Have you ever wondered who exactly is seeing your Facebook advertising campaigns? It’s one thing to market to an audience, but to understand the audience is a whole different, (and more successful) story.

Facebook Audience Insights is a free tool that allows businesses to better understand potential audiences. Once you’ve defined your Cold Audience’s demographics, interests, and behaviours, you can use this tool to analyse them on a deeper level so you know for sure they are a good fit for your campaign.

So, want to get to know your buyers? In this article, we’ll go through a step-by-step guide on how to set up and master Audience Insights for your business.

How to Navigate to Audience Insights

As always, start with your Business Manager tool in your Facebook business account. Follow the link through to “All Tools” which will then expand into “Audience Insights”.

Refine to Shine

The next step is an important one. Refining your target audience allows you to analyse them and uncover valuable insights. The options for refining can be changed through interests, demographics or other online behaviours. You can alter these audiences however you’d like. Your audience insights and size will alter accordingly.

Using interests can reduce the audience size even more, which is always a good thing if you’re trying to identify users who may be your prime customers.

When filtering by interests, you can either filter by specific interests or broad interests. Specific interests can be typed into the interests field, such as Rebel Sport, CrossFit or Nike. Alternatively, you may want to be a bit more broad with your audience selection. So in this instance, you have the option to click on broad interests, such as fitness and wellness. In the video, I select geotargeting of Australia, filtered by parents with children aged 0 to 12, that have an interest in meditation. This left me with an audience size of 90,000 to 100,000 monthly active users.

On this page, you’re then able to see demographic insights for this audience, including age, relationship status, education level and job titles.

Analysis by Page Category and Page Likes

The next opportunity you have with Audience Insights is to understand which pages your audience follows.

If you’ve ever set-up a Facebook Page, you would have selected a page category. This may be “Sports and Recreation” or “Education” for example. This is how the pages on the Page Likes tab are first catgerorised for you – it shows relevant pages your audience follows, grouped into their relevant page category.

Scroll down further and you’ll see the pages are no-longer grouped by their category, rather they are displayed individually. It defaults to being sorted by relevance to your target audience.
By using this feature, you may uncover new Cold Audiences you wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. You can also create audiences and analyse them to assure you’re hitting the right people with your ads.

You may also use this tool to identify relevant pages and build a relationship with the page administrator in an effort to develop a strategic partnership for joint promotions, or simply suggesting you share each other’s content.

There are many, many benefits, depending on how you use these insights!

Analysis by Location and Activity

Facebook Audience Insights also allows you to view your audience’s locations, cities and countries. You can also see how active your audience is on Facebook and whether they engaging on their mobile or desktop computer.

Get in with Audience Insights

Facebook Audience Insights is a highly effective tool when building a campaign, particularly if you want to research the Cold Audiences you plan on targeting.
Play around with the features, and see what works best for you. And as always, if you have any questions, drop them in the comment section below.