Target Audience With Facebook Audience Insights

Today, Facebook announced the launch of a new tool, called audience insights, that Page owners can use to learn more about who their target audience is by gathering geographic information, demographic information, past purchase history, and more all into one panel.

Audience Insights is similar in a lot of ways to Page Insights, but different in terms of the type of information it collects. Audience Insights analyzes trends about your current or potential customers across Facebook, while Page Insights collects data about interactions with your Page (i.e., likes, comments and shares).

With Audience Insights you can learn how many people on Facebook live near your stores, you can get to know their interests, along with their past purchase behavior and shopping habits (online vs. in-store).

Using Audience Insights, you can get aggregate and anonymous information such as:

• Demographics — Age and gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role and household size
• Page likes — The top Pages people like in different categories, like women’s apparel or sports
• Location and language — Where do people live, and what languages do they speak
• Facebook usage — How frequently are people in your target audience logging onto Facebook and what device(s) they are using when they log on
• Purchases activity — Past purchase behavior (i.e. heavy buyers of women’s apparel) and purchase methods (i.e., in-store, online)

• People on Facebook (the general Facebook audience)
• People connected to your Page or event
• People in Custom Audiences you’ve already created (an audience made up of your current customers)

It surfaces aggregated information people already express on Facebook, along with information from trusted third-party partners — like Acxiom — through our partner categories targeting. Like Page Insights, Audience Insights shows information about groups of people without the need to share which individual people are in those groups. This allows marketers to view aggregate and anonymous insights while keeping people’s personal information private.