Facebook Insights: How To Use in Your Digital Marketing

How to access Facebook Insights

Before diving into our discussion of what Audience Insights is and how to use the data it provides, let's go over how to access it.

Click anywhere on the main menu in the top left corner of your Facebook Ads Manager page. Under "Plan," choose "Audience Insights." Or go there directly by entering facebook.com/ads/audience-insights in your browser.

How to use Facebook Audience Insights

The first thing you need to do is to choose your seed audience. You may choose between:

1. Everyone On Facebook, to which you can apply multiple filters to narrow down your audience.

2. People Connected to Your Facebook Page, which shows data just on the people who like your page.

Once you have selected your base audience for analysis, you can use filters for customer segmentation. However, you can no longer create custom audiences from customer data due to privacy concerns.

What is Audience Insights on Facebook?

Once you have selected your seed audience, you can choose filters from the side bar on the left to segment your seed audience to discover more about selected groups of people who share characteristics relevant to your personal brand. You can segment your chosen audience on the basis of:

• Demographics, such as age, gender, relationship status, and education level.
• Page likes,
• Location,
• Interests,
• Connections,
• And recent activity on the platform.

The default location for Facebook Insights is the USA. You can exclude specific states by hovering over the dropdown arrow for "All United States" and clicking on "Exclude Locations."

Want to look at locations other than the United States? Clicking on the "X" next to "United States" removes it as a preferred location. Then type in any new country for which you want data. You can also get data on the regional or city level, and you can analyze data from more than one city at a time, for instance, "Dallas and Chicago."

Under "Age and Gender" you can set a minimum and/or a maximum age, and you can choose the genders of the members of your audience you want to analyze. Or you can leave these blank.

The "Interests" tab lists the same interests you can click when you are setting up a Facebook ad. You can include interests in your Audience Insights analysis, but you cannot exclude them.

Interests are a key insight for making money on social media, because Facebook reports real interests, not just listed interests. Facebook bases this data on the pages your audience likes, the amount of time they spend engaged on specific pages, the pages they like, and the ads they click on.

The connections tab gives you a way to analyze your audience by their connection to your specific pages. You can exclude certain pages you own from the analysis.

You can also avail yourself of advanced filters such as "Job Titles," which may be of particular importance to you for B2B advertising, "Parents," "Life Events," and "Relationship Status."

Now let's take a look at how to use the information you get.

Understanding Facebook Insights

Ready for the insights Facebook will give you for your audience? Go to your Facebook page and click on Insights. You will get information back in 10 areas.

Overview

The Overview tab tells you how your Facebook page is doing, with a number of useful details. It gives you the key metrics for your Page, such as Page Likes, Page Engagement, and Reach for the last seven days. It gives you the percent change from the previous seven-day period. It also provides key metrics for your last five Facebook posts, and compares their performance to similar posts on Facebook.

Want to know how your page is performing compared to your competitors? Go to Pages to Watch. The top Facebook posts published in this section will tell you what's trending in your industry, and give you pages to curate for your followers.

Likes

The Likes tab tells you where your likes are coming from. It also tells you the growth pattern of your likes, and your average likes per week.

Three sections report total likes on your Facebook page as of today, net likes, and where your likes happened on your page.

The Total Likes graph breaks down the proportion of likes resulting from paid and organic traffic. It also tracks your Unlikes. Steep curves up and down tell you what's working and what isn't.

The next graph tells you whether your Page Likes came from Page suggestions that Facebook serves its users, or from your ads, or directly from your Page itself.

Click on any date or drag on any date range in these graphs, and Facebook will tell you the source of your likes and unlike for that day or date range.

Reach

Your reach is the total number of people whom Facebook sends any activity from your Page, including your Facebook posts published, posts to your Page made by other people, check-ins, mentions of your page, and Page like ads. Post Reach tells you the total number of people who have been reached by your content, both organically and by paid promotion. This graph can tell you whether your ad campaign and SEO are working.

Reactions, comments, and shares measure the engagement of people with your posts. “Hide Posts”, “Hide All Posts”, “Report as Spam”, and “Unlike Page” are negative feedback that cause Facebook to display your page less often.

Page Views

Page Views is like your traffic report in Google Analytics. It tells you the total page views, the people who viewed it, and the sources of the people who viewed your Page.

If someone visits your page twice, they are only counted once, so the number of people who visited your page will always be less than the total Page views.

There is also a graph that gives you the top five traffic sources for your Page. Focus on these sources to increase the number of visitors to your Page.

Actions on Your Page

Actions on your page tell you what people did when they accessed your Page on their mobile devices. Maybe they clicked your phone number. Or they clicked to get directions. Or they clicked on your Action Button or clicked on your website. Different businesses are concerned about different actions, so Facebook Insights gives you a collection of data.

Posts

In the posts tab, Facebook Insights tells you when (the time of day) your fans are online, their engagement with each type of post (link, photo, or video), and the top posts from pages you watch, giving you new ideas for creating content.

Events

Here you will find data on the success of your Facebook events pages. This tab tells you how many people saw your event, how many people responded to your event, and the demographics of your audience.

Videos

Your videos tab tells you how many people saw your videos through both paid and organic traffic. It segments unique and repeat views and how many people clicked to play versus how many people let your video play automatically.

People

The People tab is a simple measurement of people who saw your Facebook posts, liked your Page, or engaged with your Page.

Messenger

This tab reports how long it took you to respond to messages and how many people deleted messages from you.

How to use the information from Facebook Insights

There's a lot you can do with Facebook Insights. We will focus on three important benefits of your page insights.

Determine your target audience

Create an avatar for your target customer. Supplement the buyer persona you presently use with demographic and location data to identify new cold audiences for your next Facebook ads. Take advantage of Facebook's metrics of social inclusivity to make sure you are not overlooking prospects.

Segment your customers

One of the easiest ways to achieve audience segmentation is to use location data. Find the locations that stand out among the rest. Then reference their city or state in your ads to make them stand out in their feed.

Create targeted ads and content

The Demographics tab shows you your audience in terms of age, gender, educational attainment, job title, and relationship status. Take a closer look at what stands out to you about your customers and where they are on their customer journey. See if there is some particular group that is responding to your Page.

Then pick out the largest segments to use as unique audiences for your next creative ad. You will be better equipped to create ads that resonate with your audience and achieve a higher Return On Ad Spend.

Expand your reach with email marketing

Facebook for Small Businesses and Facebook Insights are just two of many tools for expanding your reach. Email marketing is fundamental. At every step of your inbound marketing strategy, Mailchimp has the tools you need. Contact us with your questions today!