Facebook Advertising – Part 2

How to create/choose your audience.

If you haven’t read Facebook Advertising – Part 1, I would suggest you start from there.

 

This article consists of two parts:

The first part covers the Facebook Audience insight tool, which will help you choose and target your audience for Facebook ads in case if you don’t have Facebook Pixel installed on your website (store) or if you have a Pixel without enough data.

The second part covers how to create a Custom audience using your Facebook Pixel data.

 

Facebook Audience Insights.

Facebook Audience Insights is one of the most powerful analytical tools at your disposal — that is if you know how to use it.

Accessed through Facebook Business Manager, Audience Insights is free to use and provides a huge amount of demographic and behavioral data about your audience and that of your competitors.

This tool was created to enable advertisers to target their ads more effectively, but you can use this tool to learn about your audience, even if you are not advertising to them. This data can help you improve your overall Facebook marketing strategy, including stronger buyer personas, more compelling content, and more insightful competitive research.

To access this tool, simply head to your Facebook Business Manager and click on ‘Audience Insights’ under the “Plan” header.

Step 1: Choose your audience.

When you first open Audience Insights, you will likely be prompted to select an audience to start. (Note: This is just a prompt — you can change your answer later.)

The options here are:

  • Everyone on Facebook: This gives you an overview of the whole of Facebook (Note: It defaults to U.S.. However you can change this later on). This should be selected if you want to understand data based on broad interests or competitor Pages.
  • People Connected to Your Page: This option directs you to select your own Facebook Page from all the Pages you manage. This is useful to understanding your existing audience.

Throughout this guide, we will focus on the first option. However, it is the same process if you were to select ‘People Connected to Your Page’ or ‘Custom Audiences.’

By selecting the ‘Everyone on Facebook’ option, you will be taken to the screen in the next step.

 

Step 2: Select your segment’s parameters.

In this step, you want to put in the identifying characteristics of your audience.

As you can see, the default location is the United States. If the audience you want to look at is Canada-based (or any other country), you can change this by typing in the location box and selecting the appropriate country.

For the examples in this post, we will use the United States for our audience location.

You can add as many countries as you wish here, or leave it blank to look at Facebook demographics across the world.

Using this menu on the left-hand side, you can now segment your audience by age, gender, interests, people connected to your Page, and more advanced data such as behavior, language, education, work, etc.

The Interests option is a great way to uncover competitor or industry information.

You can search for interest groups here or specific Pages. It is worth mentioning that not all Pages will appear here. It usually depends on the size of the Page. However, there is no definitive logic to this, as some Pages with 20,000 Likes may not appear, while a Page with 2,000 might. The best thing to do is to have a list of Pages and interests, and simply enter them into this box to see if they appear.

If the specific Page you want to enter has dots or other symbols in the Page name, then omit them when entering the Page.

Let’s take Magic: The Gathering as an example. We want to look for the audience of the United States.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H65trHX_qvw[/embedyt]

We have now created an audience of people who like Magic: The Gathering and are located in the United States.

 

Step 3: Explore the data.

Now that we have created our audience of people in the United States who like Magic: The Gathering, we can begin to explore the data and understand more about this group of people.

There are six tabs available within the tool, which cover different aspects of data available.

These are:

  • Demographics
  • Page Likes
  • Location
  • Activity
  • Household*
  • Purchase*

*Note: The last two are only available to data including U.S. audiences.

 

Demographics

The demographics tab includes information on age, gender, lifestyle (U.S. only), and relationship status, education, and job title.

Looking at our Magic: The Gathering audience, we can see that we are looking at a monthly active audience of 500K – 600K people, as highlighted below in red, meaning that we are looking at a significant pool of data. If this monthly active audience has fewer than 1,000 people, no data will appear here.

We can see from this that 82% of Magic: The Gathering audience is male. We can also see that most of these are in the 25-34 and 18-24 age bracket. This data is highly valuable when creating personas and planning content to engage the target audience.

Throughout this process, you can segment further by clicking on the left-hand menu. For example, if you wanted to just look at the male segment of this audience, you can select this on the menu. This can be done for all of these options (age, gender, and more advanced options including language, relationship status, job title, etc.).

 

Page Likes

The Page Likes tab is split into two sections.

The first section details the top categories of Pages that the selected audience likes along with the top Pages within those categories.

Looking at top categories will give you an idea where is your target audience, what news and media they are consuming, what their favorite book & magazine distributor is, or what kind of entertainment websites they like to visit. All this data will help you create your buyer’s persona.

Taking our  Magic: The Gathering audience, we can see what else they Like on Facebook to build a picture of their interests and lifestyle (2nd section). Check out all the Pages on this list to see what kind of content your audience likes to receive on Facebook.

Obviously, top pages are directly related to our key interest – Magic: The Gathering. But the exciting thing is that you can target people who also like Dungeons and Dragons Memes because it is a relevant interest and its affinity index is high. While we’re at it, let’s take a closer look at Affinity Index (screenshot below – green outline), what it is, and why do we need it. Affinity Index shows how likely is your audience to like a given Page compared to everyone else on Facebook. For example, we chose Magic: The Gathering as the primary interest we want to target. So the most relevant Page for this interest is Magic The Gathering Rocks My World with an affinity index of 2209x.

Location

The third tab available is Location. Within this tab, you can see Top Cities, Top Countries, and Top Languages.

As we already have this data filtered to only include the United States, the Top Countries tab will only show the United States. The Top Cities tab gives us an idea of where in the United States this audience is based. If you have a regional business, this data will be able to tell you if your Page (or competitors) is reaching the right audience.

Activity

This information helps us understand the behavior and activity of chosen audience on Facebook.

This is split into two sections:

Frequency of Activities: This data shows user activity in the last 30 days. Here we can see the average number of Pages Liked, alongside some engagements (comments, Likes, shares, ads clicks) made in the last 30 days.

Device Users: The type of devices used to access Facebook, split between mobile and desktop, and then further drill down into the specific device.

By looking at frequency of activity, we can see how active this audience is on Facebook. This helps inform us as to if this will be an excellent platform to target and engage the audience.

We can see that the average Magic: The Gathering fan Likes 3 Facebook Pages, Click on 29 ads (almost twice than an average Facebook user). That means that  Magic: The Gathering fans are open to relevant ads, which is a good sign. Also, we can see that they are more likely than the average Facebook user to engage with comments, Likes, shares, and ads.  

The second data category available here is the devices used by this audience to access Facebook. There are two options ‘All Devices Used’ and ‘Primary Device.’ By selecting ‘Primary Device,’ we can see whether this audience is more likely to use desktop or mobile, alongside the type of device.

We can see that ‘iPhone/iPod’ and ‘Android’ are the two most popular here. Interestingly, Android use is 45% higher than the average Facebook user. This information is key when creating content to share via Facebook in that it must be compatible with these devices.

Step 4: Save your audience.

After capturing all of this data and using it to understand your audience and inform personas and content ideas, you can save this to refer back to or use to target your Facebook ad campaigns better.

Just click on ‘Save’ at the top of the Page, and you will be given the option to name your audience. This data can then be found in Assets > Audiences. You can also use the Open option to the left of save to access a previously saved audience.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-TCSwmG-BE[/embedyt]

Facebook Audience Insights is one of the most important tools on Facebook.

It allows us to analyze all Facebook users and find unique and particular 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.

 

How to create a custom audience. 

Why would you want to create your custom audience using Facebook Pixel? Well, it is a good question, and we’ve extensively covered it in Facebook Advertising – Part 1. It is worth checking out!  Well, in a nutshell, you want to do remarketing using a warm audience – people who already have been on your website. The process of creating Custom Audience is pretty straightforward:

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ajMK3ZqeMk[/embedyt]

Now you know how to find a desirable target audience and how to create a Custom Audience.

In the next part of “Facebook Advertising,” we will cover ads objectives and best ads formats.

P.s. If you haven’t signed up for Facebook Pixel yet, well you can do it right now. Here is the Link

 

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Get updates and deals

More To Explore

Card Games

The MTG Outlaws of Thunder Junction

Share via: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reddit Copy Link More Welcome to the vibrant and exhilarating frontier world of Thunder Junction, where you’re invited to embody

Featured Game Stores Near You

Share via
Copy link
Powered by Social Snap