If you’re a marketer, you need to do your research. It’s imperative you understand your audience so that you can craft the right message to reach the right people.

Smart marketers are using a free Facebook tool called Audience Insights. It allows you to break down audiences to learn a whole lot about them, including:

• Age and Gender
• Lifestyle
• Relationship Status
• Education Level
• Job Title
• Pages Liked
• Location and Language
• Activity on Facebook
• Devices Used to Access Facebook
• Household Income
• Home Ownership
• Household Size
• Home Market Value
• Spending Methods
• Purchase Behavior
• Type of Car They Drive

Let’s take a closer look at how to access this information and which audiences you should analyze using Audience Insights. Along the way I’ll provide examples of what I’m seeing…

How to Access Audience Insights

From Ads Manager, click the “Tools” drop-down at the top and select “Audience Insights.”

Facebook will now prompt you to choose an audience to start.

These are just shortcuts to help guide you, but they really aren’t necessary. You can use them if you want, but you can also just close out that pop-over menu.

Before we get started, note that the location set on the left by default will be your home country.

If you keep this, you will only see results for that country. Let’s remove that country to leave it open.

Now let’s break down some audiences!

1. Fans

Under “Connections” and “Pages Connected To,” enter the name of your page.

It has to be a page you control as the admin, of course.

Here are a few things I’ve learned about my fans using Audience Insights (some of which isn’t found in page Insights)…

94.3K Monthly Active Users

While I just hit 100,000 total fans, nearly 6,000 of them were not active during the past 30 days. This isn’t all that shocking given that my page is four years old. Certainly something to consider as your audience matures.

Most Common Age Group is 25-34

Men (59%) outnumber women (41%), and 44% of my male audience is between 25-34 years old.

46% are Married

This is 21% among the average among all Facebook audiences.

They are College Educated

72% of my fans went to college while a whopping 19% (217% above the average) attended grad school. Only 9% never studied beyond high school, which is 62% below the Facebook average.

40% are in a Management Level Position

Also good to see a high number in media, sales, IT, computer and business.

Relevant Page Likes

My fans are most likely to also like the pages of Social Media Examiner, Amy Porterfield, Mari Smith, Content Marketing Institute and Digital Marketer. I’d consider those pretty darn relevant!

They are Active on Facebook

My average fan…

• Likes 61 pages
• Commented 19 times in the past 30 days
• Liked 34 posts in the past 30 days
• Shared five posts in the past 30 days
• Clicked on 19 ads in the past 30 days

All of these are well above the average Facebook user.

Access Facebook from Desktop AND Mobile

89% of my fans access Facebook from both desktop and mobile, which is 112% above the average. It’s important I use both placements! When they do access mobile, it’s far less common they are using an Android device.

They are Well Compensated (US Only)

Average salary group below $75k is below the Facebook average while every group above that salary is above the Facebook average. The largest disparities happen beyond $125,000 per year.

They Use Primarily a Credit Card

Credit card usage is the only spending method above the Facebook average. This is good for online purchasing.

They Make Business Purchases

14% of my fans make business purchases, compared to 6% for the average Facebook user.

2. Website Visitors

You may not realize this, but you can also break down your website visitors. You do this by analyzing your Website Custom Audience in the top left.

I strongly advise you use the largest audience possible. You’d do this by focusing on all website visitors during the past 180 days.

This audience consists of 707.2K monthly active users.

We’ll get to what I found about this audience later.

3. Email List

You can also analyze your email list by inputing your email Custom Audience at the top left.

I use a tool called Driftrock Flow to sync my Custom Audiences every three hours, which explains the name of this audience.

The size of this audience is 44.2K, which is a little less than half of the total size of my email list (96.9K). We expect this to be the case as not every email address is going to match up to a Facebook profile.

I’ll compare my results for this audience to others later in this post.

4. Large Competitors

You can also break down the audiences of your competitors, to a point, as long as they appear as an interest.

This isn’t an exact science, of course. Interests include people who like a certain page, but it also includes any activity with that page. So while the number of fans and people within an interest audience are sometimes close, they are not exact (and often not that close).

Simply enter in the interest that matches one of your larger competitors to break down their audience.

I don’t consider Social Media Examiner a competitor, but we’ll break them down for this exercise!

We’ll soon take a look at how this audience compares to my own.

5. Advertising Target Groups

You should also break down an audience you have accepted as one you should target. Simply input the various ages, countries, interests and behaviors that you do for an audience you use for targeting to see what it looks like.

In my case, I use the following…

• Countries: United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia
• Ages: 25-49
• Interests: Social Media Examiner, social media examiner, Mari Smith and Amy Porterfield

This audience consists of between 700k-800k people.

Should I actually target this audience? We’re about to find out!

Compare the Results

Let’s compare the composition of each of these groups…

Demographics

Website Visitors: 61% men; largest group of men is 25-34 (47%)

Fans: 59% men; largest group of men is 25-34 (44%)

Email List: 62% men; largest group of men is 25-34 (37%)

Social Media Examiner Interest: 53% men; largest group of men is 25-34 (39%)

Advertising Target Group: 71% women; largest group is 35-44 women (50%)

Relationship Status

Website Visitors: 43% married

Fans: 46% married

Email List: 53% married

Social Media Examiner Interest: 43% married

Advertising Target Group: 55% married

Education Level

Website Visitors: 9% high school, 73% college, 18% grad school

Fans: 9% high school, 72% college, 19% grad school

Email List: 10% high school, 71% college, 19% grad school

Social Media Examiner Interest: 8% high school, 71% college, 21% grad school

Advertising Target Group: 13% high school, 71% college, 16% grad school

Job Title

Website Visitors: 36% Management

Fans: 40% Management

Email List: 40% Management

Social Media Examiner Interest: 41% Management

Advertising Target Group: 38% Management

Page Likes

Website Visitors: N/A (no data)

Fans: 1. Social Media Examiner, 2. Amy Porterfield, 3. Mari Smith, 4. Content Marketing Institute, 5. Digital Marketer

Email List: N/A (no data)

Social Media Examiner Interest: 1. Social Media Today, 2. Mashable – Social Media, 3. Content Marketing Institute, 4. Mari Smith, 5. Social Media Week

Advertising Target Group: 1. Social Media Examiner, 2. Amy Porterfield, 3. Female Entrepreneur Association, 4. Melanie Duncan, 5. Tony Robbins

Activity

Website Visitors: 33 page likes, 10 comments, 18 post likes, 2 post shares, 10 ad clicks

Fans: 61 page likes, 19 comments, 34 post likes, 5 post shares, 19 ad clicks

Email List: 36 page likes, 10 comments, 18 post likes, 3 post shares, 10 ad clicks

Social Media Examiner Interest: 60 page likes, 16 comments, 29 post likes, 5 post shares, 15 ad clicks

Advertising Target Group: 63 page likes, 34 comments, 43 post likes, 12 post shares, 28 ad clicks

Device Users

Website Visitors: 92% Desktop and Mobile, 9% Android

Fans: 89% Desktop and Mobile, 13% Android

Email List: N/A (no data)

Social Media Examiner Interest: 83% Desktop and Mobile, 15% Android

Advertising Target Group: 86% Desktop and Mobile, 12% Android

Household Income (US Only)

Website Visitors: Under $75k (all below average), Over $75k (most above average)

Fans: Under $75k (all below average), Over $75k (all above average)

Email List: N/A (no data)

Social Media Examiner Interest: Under $100k (at or below average); $100k+ (all above average)

Advertising Target Group: Under $125k (all below average); $125k+ (all above average)

Spending Methods

Website Visitors: 80% Primarily Credit Card

Fans: 67% Primarily Credit Card

Email List: N/A (no data)

Social Media Examiner Interest: 72% Primarily Credit Card

Advertising Target Group: 55% Primarily Credit Card

Purchase Behavior

Website Visitors: 10% Business Purchases

Fans: 14% Business Purchases

Email List: N/A (no data)

Social Media Examiner Interest: 15% Business Purchases

Advertising Target Group: 15% Business Purchases

What We Learned

Now that we’ve compared each audience, what does this information tell us?

1. My audiences (fans, website visitors and email list) are all quite similar. This shouldn’t be a shock, but it’s good to confirm this. There are minor variances, but much of it is easy to explain. For example, my most active audience on Facebook is my fans. That shouldn’t be surprising.

2. Social Media Examiner and the advertising target group are different demos than my own. My audience is about 60% men while the Social Media Examiner interest is 53% and the advertising target group is 71% women. BIG DIFFERENCE!

3. The advertising target group has a different set of page likes. These people like Tony Robbins, Female Entrepreneur Association and Melanie Duncan. This is not my target demo.

Bottom line: There’s no substitute for your own audience. If I’m going to stray away from my fans, website visitors and email list, there are a couple of things I should consider.

First, I could technically target Social Media Examiner or that group of interests, but I may want to focus on men only.

Second, I should probably dig a bit more to find interests that better align with my own audiences.

The truth is that I almost never target people outside of my own audiences. This is an advantage to having a large pool of people connected to you to work with.

Learn How to Master Audience Insights

On October 5, I will be conducting a live, virtual workshop that will dig even deeper into Audience Insights and how you can use it to improve your marketing. The workshop will be two hours long: The first hour will cover Audience Insights while the second will cover Ad Reports. If you haven’t done so yet, register now!

My private community in the Power Hitters Club actually get access to this workshop for free. It’s one of the many perks! Go here to learn more about the PHC.

Your Turn

Go ahead and break down your audiences using Audience Insights. What did you learn?

Let me know in the comments below!