BONUS MATERIAL: Free “Facebook 101” ebook
Are you struggling with Facebook ads targeting? Discovering what your perfect customers are interested in is one of the most crucial parts of Facebook advertising. In fact, just by changing one interest, you could more than double your campaign results.
Are you struggling with Facebook ads targeting?
Unsure how to find relevant audiences to improve or scale your campaigns?
In this article, I’ll show you exactly how to use the Audience Insights tool to uncover hidden targeting opportunities, which can result in a staggering 64.83% decrease in your advertising costs.
Why Facebook Audience Insights Matters
The greatest thing about Facebook advertising is the ability to reach super-specific audiences.
We can narrow them down by:
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Education level
- Relationship status
- Life events
- Unique interests
- Behaviors
Yet, every week I speak with advertisers who select generic audiences and end up wasting their advertising money. That’s exactly what Audience Insights solves.
For example, don’t promote your running shoes to people interested in “running” (more than 46 million users in just the United States). Instead, use the tool and discover laser-specific interests that include only the most passionate runners.
An example of interests that are much more relevant to running.
Already found an audience that converts well?
You can use Audience Insights to find dozens of other related interests to scale your campaigns and get more sales.
Here’s how to do that in six easy steps.
1. Access Facebook Audience Insights Tool
Navigate to the Ads Manager, click on “Tools” at the top and select ”Audience Insights” from the drop-down menu:
Where to find Facebook Audience Insights tool
Or type www.facebook.com/ads/audience_insights into your browser to access the tool directly.
2. Select Your Audience
Once in Facebook Audience Insights, select the audience you want to analyze:
Facebook Audience – Everyone on Facebook, People connected to your page, A Custom Audience
- Everyone on Facebook: All Facebook users
- People connected to your page: Your page’s fans
- A Custom Audience: People in your email list or website visitors’ audience.
If you have a very large fan base or custom audience (email list or website visitors), you could begin by analyzing them first.
Otherwise, I suggest you go with “Everyone on Facebook” as that gives the most insights. If you need a quick refresher on Facebook, grab this free Facebook 100 ebook.
3. Define Your “Seed” Audience
Next, use the sidebar to specify the “seed” audience you want to analyze by entering the location, age, and gender. Then add at least one related interest into the “Interests” field.
Avoid generic interests like sports, nature, and traveling. Instead, choose specific ones right from the beginning:
In this example, I selected a more specific interest – ‘Runner’s World’ – instead of a generic one like ‘Running’.
You can narrow the audience down even further: connection to your pages, behaviors, language, relationship status, education, work, financial, home, market segments, parents, politics (US), life events, and more!
After making any changes to the audience, you will immediately notice how the number of monthly active people changes. The age and gender chart updates, too!
See how many monthly active people there are in your target audience.
We could spend a lot of time analyzing demographics, location, activity, household, and purchase … But I like to go directly to the Page Likes tab. That’s where the real magic happens!
BONUS MATERIAL: Free “Facebook 101” ebook
4. Analyze Top Categories and Page Likes
If you followed the previous steps correctly, you can see the Top Categories that your potential audience is interested in and the most popular pages within each category:
I highlighted just a few pages, but you can see that most of them are related to running and fitness – great for us!
What’s even more exciting, you can scroll down to see a list of dozens of pages ranked by relevance and affinity:
By definition, relevance is …
The Pages that are the most likely to be relevant to your audience based on affinity, Page size, and the number of people in your audience who already like that Page.
And affinity:
How likely your audience is to like a given page compared to everyone on Facebook.
So, if you see a very high-affinity score, it will be extremely likely that the audience you selected is also liking those pages.
Sometimes, however, Facebook will not display any data if the seed audience is smaller than 1,000 people. In that case, remove some unnecessary layers of targeting or add a few bigger countries:
Or the opposite can happen. If the seed audience is too broad, Facebook will give suggestions that aren’t relevant at all.
When that happens, replace the broad interest with something more specific you found among suggested pages to get even better insights.
5. Save the Most Relevant Pages
Continue with playing with the seed audience until you see more relevant results in Top Categories and Page Likes.
Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and rank pages by affinity or relevance.
Look at all pages and write down specific interests, brands, magazines, websites, organizations, community pages, famous people, or anything else that may define the target audience:
Another example of using Page Likes section for targeting ideas – this time, analyzing ‘Ryan Deiss’ as an interest.
For that, I like to use a simple Google spreadsheet, where I save the page name, its URL, and the number of fans:
Creating a list of the most relevant pages to your product or service that could be used for any advertising campaigns.
You can even add an extra column for your own comments so that you can write down which of those interests are working well after a campaign finishes.
Note: You will not be able to use all of the pages you just discovered. Sometimes, even the smallest pages can be used for Facebook ad targeting. Other times a page with hundreds of thousands of fans will not appear in Detailed Targeting.
6. Test Your New Audiences
Just by using this simple approach to researching target audiences, you’ll reach much more relevant people and get more from your advertising campaigns.
But if you really wanted to see the differences between those interests, you would need to split test them and analyze the results.
Do that by separating audiences into different ad sets. Then, you can see exactly which interest is working best for your offer:
Cut your cost per conversion by as much as 64% by just testing a few different interests.
And like in the example above, you might be lucky to find some audiences that are converting two or even three times better than the rest!
Conclusion
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 sales.
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