Get Facebook Audience Insights without Audience Insights

In the world of digital marketing, knowledge is power. 

Only 65% of marketers say the data they have on their target audience data is high-quality. 

When asked as part of the same study, only half knew where their target audience consumes content, their demographics, interests and hobbies, shopping habits, and the products they’re interested in. 

You must do everything possible to improve your audience data as an advertiser.

Understanding your audience is the ultimate superpower when it comes to running successful ad campaigns. 

Why are audience insights so important?

Audience insights yield a treasure trove of information about the people you're trying to reach. They allow you to craft messages that resonate better, choose the right platforms for your ads based on where they spend their time, and ultimately drive better results.

Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed.
- Dan Zarella

But why exactly are audience insights so crucial? Let's break it down:

1. Targeted messaging

Knowing your audience's interests, behaviors, and demographics allows you to create content that speaks directly to their needs and desires. Understanding their pain points and friction areas is equally valuable. Addressing these needs, desires, and problems with solution-driven marketing messaging creates a personalized approach, leading to higher engagement rates and more effective campaigns.

2. Efficient budget allocation

Understanding where your audience spends their time online helps you determine which platforms to invest in. It also tells you what type of content they consume so you can create similar content and allocate your ad spend more effectively. Analyzing your audience insights and refining your targeting ensures your message reaches the right people at the right time without wasting your budget on people who aren’t interested in your offer.

3. Product development

Insights into your audience's preferences and pain points can inform product development, helping you create offerings that meet market demands. Monitoring your audience insights can show you what to stop, start, or continue to improve your product offering and customer satisfaction overall.

4. Competitive advantage

In-depth knowledge of your audience gives you an edge over competitors who might be using a more generalized approach. It may come as a surprise, but not everyone uses their audience insights to inform and drive their marketing decisions. Data-driven marketing should be the focus so you can be strategic and efficient without wasting effort on the wrong content or ads for your target audience. 

5. Improved customer experience

Understanding your audience allows you to tailor your marketing and customer journey, leading to higher satisfaction and loyalty. Taking note of the insights you gather on how your audience responds to your digital marketing systems can be super helpful in constantly improving them.

Given the importance of audience insights, it's no wonder that marketers have long relied on tools like Facebook Audience Insights to gain a deeper understanding of their target market. However, the landscape of audience analysis tools is constantly evolving, and staying up-to-date with the latest options is crucial. 

What is Facebook Audience Insights?

Facebook Audience Insights was a powerful tool that gave marketers aggregate information about two groups of people—people connected to your Page and people on Facebook. This tool allowed businesses to gather demographic and behavioral data about their audience, including age, gender, education, job titles, relationship status, and even information about their household and lifestyle.

The beauty of Facebook Audience Insights lay in its ability to help marketers understand the composition of their audience, create new audiences using their learnings, discover new potential customers, and create more relevant ads. It was an invaluable resource for businesses looking to refine their targeting strategy and improve their overall Facebook advertising performance.

As the third most visited website in the world, Facebook is a popular place to be. Facebook has over 3 billion monthly active users and over 10 million advertisers use its tools and services monthly. 

Considering these statistics, advertising on Facebook means you can reach a vast number of people with targeted ads.

Where did Facebook Audience Insights go?

Unfortunately, as of July 2021, Facebook deprecated its Audience Insights tool. This move was part of Meta's broader efforts to protect user privacy and comply with evolving data protection regulations. All the data gathered on your audience is anonymous. 

The deprecation of Facebook Audience Insights left many marketers scrambling for alternatives. However, while this specific tool is no longer available, Meta still offers other ways to gain insights into your audience. The data is still accessible. Meta simply restructured how audience insights integrate across their products. 

Let's explore one of these alternatives: Meta Business Suite Insights.

How to use Meta Business Suite Insights

Meta Business Suite Insights is the successor to Facebook Audience Insights. It offers a range of features to help you understand your audience and improve your marketing strategy. While it may not provide the same level of detail as its predecessor, it still offers valuable information to guide your Facebook ad campaigns.

Here's how you can leverage Meta Business Suite Insights:

• Access your insights: Log into your Meta Business Suite account and navigate to the Insights tab. Here, you'll find an overview of your Page's performance, including reach, engagement, and follower growth.

• Audience tab: This section summarizes your audience information and existing and potential audience trends.

Then, you have the “Demographics” tab, which includes age and gender breakdowns, as well as the top cities and countries where your followers live.

And lastly, the “Potential audience” tab has some real nuggets of info lurking inside.

It shows the potential audience if you incorporate this data into your targeting. It gives you the estimated audience size and the top towns or cities to target. But if you scroll down, you get to “Top Pages.”

“Top Pages” tells you what Pages to include in your custom audiences to reach more people who match your existing audience. It also shows a percentage to indicate how big a slice of the estimated audience you can reach if you add the Page to your audiences.

• Content insights: Analyze which types of posts are performing best with your audience. This can help you refine your content strategy and create more engaging posts like your top performers. Content insights can show you which posts should become ads to drive even more impact. Plus, they can inform the Facebook ad types that are likely to perform best.

• Page insights: Get detailed information about your Page's performance, including reach, engagement, and actions taken on your Page. From Facebook, head to your Page and go to “Manage Page” to go to your Professional Dashboard. Click “Insights.”

Click “Your Page” to get to your Page insights.

You’ll get a summary of information about your Page, including discovery and engagement insights from the last 28 days.

• Ad insights: If you're running ads, you can access performance metrics in Campaigns and Ads Reporting in the Facebook Ads Manager to help you understand which ads resonate with your audience. By studying the audience insights, you can see which ads perform better than others, allowing you to produce more ads like that in the future and improve your social media advertising. 

• Benchmark comparisons: Compare your Page's performance to similar Pages in your industry. Head to “Benchmarking,” where you’ll find the “Business comparison” tab. Utilizing this will give you a sense of where you stand against other Pages in your category. 

Go to “Businesses to watch” to compare your Page against your closest competitors. You can add other businesses to the list if they have a Facebook Business Page.

• Audience growth: Track your audience's growth over time and identify trends or patterns in follower acquisition. You can do this by monitoring the results in the Audience tab of Meta Business Suite Insights, which we covered in point 2.

While Meta Business Suite Insights provides valuable information, it's important to note that it doesn't offer the same level of detail as the old Facebook Audience Insights tool. As you can see, these insights are tucked away in different places across the platform. 

For marketers seeking more in-depth audience analysis, third-party tools can fill the gap left by Facebook Audience Insights' deprecation.

Get the most granular audience insights with Madgicx

While Meta Business Suite Insights offers a solid foundation for understanding your audience, savvy marketers know that more detailed insights can lead to even better results. This is where Madgicx's 360° Meta Audit comes into play, offering a level of granularity that is hard to get to in the native Facebook tools.

Madgicx's 360° Meta Audit is a comprehensive suite of tools designed to give you the most detailed and actionable insights about your audience. Let's break down the key components:

1. Geo & Demo Insights

This powerful tool segments your ad performance by geographic location and demographics such as age and gender. 

This level of detail lets you understand which specific audience segments respond best to your ads, enabling you to fine-tune your targeting for maximum efficiency. These insights are crucial for your targeting.

2. Targeting Insights

Which audience types work best for your business? Targeting Insights has the answer. It tells you whether interest-based or lookalike audiences are performing better, what audience size drives the best results, and even which lookalike percentage and recency settings are most effective for your ad account. ‘Top Landing Pages’ tells you which of your landing pages bring in the highest ROI, which is invaluable.

This information is pure gold for optimizing your audience targeting strategy 💰

Analyzing your audience across the full sales funnel lets you ensure you’re marketing to all stages of your sales funnel. Remember that each stage is different, and you must adjust your ad creatives accordingly. 

If you’re creating retargeting ads, for example, factor in that this audience has visited your website and is further along down your funnel than the prospecting ads you create for brand-new potential customers.

3. Auction Insights

Timing is everything in advertising, and Auction Insights helps you nail it. This tool shows you the best times and days to run your ads based on actual performance data. 

But it doesn't stop there - it also reveals which devices and placements are the most profitable for your campaigns, allowing you to allocate your budget more effectively and optimize your campaign. 

Seeing your rankings helps you understand how they affect your performance. Ads with a low quality, engagement, or conversion ranking may still perform well. If they do, you don’t have to worry about these. However, if they don’t, these rankings might give you a helpful clue as to what should change.

The power of Madgicx's 360° Meta Audit lies in its ability to provide clear and actionable insights. Instead of broad generalizations, you get specific, data-driven recommendations that you can implement immediately to improve your campaign performance.

For example, you might discover that your ads perform best with women aged 25-34 in urban areas on weekday evenings. Armed with this information, you can create highly targeted ad campaigns that speak directly to this audience when they're most likely to engage. If you need inspiration for your next ad, we have the Madgicx Ad Library, where you can browse brands and ads from your competitors.

Maybe you’re running a lead generation campaign and find that lookalike audiences based on your top 1% customers outperform interest-based audiences. This insight could lead you to shift your budget towards these high-performing lookalike audiences, potentially boosting your return on ad spend.

The level of detail in the insights provided by Madgicx goes beyond what's available in Meta Business Suite or any other native Facebook tool. By leveraging these deep insights, you can create more effective campaigns, allocate your budget more efficiently, and ultimately drive better results from your Facebook advertising efforts. Try Madgicx for free. 

Conclusion

While the loss of Facebook Audience Insights was a blow to many marketers, it's clear that alternatives exist that can provide even more valuable insights. There is more than one way to reach the end result. By combining the broad overview of Meta Business Suite Insights with the granular details offered by Madgicx's 360° Meta Audit, you can develop a comprehensive and watertight understanding of your audience that drives success in your Facebook advertising campaigns.

The bottom line is that the more you understand your audience, the better positioned you are to create campaigns that resonate, engage, and convert. So don't let Facebook Audience Insights' deprecation hold you back—embrace new tools and technologies to gain even deeper insights into your audience and take your Facebook advertising to new heights.