Audience Insights from Facebook are the real deal. After all, more than 2.7 billion monthly active users means that Facebook has swooped up more than a third of the global population. Here’s how to use Facebook Audience Insights, plus tips on getting the most from your analytics.

What is Facebook Insights?

The Facebook insights tool is perfect for businesses with Facebook pages who want to improve their on-platform marketing approach. You can use Audience Insights to: Here’s what this audience-oriented Facebook insights tool looks like:

Why You Need Insights On Your Audience

For small, medium, and large businesses, Facebook page insights are a super important way to keep track of your audience. It can help improve your ad targeting and optimize your content rollout. Use the tool to analyze two types of people: These insights do more than help you learn about your customers on Facebook. You can get a feel for your off-Facebook base as well. Recognizing patterns can lead to a more holistic understanding of your target audience. In turn, you’ll optimize your marketing initiatives by making them that much more effective. Using the tool’s features will help you create and launch better content that sits deeper for consumers. Over time, you’ll be able to expand your pool of leads and build a larger community of loyal social media friends and consumers. Your Facebook remarketing tool will thank you, too.

You Can’t Customize Audiences in the Facebook Insights Tool

Facebook Audience Insights Tool has been around since 2014. Since then, the tool has evolved. One of those changes took place in 2018 when the platform decided to eliminate the option to customize audiences for insights. While you can still customize audiences for your Facebook Ad campaigns, you have two types of audiences you can use within Audience Insights: users connected to your page and all Facebook users. If you choose to get insights on all Facebook users, you have a ton of filters you can use to narrow down the right audience. Keep reading and you’ll learn more about those filters!  

How to Access the Facebook Insights Tool

First, you need to know how to find your Audience Insights tool. Here are the steps you should take:

1. If you haven’t created a Facebook business account, you’ll need to do that first. It’s also a good idea to fully set up your page before getting started on insights. This helps you launch and scale quicker and more efficiently. Plus, you’ll have more accurate insights from the get-go.
2. If you already made your business page, head to the Facebook Ads Manager. This is where the magic happens. Once you’re in the Ads Manager, you can find Audience Insights clearly labeled under the “Plan” menu. Here’s what that menu looks like:

   Facebook Audience Insights Menu Example from Revealbot

3. You could also simply head to the Audience Insights URL and get there in a flash: facebook.com/ads/audience-insights

Find the Filters for Facebook Audience Insights

You can find the population filters for your Facebook insights tool on the left-hand sidebar. These filters help you build your target audience based on a ton of factors. For your reference, here’s what the filters bar looks like: As you can see, there are a number of ways to pinpoint your target audience. For brick-and-mortar businesses and companies that operate at a local level, location is going to play a major role. Within the Facebook page insights, you can even exclude locations if you’re looking to avoid particular areas. NOTE: Your location filter may automatically include the United States or your home country. You can click the “X” next to the country name to eliminate this if you want. Otherwise, you can keep it or add on to it. Age and binary gender delineations help you filter out demographics that aren’t related to your company. You can select an age range, plus pick male, female, or all genders. The interests filter gets super narrow, with a range of categories to choose from: Meanwhile, relationship status, education level, life events, politics, and language (to name a few) all play a part in your insights. This is in addition to analyzing users’ connections, pages they follow, and pages they don’t follow. In short, it’s a fairly holistic peek at what’s going on under the surface of social media’s reigning royalty (as far as user count goes, at least).

How to Use Facebook Insights for Your Audience

Now that you’ve met the Facebook Audience Insight tool, it’s time you two get better acquainted with one another. Once you’re on your Audience Insights dashboard, you need to choose an audience to start. As mentioned, you’ll choose either “Everyone on Facebook” or “People connected to your page.” Apply filters as necessary to get insights on a relevant audience. Don’t be afraid to get specific here, either. The more attuned to your actual target audience, the more relevant info you’ll get — and the better content you’ll be able to produce. This includes the advanced filters. Even just a finetuned adjustment can make a marked difference in Facebook Audience Insights results. The percentages change with every filter addition, too, so you can get a nuanced look of various audience combinations. Once you apply these filters, Facebook presents you with tons of percentages based on demographics, page likes, location and activity. Right now, you just have a bunch of numbers in your possession. Now all that’s left to do is analyze your insights so you can make the necessary adjustments to your content marketing campaigns!

Analyzing Your Audience Insights

Before getting started on Facebook Audience Insights analysis, it’s important to note that not everyone on Facebook reports and regularly updates their info. Still, there’s a ton of people who do—and that number may very well still be in the billions. You’ll want to analyze your insights based on category. The Facebook insights tool does a good job of setting you up for success here. “Demographics”, “Page Likes”, “Location”  and “Activity” are all separate tabs. Specifically, you’ll want to pay attention to these categories:

Likes

The “Likes” category tells you more than just your sum total of likes. You can figure out which ones happened today as well as what content they’re connected to. Plus, you can see a view of likes by demographic and location.

Reach

Your reach refers to the reach of your posts in regards to reactions and engagement. You can view metrics for organic and paid reach. Perhaps more important, you can view your negative feedback—including hide, report as spam, and unlike rates.

Check-Ins

For brick-and-mortar businesses interested in analyzing their local traffic, check-ins are a great insight to gather. Most people won’t check in to your physical location, but those that do are loyal. You’ll be able to analyze the demographics of these loyal customers and clients, which is pretty cool!

People

Insights tells you more about your biggest fans, like where they live, what they’re interested in, their age range and gender, job title and more. For comparison’s sake, you can pit your selected audience against Facebook’s global audience. You’ll see bar charts with a dark blue color, plus a gray color in the background. The dark blue bars represent your selected audience, and the gray bars behind them represent Facebook as a whole. Here’s what I mean:

Messages

Messenger insights really come in handy, especially when it comes to improving your customer service. Know your response times as well as how many times you were marked as spam, blocked or deleted.

Page Views

How many page views do you have? And how many different people are contributing to that count? This category tells you just that. You can break it down further by section, age and gender, country, city and device.

Page Actions

Views and likes are one thing, but they’re fairly cosmetic. You want people to take actions on your page, and the page actions insight helps you do that. Find out how many people clicked on an action button (like “sign up”, “get directions” or visit “website”). Set the date range and break down the data like you would with any category of Facebook Insights.

Posts

What are your top performing posts? What are the best days and times to post for your particular business? This insight answers these questions and more. Plus, you can tell which type of posts are earning more clicks, engagement and reach.

Events

Interest for events—whether virtual or otherwise—is important to track. Gather insights on upcoming and past events, plus overall awareness, engagement and ticket rates for them.

Videos

Videos are a major part of digital marketing. Track your video post-performance by paid and organic metrics. Additionally, break it down by unique and repeat views, clicks and autoplays, 10-second views and more. Whatever the category at hand, use audience insights to put together personas for your campaigns, then create campaigns that resonate with your audience. Target your ads on an even tighter level and increase your return on ad spend. PRO TIP: Save your audience before you leave. That way, you can come back to it and continue your analysis or audience build-out.

Why Audience Insights Now?

The collective shift toward social media isn’t going anywhere. According to a Facebook IQ report, 23% of people lean on their online communities to help them manage stress. As a business, you want to be at the forefront of this camaraderie. Businesses really can fill the gap, as long as they’re providing relevant content to a seriously narrow audience. As for Facebook marketing, it’s not like experiential marketing where you can make an educated estimate of the type of people who encounter your billboard on a daily basis. Using Facebook Audience Insights, you can confidently connect all the pieces of the puzzle. You just have to know how to do it. And now, you do!   About the author: John Lincoln (MBA) is CEO of Ignite Visibility (a 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 Inc. 5000 company) a highly sought-after digital marketing strategist, industry speaker and author of two books, \"The Forecaster Method\" and \"Digital Influencer.\" Over the course of his career, Lincoln has worked with over 1,000 online businesses ranging from small startups to amazing clients such as Office Depot, Tony Robbins, Morgan Stanley, Fox, USA Today, COX and The Knot World Wide. John Lincoln is the editor of the Ignite Visibility blog. While he is a contributor, he does not write all of the articles and in many cases he is supported to ensure timely content.