How to use Facebook audience insights for more effective targeting

Having an accurate understanding of your target audience does more than just save money. It guides your social campaigns and helps you create impactful content, laying the foundation for increased engagement and higher return on investment (ROI).
Want to know how your audience interacts with Facebook? Start by researching the latest demographic data. Learn who is using Facebook, how often they use it, what they use Facebook for, and whether users fit your target audience.

How do I view audience insights on Facebook?

To access Audience Insights on Facebook, navigate to Meta Business Suite, click Insights in the left menu, then click Audience . Here you can view demographic data for your Facebook and Instagram fans, as well as the top cities and countries they live in.

Facebook Audience Insights has undergone a major change. The same functionality is now part of Meta Business Suite Insights and Meta Ads Manager.

Facebook Audience Insights provides valuable data about your current audience so you can target consumers. With this data, your decisions will be more informed and customer-centric, translating into more impactful events, campaigns, and creator partnerships.

How do I get Facebook Audience Insights?

There are two ways to discover audience insights from your Page on Facebook. First, you can see organic audience data, including:

People who like your Page broken down by gender and location
Total followers
Reach and engagement metrics

To dive deeper into your business profile data, start with the Insights tab in Meta Business Suite to get an overview of your individual account performance, then click Audience.

Here you’ll get data about your Facebook and Instagram followers, their demographics, and the top cities and countries where your audience is located.

Explore the Audience tab in two ways:

Current audience: This represents people who are already connected to your business in some way, such as followers of your Facebook page or Instagram profile, or people who have interacted with your content or ads.

Potential audience: This includes people who haven’t yet connected to your business but may be interested in your products or services. These insights help you identify and target new customer segments based on common traits with your current audience or specific criteria you define.

Second, by running an ad campaign, you can access all the data from organic views and other detailed audience information, such as:

AgeContent preferences (top performing posts and videos)Device usage
Head to Meta Ads Manager and access the information using the Ads Reports and Audiences tabs in the main navigation menu.

What are the different types of Facebook audiences?

When running a Facebook ad campaign, you have four audience targeting options to ensure you reach your ideal audience. Each Facebook audience type offers a unique way to connect with potential customers. Understanding how to apply these options can significantly improve your campaign performance by targeting the right people at the right time.

1. New Audiences

New audiences are the default setting and refer to new customers who haven’t interacted with your brand before. You can refine this audience by selecting the following categories:
Location (e.g. city, country)Demographics (e.g. education, finances, and life events)Interests (e.g. family and relationships, fitness and leisure)Behaviors (e.g. mobile device users)

2. Custom Audiences

Custom audiences allow you to connect with people who are already interested in your business. It is made up of information (called “identifiers”) that you collect about your customers (e.g. email, phone number, and address) and provide to Meta. They may have interacted with your content, visited your website, used your app, made a recent purchase, or they may be on your customer list.

3. Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences are made up of people who share interests with your custom audience but haven’t interacted with your business yet. Create a lookalike audience and select a source to automatically generate a new audience that reflects your best customers.
When creating a lookalike audience, you can use a percentage range to choose how closely the new audience should match the source audience.
These audiences save you time because you don’t have to create new audiences from scratch, but can repeat the success of your most successful content and campaigns.

4. Saved Audiences

Whenever you create a new custom audience, save it for future use.
How to use Facebook Audience Insights?
Since Facebook has the highest ROI of all social networks, it’s critical to customize and save your best-performing audiences so you can continually optimize your ad spend for maximum results. To get started with the Facebook Audience Insights tool, follow these steps.

1. Upload a Custom Audience Source
   First, select Create Custom Audience from the Audiences tab in Ads Manager. Then, select a Custom Audience Source, including sources you own, such as data from your website, app activity, CRM customer lists, and more.
   You can also use data sources from Meta, such as video engagement, your Instagram account followers, lead forms, event attendees, and shopping users.

2. Customize your audience using filters
   After selecting a source, use additional rules to add inclusions or exclusions to better refine your audience.

There are several conditions to choose from:

Facebook Audience Meter will tell you if your audience is too specific or too broad. Keep iterating until your reach is just right (the ideal audience size is between 2 million and 10 million people). Further customize your audience by age, location, language, and gender.

You’ll need to identify your audience at least a week before your campaign launches. It can take up to three days for Meta to match your audience to a profile on Meta’s technology.

3. Focus on interest-based audiences

If your audience is relatively large (at least over 2 million), use additional interest-based targeting to hone in on specific audiences using the same categories mentioned earlier. Then, add a name and description for your audience list, as well as how long you’ll keep it. Now you can click Create New List.

4. Review your audience metrics

After launching your campaign, check the performance of your audience list. Did you reach your campaign goals? If not, make any necessary adjustments to your list. Try narrowing or broadening your audience, and redefining inclusions and exclusions.

5. Save and copy your best performing audiences

If your audience performs well, save it for future use. To reach new consumers with similar demographics and behavioral patterns, create a lookalike audience.
By clicking “Create a lookalike audience” in the Audiences tab, you will be prompted to select an existing audience or data source, choose the location and size of your audience, and determine how similar your audience is to the original audience (1% similarity means the audience is as similar to the original audience as possible). Once this audience is created, you can rerun your campaign or continue to customize your list.