Facebook releases tools – month after month, year after year – to make your life easier. But they’re not all created equal!. One in particular – Facebook Audience Insights – is a favorite of the most savvy Facebook marketers everywhere.
Today, we’re going to introduce you to it and show you how and why you should be using it.
1. What Is Facebook Audience Insights?
Put simply, it’s a targeting tool. Available in Ads Manager and Power Editor, Facebook Audience Insights reviews an audience and delivers a broad range of data on it. At the moment, the tool supports 3 audience types. They are:
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- Custom Audiences
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- Page Fans & Event Attendees
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- General Facebook Users
You can be very specific – custom audiences – or very general, analyzing every user on the social network. It’s up to you.
From there, Facebook Audience pulls data on those audiences. The data comes from Facebook users themselves – what they write on their profiles – as well as offline purchasing behavior from data providers like Epsilon, Acxiom, and Datalogix. If they sound familiar, it’s because they are. They’re the same providers Facebook leverages to create partner categories.
Then, Facebook organizes all this data – Facebook and real-world – into several categories:
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- Demographics
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- Page Likes
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- Location
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- Activity
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- Household
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- Purchase
Depending on what your industry is, what you’re selling, and what you want your prospects to do – sign-up for a free trial, watch a webinar, etc. – some of these categories may be more important than others.
Location matters to brick-and-mortar shops more than online businesses, and Activity really means something to companies who sell mobile products, as it tells them how often users access the social network on their smartphones.
This might strike you as more or less the same thing as Facebook Page Insights. It’s not.
Facebook Page Insights is limited to interactions on a Facebook page, such as likes, shares, and comments. Facebook Audience Insights is much broader, analyzing data across the entire social network and off-Facebook as well.
Facebook ad success is determined by how well – and how fully – you know your audience.
[Tweet “Know your audiences better – for more clicks, conversions – with Facebook Audience Insights.”]
2. Why Should I Use It?
If you’re like most social marketers, you already have quite a few tools in your repertoire from partner categories to third-party solutions.
But, think about what makes your Facebook ad campaigns work – or not work. It isn’t always your creative or even your product. Those can be on-point and still fail to deliver. Sometimes, you’re just not hitting the right users – or understanding them well enough.
Generally speaking, the more targeted a campaign is, the more effective it is since you’re speaking directly to the people who are most likely to benefit from your product and you’re telling them exactly what they respond best to. You’re not running generic, universal ads that everybody understands, but nobody engages with.
Bespoke ads simply outperform off-the-rack ones, and that’s what makes Facebook Audience Insights so powerful- lower cost-per-click and a cost-per-acquisition.
Add to that an audience more likely to view you as a thought leader than just another billboard in their newsfeed, and you’re winning! You’re on Facebook to do more than just sell. You’re there to humanize your brand and build a community around it.
And if you’re just starting to advertise on Facebook, Audience Insights offers you something more.
Naturally, when you don’t know where to start, you’ll need to guess a little, take a risk or two. And frankly, you usually don’t get what you want the first – or even second and third – time around. Facebook Audience Insights gives you a leg up in the beginning, narrowing down who to target and how to speak to them so you can get to your ideal targeting parameters faster. That saves you time, money, and frustration.
Not a bad way to take the rookie edge off.
Get job title intelligence, for more accurate and more successful B2B ads.
[Tweet “Audience Insights: Facebook data & real-world data for easier, better, cheaper targeting.”]
We don’t recommend every tool Facebook has to offer. Many of them just aren’t worth your very limited and valuable time. But Audience Insights is one you shouldn’t miss. It’s one we rely on personally, and a favorite of the industry at large.
Give it a shot.
Related Post: How to Use Facebook Audience Insights for Better Targeting
