So we received a brief, texts and images and a go from our client. You have both hands on the wheel and you have to pave your client’s way to success – and results! How do we do it? Who is our target audience and how do we know who to turn to?
In the following article you will be able to find out the answers to your questions using a wonderful Facebook tool which is mostly left unused – meet Audience Insights.
What Is Audience Insights?
A short explanation of the tool to those who are unfamiliar with it – this tool allows us to get an indication about a potential target audience for a certain niche we want to advertise in. In view of all our surfing all day long in Facebook and in view of millions of users – Facebook knows our interests, the pages we like, are we in high-school / university, which phone we are using etc. Facebook has concentrated and continues to concentrate this data that helps us, as advertisers to reach a more exact audience.
I must say that using this tool will not grant 100% of results but as a start, this is a great tool to “blast” your pixel with data and send plenty of users to your website / landing page / business page or any other destination you want to send your surfers and audience.
How to Enter Audience Insights?
- Enter the main menu when we are in the Ads Managers
2. Click Audience Insights and then Everyone on Facebook.
3. We must change the country where we wish to receive data about our potential audience for the business we promote. As a default, Facebook chooses USA – in our case and for the example I provide in this article, we change it to Israel.
Click the X button that opens when we stand on the column of United States and then type Israel
4. After choosing Israel our column on the left hand side will look like this:
5. After choosing Israel – a short explanation about what each column describes us.
Example
Suppose we are advertising for a pet shop that wants to promote its business both online and offline.
We have to reach a potential audience who likes dogs, is interested in dogs, buys dog food etc. How do we do it?
Let’s return to the column on the left and type the word dogs in the interests column.
We also want to add the interest dog food.
After adding the interests – Facebook’s system automatically updates the data. The data and percentage will change according to the interests we defined.
Important notice: If we are selling online, add the interest “Online Shopping”.
Our page will look like this:
Next, we open an excel / Google Sheets document that looks like this:
So we have all the data and an excel workbook – start typing the data in the worksheet and use them for the Ad Set level and the targeting of the audience.
Interests – enter Page Likes and feed the pages that most of our target audience likes (some of which appears in the interests when we get to targeting)
Work – the occupation of the majority of our target audience – we can also target them, minimize the audience and thus be more specific.
Locations – where can we find our target audience? Which cities are there more of it?
Smartphone type – which OS is used by most of our target audience? Android / iOS?
Enter Page Likes and we can see all the pages liked and followed by our target audience. Some of these are on Facebook’s list of interests when we begin the ad set, and some are not. We will write them all down and try to target them.
After feeding the data into the Excell worksheet our table looks like this:
We will continue to feed data for the professions, locations and smartphone type columns. We receive the following table:
How to Use this Data to Improve Your Campaigns?
So we have the data, what’s next?
Let’s move on to setting up the campaign. If we are in preliminary stages of advertising, it is recommended to embed Facebook and Google codes for remarking and then launch a preliminary traffic campaign. Our objective is to send users into our website or any other destination and fill Facebook / Google follow-up code with audience which is relevant for us.
We have reached the ad set:
Starting with locations:
We go to the Excel worksheet, mark all the locations we typed and copy them (ctrl + c)
Go back to the ad set and paste these locations:
Next, the following window opens, where we choose Cities:
I always prefer to put the radius on 10 mi, but you can also choose city only if you prefer this choice.
Add the locations:
After adding the locations, you can analyze the data Facebook provided us with before and match them with the age.
18-24 = 18%
25-34 = 30%
35-44 = 21%
45-54 = 15%
It is evident that ages 18-54 are 84% of the target audience – therefore on ages we choose 18-54.
Genderwise, we can see that there is no significant difference (50-50), so we keep all.
We have reached interests:
This is where we type the pages our audience likes and follows by Facebook and see whether or not they count as interests. In addition, we type the professions.
* After typing the interests we add the interests our market study was based on, in this case it is: Dogs, Dog Food.
It should come out like this:
Now for a little trick.
We received a rather large audience, who do we minimize it and make it more exact?
Tell Facebook to take all these interests, but it should match 2 interest. Essentially, we are creating a funnel to tell Facebook “target all the people who are interested in these interests but they must also have the interests of dogs and dog food.
Click narrow audience
Type dogs and dog food.
You will see straight away that the audience is narrowed significantly and thus we have a potential audience to answer the traffic campaign in the bets possible way.
Of course that if you want to be more specific and narrow down options you can change the locations of the ad (Facebook / Instagram / Marketplace etc.), provide it only for mobiles and not for desktops, only for Android, etc.
My recommendation – as a first campaign it is best to let it run for a week or two and then optimize and see where more traffic came from and study for your next campaign. The target audience should be between 20,000-100,000
Summary
- If you don’t have plenty of budget – this article is highly recommended for a preliminary campaign to create the narrow relevant audience to work with.
- If you have the budget (more than 5,000$) you can run tests with all kinds of interests. This means, to create an ad set with a single interest (with dogs and dog food) and see which interest / profession answers the best and brings the most clicks for the lowest cost.
- This article includes a basic explanation for advertisers wanting to build a relevant audience.
- This article was written in view of my own personal experience and does not defy any learned strategy.
About Me
Guy Margi, 26 years old, specializing in managing digital campaigns in a variety of channels.
