How to Use Facebook Audience Insights for Campaign Planning

If you haven’t already noticed, your Facebook ads account now comes with an inbuilt tool to analyse various aspects of your target audience which you would have previously done using third party tools like SocialBakers Market Insights.

By using this tool you can play around with different targeting options you may use in your Facebook ads campaigns. For instance, Facebook custom audiences tool  allows you to narrow down your potential target audience on Facebook using several demographic and behavioral filters.

To access your Audience Insights tool, go to your Facebook ads account and look for the “Audience Insights” link on your left hand sidebar.

Once you access the tool, you can input different targeting options and see advanced insights to understand the type of the audience you are going to target. For example, imagine if I want to target Sri Lankan women, 25+ who are having at least one child below the age of 12 (I’m sure you can guess the types of products you can advertise for this audience).

Once I enter above targeting settings, it gives me detailed insights about this audience. 100% of this audience is ‘married’ in their FB status, meaning there are no single mothers on Facebook in Sri Lanka. Majority of them are at least college educated (in Sri Lankan context, this got to be their school) and are employed mostly in administrative (government service), education (teachers) and healthcare/medicine (nurses??).

More interestingly, you can dig deep into behavioral insights like what Facebook pages are popular among your selected audience, and what devices they use to access Facebook. In the above example audience I tested, 50% of them were using both a mobile device and a desktop device to access Facebook. 30% of them are accessing through a computer, 5% on Apple devices and 25% on Android devices.

As you can see, these insights will not only help you plan your Facebook ads campaign but can be extremely helpful in understanding the consumer media behavior for your other media planning activities including your traditional ad planning. For example, 30% of Sri Lankan women 25+ (with a child below 12) having access to a smartphone means, you have to seriously consider multi-screen planning when strategizing your communications approach. If this is your TG, they are most likely to watch their favorite TV program on TV but are highly likely to skip your ads during the commercial break and check their FB notifications instead. As an action point you may consider engaging these consumers through a cross platform campaign which links their favorite TV shows and their mobile device.