Facebook’s gigantic userbase of over 2.9 billion makes it a goldmine for advertisers.
No matter who you’re trying to reach, they’re most likely hanging out on Facebook.
On top of that, Facebook’s powerful ad platform lets you promote your offers at an impressively low cost per click.
But, if you don’t know how to measure your ad performance, Facebook ads can get expensive and even ineffective.
Let me tell you how to leverage Facebook Page Insights data to inform ad campaigns.
The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Insights for Advertisers
Navigating to the Facebook page “Insights” dashboard
To get to your Facebook Insights dashboard, go to your page and click on the “Insights” option on the left.
You can then navigate and understand different metrics on your insights page.
It shows the “Page summary” report that has your page’s performance data.
You can get these metrics for today, yesterday, the previous 7 days, or the last 28 days.
Note that this “insights” dashboard only contains the data for your Facebook page.
Your ad performance data is shown in the Ad Manager Dashboard.
Both show different metrics, so you want to treat them separately.
Here are the metrics you’ll see in the page summary dashboard:
- Page views
- Previews
- Likes
- Post reach
- Story reach
- Post engagement
- Responsiveness
- Followers
- Videos
- Orders
In short, it provides everything a busy marketer needs to understand how their page is performing.
Let’s talk about the top Facebook insights and help you create powerful ads based on them.
Facebook Insights for Advertisers
It can be overwhelming to comprehend all the data when you first get into the Facebook Insights tab.
Just keep in mind that you don’t need to understand all of that to fully leverage Facebook ads.
Let’s talk about the metrics every marketer needs to locate and understand deeply.
Fan Demographics Data
Smart marketers constantly try to figure out who their fans really are.
From building a buyer persona to tracking online users, it’s a never-ending effort for many marketers.
Thankfully, Facebook fan demographics data makes it less of a problem and help you understand your audience better.
On the Facebook Insights page, click the “People” tab on the navigation menu to get started.
Once you do that, you’ll have the demographic information of your audience in front of you.
As you can see, at the top of the page, you can see your fans and followers.
The demographics are divided into “Men” and “Women”.
The data chart also tells you which age groups are most interested in your content.
For instance, the above screenshot suggests that most of your fans are Men between the ages of 25 and 34.
This is powerful information as you can use this demographic while selecting your target audience in a Facebook ad.
Eventually, with that kind of information on your audience, you’d be maximizing your chances of generating leads or even sales.
Here’s how you use this data to inform your ad campaign.
Let’s say a majority of your Facebook page fans are men under 34, but the rest are females between 18 and 24.
What you can do is allocate 75% of your Facebook ad budget to men under 34 and 25% to women between 18 and 24.
Fan Geographic Data
The next set of data on the Facebook Insights page is geographic data, in other words, the locations of fans around the world.
Just scroll down and you’ll find three columns.
After knowing the country, city, and even language of your fans, you can really narrow your audience to the most relevant ones.
Online Habit Data
All the above Facebook fan data is great. It tells you where most of your target audience is coming from, and what are their demographics.
But, it doesn’t tell you the time they’re online.
Knowing when your target customer is hanging out online is important to get in front of them.
It makes sure that your ad reaches your audience when they are most active.
Thankfully, you can know that by navigating to the “Posts” tab.
You don’t want to leave your ad active at 4 am, right?
So, make sure you use this data the next time you’re executing an ad strategy.
Plus, make sure you’re available at that peak time for any queries your prospects may ask.
The good thing is there is plenty of live chat software that you can integrate with your Messenger.
You want to make sure your audience is entertained whenever they try to reach you, even if it’s a bot telling them “we’ll get back soon”.
Post Type Data
On the same tab, you’ll see a list of all published posts with the reach and engagement of each.
This can help you understand the type of posts that are getting the most traction from your followers.
If you’ve ever promoted a post, it’ll also be shown in that list.
Keep in mind that your posts’ organic reach will be different than the reach you get with the promoted posts option.
But, you can have a good idea of what’s working and focus on that.
For instance, if you think videos are performing better than images on your page, make them a priority.
How to Use Facebook Insights?
Now that you know who your fans really are and what are they interested in, you can start creating ad campaigns confidently.
Go to the “Ads” option on the left column of your “Insights” dashboard.
Once you’re in the Ad Manager, click on the “Audience” tab.
This will give you the list of audiences you’ve created in the past for your ads.
You can create a new audience by going to “Create audience”.
Next, start adjusting the targeting options or parameters based on what you learned in Facebook Insights.
For instance, add gender, age, location, and interests to create a completely customized target audience.
The “Detailed targeting” option lets you narrow your target audience based on many factors, including their:
- Job and marital status
- Living situation (Whether they just moved in)
- Education
- Hobbies
- Online behavior
- And much more
Now that you’ve built your custom audience, you can just add it to your targeting options while creating a Facebook ad campaign.
However, make sure you optimize it in real-time while publishing your ad.
This will make sure you’re investing your ad budget in the right audience.
Final Thoughts
Facebook is, without a doubt, the most popular social media platform in the advertising community.
Advertisers in all kinds of businesses have been running Facebook ads to achieve their marketing goals for years.
And that’s mainly because of the low CPC cost and impressive return on investment the ad platform offers.
However, you need accurate data to make sure you’re not sending your advertising budget down the drain.
Thankfully, you get everything you need to run profitable Facebook ads from Facebook Page Insights.
This includes your target audience (Page fans):
- Demographics
- Online behavior
- Post data
- Geographics
With this data, you can design impactful ad campaigns and grow your business cost-effectively.
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