Facebook introduced its Audience Insights tool in 2014, and it was readily embraced by marketers of all stripes – not just those who specialize in social media marketing.
Why? Facebook Audience Insights is designed to give you better visibility into Facebook audiences for advertising purposes, sure, but it’s useful for so much more, from discovering niche audiences based on demographics, geographic data, and interests, to driving your content strategy by identifying the trends and topics your audience craves most. Audience Insights can inform many activities designed to boost Facebook engagement.
But how can marketers tap into the power of Audience Insights to develop targeted ad campaigns and gain insights for marketing activities that extend beyond the ad?
To find out how today’s leading marketing pros, social media experts, and content marketers are harnessing its power, we reached out to a panel of marketing pros and social media experts and asked them to answer this question:
“What’s your top tip for getting the most out of Facebook Audience Insights?”
Meet Our Panel of Marketing Pros and Social Media Experts:
Read on to find out what our experts had to say about how you can get better results from your social media marketing efforts by better leveraging Facebook Audience Insights.
George Schildge
George Schildge, CEO at Matrix Marketing Group, helps startups and small businesses with digital marketing strategies to help them develop models and processes to gain predictable, scalable revenue growth. He works closely with management teams crafting marketing and sales strategies to promote the brand, generate more leads, and convert more leads into sales.
“My top tip for getting the most out of Facebook Audience Insights is…”
“I use it to improve my Facebook ad targeting. Once an ad is running for a while, I review Facebook Audience Insights: Purchase. Find the Purchase tab and it will show you information about the spending behavior of your target audience. We recently ran several ads for an online coffee retailer and found the key spending behavior the report pointed out was small-batch coffee roasters.
“The report showed that 63% of the selected audience spend on small-batch coffee roasters with a compare value of 32%. The compare value is the percentage value of how likely the audience will be in a particular group. The higher this value, the better. I suggest that your compare value not be less than 5%. Remember to record your purchase value in your reporting.”
Juuso Lyytikkä
Juuso Lyytikkä is the Head of Growth at Funnel.io, a fast-growing marketing analytics SaaS for online advertisers and data-driven businesses.
“Use the data in your Insights to develop and refine your content strategy. ..
“By regularly monitoring which post types receive the highest reach and engagement, you can use this data to strategize future content. Facebook Insights allows you to sort all of your content into a certain ‘type.’ If one type, say video, for example, has a significantly higher reach and average engagement, your future content investments should be a no-brainer.”
Adam Cole
Adam Cole is the creator of Innovative Approaches to Music at www.acole.net, and the Co-Director of the Grant Park Academy of the Arts. He is a veteran musician and educator whose emphasis is on increasing well-being through the study of music. He has been featured in many stories for his approach to music instruction, and for his books, such as Blues Improvisation for Beginners…and Piano Teachers.
“I promote everything I do on three Facebook pages…
“My regular page where I keep in touch with family and friends, my personal business page, and my company’s page. On my regular page I also do normal type posts about the weather so that doesn’t become a spammy business site. I monitor the likes and comments of all posts regularly to see if I’m attracting any attention.
“If a page doesn’t get any response, sometimes it’s because Facebook’s algorithm has buried it. There’s not much I can do about that except like it myself and perhaps share or simply repost it. If it gets very few likes, that gives me a clue as to which part of my audience is interested. If it gets comments, I know I’ve attracted significant attention.”
Luke Bastin
Luke Bastin owns PDA Buzz, a digital marketing company serving eCommerce and local businesses in California, the US and Europe. PDA Buzz specializes in harnessing the power of SEO and other search engine marketing techniques to bring brand awareness and business transformation value to established businesses looking to grow.
“Many sources online, including Facebook’s own resource pages, explain at length how the Audience Insights tool enables marketers to…
“Aggregate information about demographics, purchase behavior, and other valuable data. What is less known is the immense power behind the affinity scores within this tool. Once entering in your target audience sections (location, age, and gender), navigate to the Page Likes section of Audience Insights. This is contained on the main navigation bar to the right of Demographics and to the left of Location and Activity. Then, enter a high-level interest in the Interests section. For example, if your target audience were interested in baseball and you were looking to promote a baseball service or product, then enter baseball.
“Now look at the Page Likes data. You will see a series of pages your defined audience typically likes. When you sort by Affinity, these are ranked by the pages your target market is most likely to like. Now the real fun starts! Keep adding the liked pages shown by this data as additional interests. In the baseball example, FunCheapSF and DoTheBay come up as additional pages you could add. As you do so, you will see your Affinity scores shoot up, and in doing so you will be dialing in your targeting to the most laser-targeted buyer audience imaginable. This technique is especially effective for B2C and e-commerce operations but can be made to work equally well for local businesses.”
Rosie Faulkner
Rosie Faulkner is the marketing manager of Bulldog Adjusters, the biggest public adjusting company in Florida. They’re known as the Hurricane Adjusters because of how quickly they expand in order to give free inspections to all homeowners with damage. They were the first adjusters giving home inspections in the Keys after Hurricane Irma, where over a 25% of the properties in the area were destroyed.
“You can create audiences that have similar habits and attributes to the users you already want to target…
“Gather an email list from your current customers and use this to create a lookalike audience. You’ll then be able to target Facebook users who have similar characteristics as the customers who are already purchasing your product or service.”
Meg Brunson
Meg Brunson is a former Facebook employee who believes that all people should be pursuing their passions. She is focused on helping families and family-friendly businesses leverage the Facebook platform to monetize those passions.
“Audience Insights is a tool you should use to develop the content of your ads/posts…
“Use it to analyze your target audience based on the demographics that you know (those things that you choose when you are building the audience – whether it’s a custom audience, lookalike audience, or an audience built with Facebook’s internal targeting options). The insight you acquire from the data should influence your copy and creative. Incorporate the strongest insights into the imagery you select for your ad, and/or use those insights to influence your word choice.
“This tool helps you dive deeper into understanding what your targeted audience looks like in terms of additional demographics, interests, locations and activities. The data is far less substantial now than it was before the Cambridge Analytica scandal caused Facebook to sever ties with third-party data partners, but you can still learn a thing or two about your audience to make your content more relevant! Remember that Facebook places the utmost importance on the user experience, so providing content that your audience relates to, and will interact with, is essential.”
Scott Ginsberg
Scott Ginsberg is the Head of Content of a performance marketing agency called Metric Digital.
“Our company specializes in Facebook marketing to…
“Dramatically grow brands that reshape their industries. In the past several years, Metric has been able to increase sales consistently. We’ve seen 250%-400%+ blended ROAS for many brands of all different shapes and sizes, i.e., Bonobos, Canada Goose, Mack Weldon, and Citizen. Email is the number one sales tool in the world, especially as a cross-channel strategy using Facebook Audience Insights. Every brand can upload their email list as a custom audience in Facebook. And then, use the Audience Insights tool to learn about the demographics, page likes, and purchase behavior of their users. Once that data is known, it can be used for dynamic retargeting to reach prequalified, already proven leads and convert them into paying customers.”
Linda Murray Bullard
Linda Murray Bullard is the Chief Business Strategist at LSMB Business Solutions.
“Who are your customers?
“What age group(s) is attracted to your product or services? Facebook Insights can help you answer this question on various levels.
“Entrepreneurs can find out whether their customers are mostly male or female. Also, they can learn other demographic information and use this information to determine the psychographic information to use when creating a relationship marketing campaign.”
Paulson Thomas
@PaulsonThomas45
Paulson Thomas is the Founder of Branchwater Marketing Group. After spending close to a decade on the clinical side, they decided to venture out into business and start a healthcare digital marketing firm, based out of Houston, TX. Their primary focus is to start and grow, wildly profitable medical practices leveraging social media.
“Draw a cartoon of your ideal client that makes up 80% of traffic…
“Then reverse engineer where your ideal client hangs out on the internet and follow up with Facebook Audience Insights tools to engage on behalf of your business with relevant information to help them cross the bridge over to your business. As a healthcare digital agency, our top priority for our clinical providers is to first identify your ideal customer before deciding the right medium.”
Andrew Becks
Andrew is a digital media and marketing expert with experience and proficiency in a variety of disciplines. He currently serves as the COO and co-founder of 301 Digital Media, a Nashville-based full-service digital operations, marketing, audience, and publisher development agency.
“The single greatest tip I can offer for…
“Media buyers and advertisers on Facebook for getting the most out of Facebook Audience Insights is to simply use it. I’m always surprised by how few brands and marketers are truly aware of the fact that the Facebook Audience Insights tool exists, let alone how much value you can extra out of it.
“Beyond just using it, leveraging Facebook Audience Insights can be a great way to sleuth/dig up insights about your competitors – for everything from market research to building interest and demographic-based targeting for your own paid marketing campaigns. We routinely work with companies and brands to leverage some of the knowledge and insights provided via Facebook Audience Insights to develop and launch new products, reach new audience segments, and close sales deals.”
Gianna Sollitto
Gianna Sollitto is a public relations and digital marketing professional at Newberry Public Relations & Marketing, located in East Providence, Rhode Island. They are a full-service public relations and marketing agency who get it done, allowing small to mid-sized businesses to see tangible results.
“My tip for getting the most out of Facebook Audience insights is to use it to tailor your content…
“If we show clients their Facebook Audience Insights and they take it as information, but don’t do anything with it, that knowledge has no value. From there, your marketing strategy on and off social media has to pivot according to this new information, and so often people or agencies don’t make this very common-sense adjustment. If you’re being told this is who is consuming your content and who is interested in your brand, what good is it to not give them more of the content they’re looking for, to hopefully expand to more people within this target audience? The most valuable thing you can take from Facebook Analytics is an action plan for marketing on and off social media. Tailor your strategy in accordance to your newly found target audience, as it might not be who you anticipated it would be, or you might as well not even be marketing at all!”
Adam Gingery
As Digital Strategy & Paid Search Manager at Majux Marketing, Adam manages all paid search campaigns and is involved with overall digital strategy and SEO. The Philadelphia-based agency specializes in digital marketing, including web development, SEM, and SEO services. Their client focus includes, but is not limited to, the legal and ecommerce industries.
“It’s important to align your ad or offer carefully with the audience you’re targeting…
“This sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how many advertisers simply apply a one-size-fits-all ad to every campaign and audience they run. As you build audiences with Facebook’s various demographic options (and as you build your remarketing audiences too), prioritize each audience based on how ‘warm’ they are. Here’s an example:
- List of users who interacted with your Facebook/Instagram account (likes, comments, etc.)
- List of users who visited your website
- Your ‘lookalike’ audiences
- Saved audiences from FB’s Audience Insights tool
“Once you’ve prioritized your audiences, develop unique ads and offers for each group. My tip for the ‘coolest’ audiences (generally your ‘saved’ audiences): include customer testimonials on the image or in the copy.”
Shane Park
Shane Park is a Digital Strategist at Trailblaze Media.
“Targeting on Facebook Ads is tough – especially for new businesses…
“By entering your largest competitor as an interest in Facebook Audience Insights, you’ll get a ton of data about those users so you can create your best cold audience. You can add additional interests or demographics to further refine your audience archetype. The UI is a little overwhelming at first, but it starts making sense once you add and remove options.”
Matvey Dyadkov
Matvey Dyadkov is the CEO of the online digital advertising platform, Bitmedia.io.
“For anyone who is serious about their crypto company or their proposed ICO, Facebook ads don’t really matter…
“The removal of advertising from Facebook will certainly do something to slow these schemes down, but there are other ways they’ll be able to get their message out through targeted ads. Instead, companies should look to focus on higher retention rates and quality of impressions that can be improved with specialized algorithms focusing on relevant viewers.”
Aaron Childs
Aaron has been with Hanapin Marketing for almost two years. He works almost exclusively in paid advertising for social media for clients in a wide range of industries.
“Use Google Analytics to build your base persona for Facebook…
“The best way to get the most out of your Audience Insights is to first start with Google Analytics. This is where you’ll find your most valuable customers. Look at things like where they live, their gender, age, and what languages they speak. From there, you can use that information to build a base persona for Facebook. Using Facebook Audience Insights, you can get a more detailed picture of demographics, what pages they like, their location, and online activity. This will also help you to further refine your targeting and craft ad copy/images that will speak to this audience.”
Tyler Riddell
Tyler Riddell is the Vice President of Marketing at eSUB Construction Software with over 15 years of experience in Marketing, Product Management, Advertising, and Public Relations. He has a proven track record for successful go to market and corporate communication programs in multiple vertical tech markets.
“Facebook’s audience insight can be a valuable tool for…
“Accessing what topics get traction and how many people are commenting or interacting with various pages. You can go in and select your target audience by searching seed, then analyze the top categories and page likes. Once you have gone through the data, you can then save the most relevant pages.”
Andrei Vasilescu
Andrei Vasilescu is a renowned Digital Marketing expert and CEO of a Money Saving platform in the name of DontPayFull. He has been providing cutting-edge digital marketing services to various international companies and different online coupons of various brands for years.
“Conduct competitions with surveys…
“As any other business, you are also keen in social media marketing for your business promotions, and you put a serious effort in communicating with your target audience through Facebook. In that case, one of your prime targets must be to know the reactions and suggestions of your audience to your business promotions through Facebook. Comments, likes, and sharing your content can give you only the faintest idea of some aspects of your target audience. But, if you host interesting competitions which will subtly conduct some very useful surveys and end with some special offers as prizes for the winners, you will get the most valuable engagement data of your target audience.
“In these competitive surveys, people open their heart to your specific questions and provide you the purest market data you need. Thus, you get the clearest idea of how your content is engaging your audience and how to create more engaging promotional content; in brief, you can make better decisions about your content marketing efforts. Therefore, conducting attractive competitions embedded with surveys is the best process to know the actual insights of your Facebook audience.”
Steve Pritchard
Steve Pritchard is the Digital Marketing Consultant at Cuuver.com.
“Facebook Audience Insights is a great way to test which types of content your audience is most interested in…
“Post different kinds of content at similar times of the day and see which gets the most engagement. This will allow you to pick out the content that is the most popular among your audience, so that you know to focus on producing more of this kind of content in the future. This kind of A/B testing will help you to refine your content strategy going forward.”
Roman Daneghyan
Since January 2016, Roman has been the Chief Marketing Officer of Renderforest, which is an online video production platform for creating any kind of videos. He is also the founder of the I Love Programming Facebook page for programmers, which was founded in January 2013.
“First, we should use Facebook Audience insights wisely…
“Facebook gives us amazing statistics, which include timing for best posts, countries our fans are from, which kind of posts work best, and more. All you have to do is to create a task for yourself and check all this data. It’s a good idea to do week-long tests for understanding which times work best or what kind of posts perform better. Test for a week, analyze the results, and test again. Do this until you feel that your engagement rate is good for you and you are satisfied with the results you get. And don’t forget that you can always increase your engagement on Facebook.”
Saud Ibrahim
Saud Ibrahim is the Digital Marketing Manager at The Jacket Maker.
“Audience Insights is a wonderful tool by Facebook…
“My top tip to get the most out of it is to make full use of interests targeting. With interest targeting you can pinpoint your ads to the most relevant target audience.
“Combine with demographics targeting. They can make a very good combination and result in better performance of ads and in sales.”
Christopher Wick
Christopher Wick is the founder of SMM International, an international award-winning social media marketing firm.
“My top tip for getting the most out of Facebook Audience Insights is through engagement…
“You can have engagement with your customers by providing them the reason why they should buy your products or use your brand, rather than introducing your products and brand. So you start asking WHY? HOW? WHAT? In addition, once you respond to your customers on Facebook, make sure you respond to them sincerely and avoid using copy-and-paste replies.”
Robb Hecht
An adjunct professor of marketing at New York City’s Baruch College, Robb Hecht coaches brand marketing executives, GenZ business students, and gig economy Instagram and Facebook startup side hustlers, helping to establish them as leaders to their customers through digital transformation marketing mindsets, social media business strategy, content marketing strategy, brand storyboarding, paid social, and content creator programs.
“For me, Audience Insights is the most important tool on Facebook…
“It allows us to analyze all Facebook users and find unique and very specific interests that we didn’t know even existed. As a result, we can show our products or services to much more relevant people – and convert them more easily into leads and ultimately sales.
“For example, instead of promoting a client’s bike to people who are interested in ‘biking,’ which can include millions of users in just the U.S., we can use the tool to discover laser-specific interests that will include only the most passionate bikers. And by looking at all Facebook pages that have related interests to biking (races, stationary biking, Peleton, bike races, etc.), we write down specific interests, websites, organizations, brands, magazines, community pages, famous people, or anything else that might define our target audience.
“As you know, FB has recently shut down the Partner Category targeting feature. If we want to target certain users, we have to use Facebook Behavioral targeting, interest targeting, or custom audiences – with email addresses obtained legally (e.g., first-party, opt-in data collection).
“So, to get the most out of Audience Insights to build an effective ad and targeting, we look at two types of interest on Facebook: core interest and pages.
“Core interests are things that you tell Facebook you like when you are creating your profile.
“Pages is the other top Facebook aspect to focus in on. In Facebook Audience Insights, under Page Likes, you will find information about the top categories that are followed by your target audience. Each category may contain multiple Facebook Pages or a single Page. The Page Likes table shows you Pages that are relevant to your target audience. One of the most important pieces of data in this table is the affinity score. The affinity score tells you how likely your audience is to like a given Page as compared to everyone on Facebook. The higher the affinity score for a given Page, the more likely it is to be liked by your audience. And hence, you should develop your ad targeted to Pages with the highest affinity scores.
“To be the most effective in your Facebook advertising, make sure to leverage Facebook Audience Insights. You’ll be surprised how effective the tool can be if you spend the right amount of time with it.”
Domenick Delbuco
Domenick Delbuco is the CEO of Puzzles Marketing Systems in Gainesville, Florida. Domenick is one of the few business owners that took on no venture capital to create a successful business in less than 3 months – and he is only 22 years old.
“The top tip for getting the most out of Facebook Audiences Insights (FAI) CURRENTLY is to keep it simple…
“FAI is under investigation for violating privacy. Just last week, I was presenting my dog and pony show to a realtor who was interested in Facebook ads.
“I opened Audience Insights and was ready to show him that we could select people to advertise to with over X amount annual income, and we can find out if people are likely to move because Facebook Pixels on websites like Zillow will tag home seekers as likely to move on Facebook.
“That’s what I was ready to show. I presented to him last week and there was no longer annual income targeting or likely to move targeting. FAI stood me up hard…
“As of now – keep your insights simple. The wholehearted reason that people want to zone in to their audience as granular as they can is because ad spend is cheaper if you’re only advertising to people who might be interested. If your FAI isn’t correct, you have a leak in your ad budget, right? Well, for now, this is wrong. Because we cannot hyper-target like we used to, Facebook is going to have to drop their prices.
“The moral of the story is if you want to get the most out of any digital marketing tool, including FAI, is to look at the opportunity when massive change is happening. This now levels the playing field for people like me, people behind me, and people ahead of me. The rules are reset constantly. If you can deal with change and keep up to date, then you will do fantastic with FAI.”
Timmy Levin
Timmy Levin’s interest in social media started in college when he realized social media was the future of marketing. Post graduation, he turned all his attention to interning with social media marketing agencies until his skills and knowledge landed him his first Social Media Manager job. Now the Director of Social Media for Efferent Media, let’s just say he hasn’t looked back since!
“There is something in the Facebook Insights that is extremely helpful to a business; however, not many people know it’s even there…
“Facebook Insights has the ability to compile data about your audience and inform a business on what times that audience is most active on the Facebook platform. This is extremely important information. Too many times, I have heard business owners tell me they just ‘looked up’ the best times to post content on Facebook. That is all well and good, and yes there are universal ‘optimal’ times to post content throughout the day. The only problem is that each audience is different. For example, an audience of users 55 and older are going to have a different optimal time then an audience of young adults. Facebook Insights letting you know what time YOUR audience is on Facebook will help your content reach the most people possible, and as a result produce higher engagement and more traffic to your page! All you need to do is click on the Insights tab at the top of your page, click ‘posts’ on the left side menu, and hover over each day of the week to find out when your audience is most active.”
Steve Dolson
Steve Dolson has over 8 years of experience in the digital media space, helping over 100 brands improve their digital appearance, helping them better connect with their target audiences and potential customers.
“My top tip for getting the most out of the Facebook Audience Insights would be to…
“Run a test campaign using about 1/10 of your full budget to see how people are initially responding to your advertising. After the results come through, just adjust accordingly towards the audiences that are responding the best. If you use that methodology, then you can see what’s working and cut out what is not, strengthening the later performance of the results at the end of the campaign.”
Javier Gutierrez
Javier Gutierrez runs a personal finance blog and a digital marketing website. He specializes in Facebook ad campaigns.
“My number one tip on getting the most out of Facebook audience insight is to…
“Simultaneously run and compare the data with Google Analytics. Retargeting audiences has helped me grow my blog quickly, and this has been done thanks to data analysis provided by Facebook and Google Analytics.
“I believe that if marketers and business owners alike can simultaneously use both platforms, they can achieve their goals quickly and efficiently.”
Dimple Thakkar
Dimple is a multiple award-winning serial entrepreneur with a career in marketing and technology that spans 10+ years. Having previously won the Power 30 Under 30 Award early in her career, along with a Small Business of the Year Award from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Dimple is a seasoned executive that advises everyone from savvy start-ups to billionaires with complex projects. Aside from consulting services provided by her firm, TrillionVue Advisors, Dimple’s other company SYNHERGY oversees the social media marketing for clients in technology, telemedicine, nonprofits, start-ups, food, and beverage.
“Facebook Audience Insights can be a robust tool for…
“Learning about certain segments, industries, interest categories, and actual behaviors of your direct and indirect target audience and customers. To get the most of out of it, try two things:
“1. Import your master email data base of customers into Facebook Audience Insights. Try to use the provided data from the tool to identify trends and patterns among your audience and customers. Why? It will provide the intelligence you need to send informed marketing messages to your audience that actually resonates with them. Eliminate the guesswork to improve your cost-per-acquisition on sales and leads. When you interact with others in social media, you don’t want to crash anyone’s party, you want to be on their VIP list. For example, what income level do you see? Are your customers city dwellers or suburban? Do you see a difference in the male to female ratio? Do you attract an audience within a certain age group? All this and more can help your social media become more proactive instead of reactive.
“2. Unlock the power of Facebook Marketing Partners. Not many use this (sometimes free) feature! Facebook has a list of marketing partners that will give Facebook advertisers the ability to target certain categories that are not available to the general public . These partners can be massive data collection companies like Oracle, Experian, and Epsilon. A full list can be found here. If your brand is attached to a specialized category, these partners can add targeting features to your advertising account that can introduce your brand to thousands of new, interested customers that have proven to be loyal enthusiasts of certain products and services. Once you’ve created an audience using these somewhat hidden features, import it into Facebook Audience insights to examine and learn more about ways to make your marketing smarter and effective.”
Austin Iuliano
Austin Iuliano is a social media consultant and keynote speaker who live streams to over 1,000,000 followers.
“One of my favorite tips for Facebook Audience insights is…
“To see what other similar brands the audience likes. Knowing this, you can dive down a rabbit hole and learn a ton about a potential audience. For instance, you can find the type of content they engage with the most and add that style of content into your brand’s content strategy. You can find the messaging and products they like. You can also set up micro-targeted ads specifically to the people who like the brand. ‘You have tried X brand; have you seen what Y can do for you (target audience)?’”
Miranda Scott
Miranda Scott is a Social Media Strategist at Geben Communication. Over the course of her career, she’s had experience with both B2B and B2C clients across a variety of industries, including CPG, retail, hospitality, and tech.
“I believe it’s important that communication professionals dedicate the time to really drill down into the data…
“A phrase we love to use is ‘actionable insights,’ and that’s exactly what Facebook Audiences offers. The better you understand your audiences, the better you can connect with them, through both refining ad targeting and developing meaningful content they’ll actually want to engage with.”
Marissa Heckman
Marissa is an Organic Social Media Project Manager at Power Digital Marketing. Having graduated top of her class at SDSU, she finds enjoyment in the ever-changing and challenging world of marketing.
“I’ve found that the best time to leverage Facebook Audience Insights is when on-boarding a new client…
“Once partnered with a new brand, you can look up that Page’s current audience data. This then allows you to see just who is following this brand: demographics, page interests, education, and more. Not only does this help a marketer understand who they are currently reaching, but it also helps them identify other areas of opportunity.
“You can use Facebook Audience Insights to gather data on your current following, your competitors’ followings, and to gather data based off of general interests. My top tip is to do three separate searches, the first being a look at your current Facebook page followers. Identify who they are and how to talk to them, if you are not already doing so. Then look at the followers of your competitor. Identify trends in the data, points of interest, and potentially targeting criteria for advertising. Lastly, use the general interests that relate to your brand for the search criteria and gather data from those findings. With all of this data, you are setting yourself up for a strong, data-driven content strategy.”
Thomas Budnik
Thomas Budnik is the SEM Marketing Specialist at Auto Accessories Garage.
“Create audiences that reflect what’s been most successful in the past…
“Audience Insights are the best way for us at Auto Accessories Garage to develop audiences for new campaigns so that we are spending in the most efficient ways possible. For example, if we’re creating a new campaign for a site-wide sale, we are going to want to create an audience that reflects what has been the most successful for us. Unsurprisingly, a large portion of our audience is people ages 24-44 that are married with a college education, but Audience Insights allows us to also see that nearly 20% of our audience also works in production and that people who like Dunkin’ Donuts have the most relevance to our brand. With this information, we can create an audience that we know gives us the best opportunity to maximize our return.”
Devin Stagg
Devin is the Marketing Manager at Pupford, an emerging dog company working to help all dog owners build healthier relationships with their pups. Devin has worked in a wide variety of industries focusing on driving profitable campaigns on Facebook.
“To get the most out of Audience Insights, you should check out the affinity scores of the Page Likes section…
“It is an extremely useful tool to help you discover new audiences on Facebook that have similarities with your already profitable audiences. The higher the affinity score of a new audience in conjunction with your current audiences, the higher the chance of success.”
Mary Urdahl
Mary Urdahl is a Managing Partner at AthenaDMG.com.
“Everyone knows that LLA are…
“Powerhouses, and Audience Insights has some great data on your customers – but how can they work together?
“TIP: Use Audience Insights to build audiences based on the data there, and then in go to Assets –> Audiences look at your lookalike audience and see how it overlaps in interests.
“So if you can measure the audiences that are converting (or NOT converting), you can leverage that data and save money by not building competing ads against each other, and stack them in one audience if there is overlap. The overlap is then an indicator of strength.”
Stacy Caprio
Stacy Caprio is the Founder of Growth Marketing.
“My #1 tip is to…
“Look at the audience interest section to find themes your audience is interested in, then use these as ad targeting themes when creating your ad targeting.”
Jeff Miller
Jeff Miller is co-founder of the AE Home Group real estate team in Maryland.
“We find Facebook Audience Insights to be…
“More accurate for some criteria, while less accurate for others. This varies greatly depending on the location you’re trying to target. To discover the accuracy of certain criteria, we’ll run split tests on our ads for that specific geographical area. We start with a control group that is simply based on our target age group and create test groups that add a single filter that better identifies our ideal customer. If conversion are higher in this group, then we know that this criteria is accurate, and we roll it into our production audience.
“Note: It is important that you have a thorough understanding of your target audience to be successful. Otherwise, you could end up with a sub-optimal audience.”
Ron Baise
Dr. Ron Baise is the founder, owner, and principal dentist of 92 Dental, a fully private, independent dental practice in Hammersmith, West London. He focuses on providing minimally invasive dentistry and empowering his patients to be proactive in looking after their oral health.
“I have had most success with Facebook Advertising when…
“I use lookalike audiences. I do this by installing the Facebook Pixel on the landing page that I send traffic to from my Facebook ad.
“The Pixel tracks the users who, from clicking the Facebook ad, then go on to take the desired action on my landing page. In my case, it is those who book a free consultation for tooth whitening or those who click to call when on a mobile device.
“Facebook then creates a target audience based on the interests of only those who convert from the Facebook ad. This allows me to laser target only the Facebook users who are most likely to convert, rather than those who click the ad and then bounce back off without taking action.
“I can then A/B test this new lookalike audience based on the interests of past converters against my first audience that I have created myself. I can then tease out exactly the interests of people that lead to their converting and work from there.
“Once I know exactly what these converting interests (the interests that correlate most highly with conversions) are, I can slowly increase the locations that I target until I hit a sweet spot where I have the optimal profit per click.”
Nate Masterson
Nate Masterson is the CMO for Maple Holistics.
“Our top tip in how to use Facebook Audience Insights to your advantage is to…
“Cater your ad campaign to a new audience by researching similar interests of your current customers. The data you receive from this program provides information about what the customer likes, where they live, how often they use Facebook, and what they purchase.
“Take advantage of this data to figure out what your new ad campaign should focus on. You can target new people by finding users who like the same things your current customers like. Facebook Audience Insights provides so much qualitative data, so you can ensure your new ad campaign will be as successful and as far-reaching as possible.”
Matt Erickson
Matt Erickson is the Marketing Director for National Positions, a digital marketing agency in Westlake Village, CA. He has his undergraduate in International Business and Marketing as well as his MBA from CSUS Sacramento. His main areas of interest include social media, branding, and marketing psychology.
“My biggest tip for getting the most out of Facebook Audience Insights is to be patient and curious…
“You may have an idea of the type of audience you want…or do you? So often, people will jump in, select an age range, geographical area, gender, some general interests, and a smattering of other things, and call it good, all the while only focusing on the audience size. After picking what YOU think your target market looks like, go BACK through all the insights to see what your audience also likes. Your audience may be drawn to a particular style of music, authors, websites, celebrities, average education levels, etc. This is all additional information you can use to fine-tune your audience or even build a new one. Audience Insights will provide you with more INSIGHTS than you know what to do with – and they can help you tremendously with your campaigns. So, be curious about your audience and try to learn more about them as you build your campaigns. It will serve you well.”
Lauren Mello
Lauren is the Head of Social Media at Brand Content, an integrated communications agency in Boston. With a deep understanding of the social media landscape, she specializes in helping clients develop a digital brand strategy and grow their online audiences through data-driven campaigns across all social channels.
“Audience Insights make it incredibly easy to…
“Not only learn about your consumers, but it also allows you to test different messaging based on their age, demographic, interests, behavior, device, gender, and when they’re online and looking at ads. To get the most out of this information, here are some examples of how to use Insights to inform your targeting and messaging strategy:
- Test, test, test. There is so much information provided by Audience Insights, and each piece of information is important and can be used to optimized campaigns. The key is to start broad and then narrow the audiences based on the learnings in the early stages of the campaign. An example: Set a wide age range for the campaign if you’re not sure which age group responds most favorably to your ads or is most likely to convert. Depending on the flight and budget of your campaign, you can typically tell in the first few days which audience segments are performing better than the rest. You can then optimize your campaign to target that age group with more aggressive CTAs in the messaging as they are the most likely age group to convert. You may consider targeting the other age groups with brand awareness ads or traffic ads with a Learn More CTA vs. a Show Now.
- Monitor. It is key to be regularly monitoring your audiences. As you introduce new products, services, or anything new to your business, your key audiences are likely to shift. In order to best serve each of your audiences, it is critical that you’re watching their behavior.
- Optimize. To get the most out of Audience Insights, you need to not only be monitoring the data for future campaigns, but also using the data in real time to improve the current campaigns results. An example: If you’re a week into a campaign and you notice that all of the actions are happening during a certain time frame, schedule your ad to run only during those hours to maximize dollars and not oversaturate your audience.”
Brock Murray
Brock Murray is the COO and Co-Founder of seoplus+.
“My top tip for getting the most out of Facebook Audience Insights is to…
“Use the demographic and audience data to define your target market and create more relevant ads. By analyzing Facebook’s users, you are able to find common interests that you may not have discovered previously. Use the lifestyle data to craft your ad messaging and increase the granularity of your targeting.
“Using this information can also help you find new targeted audience members. If 15% of your audience has the same common interest, there might be an opportunity to target other individuals who like the same interest. It can also give you future partnership ideas with some brands or products that your clients like that wouldn’t be one of your competitors.
“Finding these correlations is all Audience Insights will do, it’s up to you to find ways to use the data given to optimize your social media strategy.”
Looking for more detailed insights into your audience? ShareThis’ Audience Segments are formulated from proprietary sharing, interest, and intent signals, sourced from our global network of three million publisher domains. Tap into our global network of Sharing Intelligence™ for real-time sharing, interest, and intent data to start making better, smarter, data-driven marketing decisions.
Finally, you can check out our other guides on all things Facebook marketing to get the answer to questions like: how to pin a post on your Facebook profile?
