when you have clues about your audience.
Knowing how to use Facebook audience insights will give you enough information about your audience – what to sell, who will buy it, and where to find buyers.
Assuming you want to sell a pen on your page, who do you think would be your potential customers?
You can’t be sure your potential customers are students.
Although it is certainly most students will be interested in buying a pen because they use it every day. But because the type of pens you sell matters, you can’t be sure many students will show interest.
Forget the fact that every student needs a pen.
If what you sell is not what the category of students on your page needs, the campaign will fail.
So, you have to take note of the correlation between what you want to sell and who you want to sell it to. Then use the result to optimize your ads.
Despite the fact that everybody would like to use a pen at a point in time, everybody can’t use all types of pens at the same time.
So, you need to know what type of pens you want to sell and what types of people is the pen suitable for.
If you are selling a fountain pen, don’t expect a high school student to be your potential customer. Instead, you should rather look for businessmen or divert into gel pens if students must be your target customers.
Meanwhile, knowing your audience will make it easy to target each with the right ads.
You need to know their age, gender, status, education, profession, location, the language they speak, and their interests by learning how to use Facebook audience insights.
How to use the Facebook Audience Insights tool
If you don’t want to waste your time and money doing a trial and error, you have the best tool here.
When you use the tool effectively, it gives you insights into the business and category of the audience that has the biggest prospect.
So, take the following steps to achieve your objectives…
Launch the audience insights tool
- Go to Facebook Ads Manager.
- Click on Ads Manager at the top-left of the page to find the audience insights. Or you can type www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights/ in your browser to launch the tool.
Select the audience you want to analyze
When you launch the tool for the first time, you will see a popup box in which you can select the type of audience you want to target.
If you select Everyone on Facebook, you have a better chance to expand your coverage around all the Facebook users.
This option will help you gain new potential fans and customers.
Or if you select People connected to your page, you will limit your ad’s exposure to your page fans only. In that case, the option will help you retain your content among your existing fans.
The second option might not be suitable if your page doesn’t have an enormous fan base. Since the scope of this guide is to know how to use the Facebook audience insights tool for optimum conversion and sales rates, my advice is to select “Everyone on Facebook“.
Target your audience by their demographics
This step will help you get people who are in dire need of your products or services to see your ads.
If you look at the screen very well, the page is divided into two.
On the left side are all the demographic parameters you need to make your ads suit your target audience. On the other side are graphs and charts representing your audience.
By default, what is on the screen is the analysis of Facebook users. This will change by the time you start making inputs on each form available on the left.
Audience targeting by location
The first demographic parameter to tweak in Facebook audience insights is location.
Location can be used to target your audience on Facebook. Assuming your product is alcoholic, you have to know that some audience due to faith or health issues won’t like your products.
So, you can use this parameter to target areas where taking alcoholic products is not a barrier. Because that is where your sales can improve.
Note also, if your product is a physical product, consider a location where the shipping won’t be a problem for you.
But if your product is a digital product like software, game, eBook, or digital service, location won’t be a problem so far your customers can download the item from anywhere in the world.
Audience targeting by age and gender
Facebook audience insights can only provide information about users who are 18 years and above. There is no provision for users younger than that limit.
You can effectively use this parameter if you have done your research about your audience personas. You need your findings to know the best age group to target.
Audience persona research is not a difficult thing.
All you have to do is to identify the age group that can benefit most from your ads. If your niche is tech, millennials are likely going to be your largest audience.
So, you can set the ages between 18 and 34 depending on your product, and see in the graph the percentage of the audience you’re likely going to reach.
Test with different age groups and resolve to what will give you the best result.
Then set the gender as applicable to your product. You can select male, female, or both at a time for optimum results.
Audience targeting by interests
You can also use what the audience is showing interest in to target them on the Facebook audience insights tool.
Facebook monitors user areas of interest and activities from time to time to ensure that what users come across on the network is within their interests.
If you click on the Interest tab, a list of interests will drop down right below your cursor as follows:
- Business and Industry
- Entertainment
- Family and Relationships
- Fitness and Wellness
- Food and Drink
- Hobbies and Activities
- Shopping and Fashion
- Sports and Outdoors
- Technology
Mind you, each of these interests has sub-interests to help you narrow your target audience down to a specific category.
If you’re confused about what specific interest to select, try different interests that best describe your audience and monitor the differences on the graph.
Let me quickly tell you how this works!
Have you ever noticed that after a while you have been engaging with other people’s posts on your Facebook wall, a post would just pop in?
Next to it would be a notice from Facebook that the post was sent to you because you have shown interest in a similar post recently.
So, when you set the right audience interest, Facebook will automatically place your campaign on every user who might have shown interest in a similar campaign before.
A lot of competition is going on here.
You just have to make sure that whatever demographic parameter you select about your audience is strongly relevant to your product or what your campaign is all about.
Audience targeting by advanced
Click on Advanced, just like you did above and another set of items will drop down. The list comprises your audience by relationship status, education level, job title and office type, and cultural group.
Remember, you can’t target audiences younger than the age of 18.
So, with the Advanced parameter, you can target parents who will likely involve their children. By so doing, you can reach the younger ones through their parents.
You have to ensure that the age you’re targeting is old enough to be a parent.
The bottom line is that while you’re setting an insight parameter, you can always go back to your settings and create further layers to refine your audience until the graphs give you a desirable result.
When you are done with the settings, click on the save button and name your campaign. You can create different campaigns and publish the one that will give you the best result in the end.
Conclusion
I hope this guide covers all you need to learn about how to use the Facebook audience insights tool to target the right customers and boost your ROI.
If you want to get the best of Facebook ads, you need to know more about your audience.
Facebook makes this tool free to use and to help you or other companies and their marketing teams to know which audience is likely going to buy their products or which audience should be targeted while posting a campaign.
With that approach, you can optimize your Facebook ads and maximize your profit.
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