How to Use Facebook Audience Insights for Cost-Effective Ads

Facebook Audience Insights was an analytics tool built into Facebook. The standalone tool was discontinued in 2021.

Facebook audience insights (notice the lowercase ‘a’ and ‘i’ here) is a term used to refer to analytics data about advertising audiences that can be reached on Meta platforms. Confused? Don’t panic. We’ll walk you through everything you need to know about where to find audience insights on Facebook to make the most of your Facebook ads budget.

Knowing who already engages with your content is critical to building your audience even more. Audience insights help you learn about what your existing audience responds to. But even more important, they help you research your potential audience to look for new ways to connect.

Now it’s time to start using the information available here to build a target market for your ads.

Click the Filter button on the top right to select audience characteristics to target.

You can choose any country, region, or city.

If you’re managing a local business with a bricks-and-mortar location, you’ll likely want to choose only your city, or your local area. If you’re selling online services, you may want to include countries worldwide. If you sell a physical product, you should stick to the countries for which shipping is available and not cost-prohibitive.

This is where it gets interesting. Start typing in the Interests box and suggestions appear. You should get as detailed as you can here based on information you know about your existing customers.

You can learn a lot just by watching what happens with the graphs as you refine your choices.

• For example, the gender split of the potential audience of U.S. Facebook users is 61.8% women to 38.2% men.
• Add “Food and Beverage” as an interest and that changes to 64.22% women and 35.8% men.
• Add “Restaurants” and it jumps to 68.4% women and 31.6% men.
• Change restaurants to “Coffeehouses” and the audience is 71.7% women and 28.3% men.

To get more advanced here click the option to See your audiences in Ads Manager, then select the name of the audience you just saved and click Edit.

In the pop-up window, click Browse in the box to add (or exclude) demographics, interests, or behaviors under Detailed targeting. You can narrow your audience by factors like relationship status, education level, and job title. You can choose to target parents, or even parents of a specific age of child. You can also target using life events like people who have recently moved or started a new job.

Remember that the more detailed you get in your targeting, the smaller your audience will be. Always keep an eye on the estimated audience size.

Now that you’ve selected your demographics and learned some key intel about the makeup of your target audience, head back over to the Audience tab in Business Suite and scroll down to Top Pages.

This is some really juicy information. In this section, you can see which existing Facebook pages are already connecting with people in your audience.

You can use the audience you build as the target audience for an ad.

Head back to Ads Manager and select the audience you want to target. Click the Actions drop-down and select Create Ad to place an ad targeted to this specific group.

If you look back at the interests targeting in the last section, you’ll notice that some guesswork was involved. Sure, it’s easy to choose coffeehouses as an interest if you’re running a coffeehouse. But what other interests might help you narrow that audience further? Here are some ways Hootsuite can help you figure that out.

Hootsuite Streams is a social listening tool that allows you to understand your Facebook audience and your competitors by tracking social posts relevant to your business.

Facebook limits the amount of content you can gather to specific mentions of your business or posts shared to your timeline. However, if you have an Instagram account for your business, you can also use it for audience research here by adding a stream to track hashtags. Since Meta ads can be placed across both Facebook and Instagram, this is all relevant info.

For our Portland coffee houses example, you could use streams to monitor mentions of your business on Facebook, so you can get a sense of the conversation about your company happening already on the platform

Then add Instagram streams to monitor relevant hashtags. Try to focus on detailed hashtags like #pdxcoffee rather than more general ones like #coffee. See what people have to say and which kinds of accounts are talking about coffee in general. For each hashtag, you can create streams for both the most recent posts and posts that are trending.

Above, we talked about clicking through to the Facebook Pages of the top Pages your target Facebook audience follows to see what they’re up to. There’s an easier way to do this in Hootsuite Analytics.

First, get an overview comparison of how you’re doing compared to the competition by clicking Industry under Benchmarking in the Analytics tab of the Hootsuite dashboard. Choose your industry, then scroll through the detailed reports of how your efforts stack up. Take particular note of your audience growth rate to see if you’re keeping up.

Then, go back to the left menu and choose Competitive analysis. Add in pages you think are your top competitors. Or, grab that list of top pages you found above and add some of them in here.

You’ll get a graphic report of how your performance and audience growth compare. Take a close look at the graphics showing performance by post type – as well as post length and number of hashtags – to get a sense of what kind of content is working well for your competitors.

You’ll also see top hashtags that could be useful in reaching your desired audience.

Hootsuite can show you when your audience is online and suggest the best times to post for your desired goals. The best time to post information is designed for organic content, but you can also use the data found here to target the times for your Facebook ad campaign display.

Under Organic Reporting in the left column of Hootsuite Analytics, click Best time to publish. You’ll see a heatmap showing when your Facebook audience is most likely to be online, as well as recommended days and times to maximize your impact.

Connect your CRM to Hootsuite to use it to build advanced audiences within the Hootsuite Social Advertising tool. You can design campaigns to re-engage customers and leads, or find people similar to them.

Or, you can build audiences using include and exclude functions just like you can in Facebook audience insights.

Once your ad is running, you can see how well it performs alongside your organic content and your ads on other platforms, so you can make budget changes on the fly to maximize the amount of your audience to reach.

Get the most out of your Facebook advertising budget with Hootsuite. Easily create, manage, and optimize all your Facebook ad campaigns in one place. Try it free today.