Traction and Scale - Audience & Messaging

How to Target Your Audience with Facebook Audience Insights and Facebook Analytics

1. Audience insights - Without pixel history or existing customers, expand your understanding of the audience based on page likes, affinities and relevant demos.

2. Highlight FB analytics as another tool to think horizontally.

So today we're going to talk about how to expand your audience on Facebook, and assuming that you don't have much of an audience to start with, how to build that up from almost nothing to start doing cold outreach to folks.

Audience Insights

So the first place that we want to start is called the audience insights, and you can get to this in your business manager. At least as of today, it's located under the plans section.

So if you expand out your window, the first item there above the campaign plan and creative hub is you'll find audience insights. You can go in here, and this is a great place to get started. If you have a decent amount of interest in your page, this is a good place to go first.

So let's assume that you have maybe 10,000, 15,000 people who like your page. You're trying to translate that into actually turning that into Facebook campaigns. So you go in here. What you'll do on the left side is you'll pick an audience. So down here on the left I've picked one, Bun Maternity. So this is a company that provides apparel for new moms, nursing moms, and those who are in their second and third trimesters.

So we're targeting young families. We've got a pretty good idea of who we're reaching out to. But even so, we're going to go ahead and plug that in, and then we're just going to let Facebook tell us about it. So this audience, there's 28,000 people active monthly, which is a great size audience to do some analysis on.

You'll see that the first thing is it's 100% women. Not a huge surprise here, but this is a good piece of starting information. Do you skew a certain way in terms of your gender? Then we can also see that there is an age breakdown, so a little bit in the 18 to 24, heavily, heavily in the 25 to 34, and then a little bit in the 35 to 44. You can see the gray backgrounds here. These are the samples of how folks normally shake out. Normally, the percentage of Facebook users shakes out roughly this way. You can see we skew heavily in the young female category.

Then just as interesting down here is this lifestyle category. So you can see how much more likely a fan of this page is to be in one of these different lifestyle groups. If you mouse over one, you'll get this little I pop up next to it, which you can mouse over and learn more about it.

So, for example, the outward bound group year, you're talking middle income, tend to be rural, a few with toddlers and preschool age kids, home ownership, and there's some down here in the career building section, the casual comfort section. This is a great place to get an anecdotal start to understanding your audience.

Facebook Analytics Tool

Beyond this, you can also go over to the Facebook analytics tool to get a little more specific, which is where we're going to go next. So once you've got a good idea of this starting place, let's jump into the Facebook analytics tool. Now, in this case, we've had the pixel installed on the site for a while, and we can analyze people who like the page or who visit the website. So, for example, here's all the people. Again, you can get to this analytics section here in the measure and report section. 

You can go look at here's all the people. You can see the pages that are listed. So here's Bun Maternity. Here's our brand.

Obviously, we've got a relevance of one, high relevance, 5% audience, 30,000 page likes. We're a clothing brand. We know that. But here are some other companies that we like. So here are some other targets we can go after, right? We can just see which ones are websites, which ones are clothing stores, kids' goods, clothing brands. So there's a good correlation here. Then you've got a few in here that are more like media companies. These are great ways to do interest-based targeting, build an audience with these.

You can actually sort it instead. If you want say what percentage of my audience likes these different companies, that's a different way to do it.

So what percentage of my 30,000 people like The Honest Company which has two million Facebook likes. It's about 10%, even though it's only a 38 on the relevance score. The relevance might be higher on some of these even though some of them are smaller. This is also a great place to go verify your demographic and your technology data.

You can click in here and see demographic information confirmed, see breakdowns of geography and language, healthcare extension and education, jobs, things like that. So this is a great place to go as well.

Asset Library

The third place that you want to go when you're building out your audience is into your asset library. Let's suppose you just anecdotally know what your audience is into.

So, again, I have Bun Maternity. I know that my parents are into breastfeeding, so I click that as a first step. It tells me that there are 18 million people in the US 18 to 65. Well, based on my other information, I'm going to drill in here. I'm going say women who are 25 to 40 who are interested. Now I've cut it down to 8.8 million people.

Now I'm going to go over here to this suggestions tab, click on it, and Facebook is going to tell me other things that are similar; new parents, pregnancy, newborn baby, certain demographics, motherhood, baby shower.

I can just scroll through. I can add others. The more I add, the more Facebook understands who I'm targeting. So now it's changed. So now I've added breastfeeding, newborn baby and new parents. Now I'm very drilled in. So I can just go through and add a whole bunch. Now we've gone from 8.8 to 9.4 million people. Then I can segment this out.

So if you're feeling kind of overwhelmed, there are a lot of different ways you can target here. We're going to offer a resource to help you out. So all you have to do is download the ecom audience expansion document. So the ecom audience expansion document is going to help you. It's a framework that walks you through some questions you can answer before you ever get into any of these three tools.

Audience Questions

So we can talk about your demographics. Do you know that you're targeting highly-educated folks or people with kids or people who lean vote left or right? What about the interests they're into? Do they follow certain actors, musicians, athletes? Do they like certain television shows or brands? What about they spend their free time on? Do they spend it on boats? Do they spend it on makeup? Do they spend it on water sports gear? Do they spend it on travel? Are they an iPhone user, or are they an Android snob? Do they tend to be really into tech or avoid tech at all costs? This is a fun one. What email domain do they use? I've got a client who's targeting a bit older. We tend to target folks who have an email domain on AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo because they tend to not be quite as tech savvy, and we tend to exclude the tech early adopters.

So this is a great framework to get you started answering these questions, and then jump into those three sections of Facebook. Again, the asset library to create a saved audience, the analytics and the audience insights. Great place to get started expanding your audience. Good luck.