Facebook Audience Insights: The Ultimate Insight
So now you might be wondering what tools you can use to measure the success of your Facebook Ad campaign.
Facebook Audience Insights is a tool native to Facebook that allows you to learn more about audience engagement and performance metrics from paid campaign activity in order to deliver meaningful and targeted messages to people.
Facebook Audience Insights aggregates anonymous information about your ad performance such as:
- Demographics: age, gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role.
- Page Likes: Top Pages people like in different categories.
- Location: top towns/cities, countries, language.
- Activity: frequency of logging in and through which device.
- Household: income, ownership, size, market value, spending methods.
- Purchase: retail spending, online purchases, purchase behaviour.
The information in Audience Insights is aggregated from three different groups of people:
- 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).
So where within the Facebook platform do you go to manage your ads? Facebook’s Ads Manager is a self-serve tool where advertisers can launch and manage their own ad campaigns, define objectives, targeting & placements, and upload the creative they wish to run. Ads Manager is the starting point to building campaigns and setting campaigns live on the platform.
Ads Manager offers many features and settings which include: Marketing Objectives, Campaign Structures & Planning, Ad Creation & Management, Assets Management, Ads Reporting, Billing & Payment Methods.
Marketing Objectives
these are the various brand and direct response approaches an advertiser can take and can be found under the ‘Create & Manage’ tab.
Campaign Structures & Planning
These are the Campaign, Ad Set and Ad levels that allow you to set the right Objective, Targeting and Creative. This can be found under the ‘Create & Manage’ tab.
Ad Creation & Management
This is the create flow that lets you build ads across the three layers. This can be found under the ‘Create & Manage’ tab.
Assets Management
This is a space that holds your pixels, audiences, product catalogues and more. This can be found under the ‘Assets’ tab.
Ads Reporting
This is the interface that allows you to analyze the performance of all campaigns. This can be found under the ‘Measure & Report’ tab.
Billing & Payment Methods
Here you can add new payment methods, download invoices and set spending limits. This can be found under the ‘Settings’ tab.
Now that you know how to navigate Facebook’s Ads Manager, let’s discuss the best practices to apply to get the most out of your campaigns:
- It is vital to align your marketing objectives when selecting them on Ads Manager with the objectives of the business. If your job is to grow the brand or drive new customers, reach and awareness objectives should be set. For example, if you are set to get new sign ups, select Lead Generation.
2. Always structure your campaign to the audience you select and the desired outcome. If you are reaching out to new customers, be sure to exclude existing customers in targeting.
3. Strong, impactful copy, imagery, and video should be provided for the campaign. The success of the campaign is strongly influenced by the quality of the creative and it’s relevancy to the target audience.
4. As you have seen, there are many ways and permutations with which to reach out to audiences on Facebook platforms. Be sure to build precise targeting clusters.
5. There are a few ways to bid on advertising, we will discuss those later in the module.
6. A “test, learn and scale” approach is the best way in which to approach advertising in general, but particularly on Facebook. It is important to frequently check the performance of campaigns against metrics that matter to you. Analyze what works and what doesn’t. Whatever works well, be sure to invest more in it so you can scale success.
Navigating Ads Manager is really quite simple, it just looks daunting because the tool is so comprehensive. Check out the tutorial in the resources section to see how to create and edit a campaign, ad set and ad in Ads Manager, and also how to turn them on and off!
In addition to Ads Manager, Facebook offers Power Editor which is a tool designed for larger advertisers who need to create lots of ads at once and have precise control of their campaigns.
The functionality and layout of Power Editor allows marketers to see more live campaigns than Ads Manager and makes the management of bulk ads, individual ads, ads sets and multiple campaigns easier with easy tab navigation and high-level metrics such as results, reach, and spend.
Now, we will walk through how Facebook Ad Auctions are designed to bring relevant content to people while providing maximum value for your advertising budget.
First, a ‘total value’ is assigned to every ad competing in the auction, your ad competes with others, and the one with the highest total value wins the auction. The ‘total value’ number is based on:
- The amount you have bid
- The likelihood of your ad leading to your desired outcome
- The quality of your ad
- The relevance of your ad to a potential viewer
To make sure your ad is competitive, you’ll need to choose an objective that aligns with your business goal. Then, bid the maximum amount the ad is worth to your business. Make sure you set the budget and bid on your ad type so you’re likely to capture at least a few of your desired actions each day. Low bids tend to result in slow delivery to a small percentage of the selected audience. High bids tend to result in speedy delivery to a large percentage of the audience, which is why bidding the maximum amount is recommended.
To win a spot in an ad auction, the ad has to have the highest “total value.” The total value isn’t how much an advertiser is willing to pay to show their ad. It’s a combination of the following three factors:
Advertiser Bid (Automatic & Manual)
An automatic bid let us the system optimize bid amounts for you, whereas with manual you are instructing the system what bid level you want to go for e.g. €3 per website click.
Ad Quality & Relevance
For this second factor, targeting and quality of creative are important to get right in order to win the auction.
Estimated Action Rates
The system estimates the likelihood of an audience reacting positively or negatively to the ad.
Facebook also gives ads a Relevance score from 1-10 that is calculated differently depending on the objective set, based on positive and negative feedback the system expects from the people seeing it, and also how the ad is performing. Only set the ads live that have high relevance scores.
There are three key components to success when planning or using an existing ad campaign on the Facebook platform:
Creative
The relevance of the creative visuals and copy is vital to the success of the campaign. If the messaging doesn’t suit the audience, very few will react positively and the ads system will regard the ad as not interesting for the audience – meaning delivery will get more expensive.
Targeting
Selecting the right audience for your product offering is also vital.
Bidding
As mentioned earlier, when you bid for value you get the optimum delivery for your ads.
Let’s now walk through one of Facebook’s more unique ad types –Canvas. Facebook Canvas is an immersive and expressive mobile ad experience that businesses can leverage to tell their stories and showcase their products. Canvas enables you to shorten the distance between your message and the customer. It loads instantly, is mobile-optimized and is designed to capture complete attention of your audience. Canvas ads let people watch engaging videos and photos, swipe through carousels, tilt to pan, and engage with lifestyle images with tagged products – all in a single ad.
To create a Canvas ad, use Facebook Canvas Builder and the Canvas management tools within your page’s Publishing Tools. Marketers can select various components such as video, text and headers to include in their Canvas. It is recommended that marketers test and learn which components work best with each other, especially in relation to their marketing objectives.
Although Canvas ads still follow the same three stages of the Buyer’s Journey, the ad objectives for Canvas differ from the other Facebook ad types.
- For Awareness, the objective options remain as Brand Awareness and Reach.
- For Consideration, only Traffic, Engagement, Video Views are available.
- And for Conversion, only Conversions can be selected as an objective.
The Canvas creation process starts with three default components: header, photo and CTA button. You can move these components using the arrows at the top right of each component’s box. You can also use the trashcan icon to delete a component from your Canvas (and you always have the option to add it back). There are additional Canvas components available which include: carousel, text block, and video.
A finished Canvas has its own URL that can also be used within a Facebook Ad for mobile News Feed.
It’s worth noting that Canvas also has unique reporting metrics to other formats. The added metrics Canvas has are:
Canvas View Duration
The average total time, in seconds, that people spent viewing a Facebook Canvas.
Canvas View Percentage
The average percentage of the Facebook Canvas that people saw.
Link Clicks
The number of clicks on links to select destinations or experiences, on or off Facebook-owned properties.
Canvas Component Duration Percentage
The average percentage of time spent viewing each component of a Facebook Canvas.
Outbound Clicks
The number of clicks on links that take people off Facebook-owned properties.
The following are the metrics you can report on within Ads Manager and each report can be configured by date range, account, campaign or individual ad.
Responder Demographics
These reports show which users are viewing/interacting with the ad.
Responder Profile
These reports show user interests, ranks and clickers.
Placement Based Metrics
This shows the breakdown of results by placement (ex: Facebook desktop News Feed, Instagram mobile News Feed) where your ad was shown.
Facebook Page Actions
These reports show Pages action activity that happens as a result of your ad. This include: Post Engagement, Page Likes, Check-ins, Page Mentions, Page Tab Views, and Event Responses.
Video Actions
This report shows engagements (views, likes, comments, and shares), retention, and clicks (clicks to play, link clicks, and other clicks) on your video.
Website Conversions
This report measures ads’ ability to drive online conversions, offline sales and in-store visits (via a pixel). This includes: Website Conversions, Website Checkouts (Conversion Tracking Pixel), Website Registrations (Conversion Tracking Pixel), Website Leads (Conversion Tracking Pixel), Website Key Page Views (Conversion Tracking Pixel), Website Adds to Cart (Conversion Tracking Pixel) and other website conversions.
Cross-Device
To enable the cross-device reports, you need to install the Facebook pixel on your mobile and desktop websites and select the Facebook pixel or App Events in your ads. If you’re using the Facebook SDK, you can also install the Facebook SDK into your mobile app and configure the app events.
App Actions
This report measures app actions including; Desktop and Mobile App Installs, Desktop App Engagement, Desktop App Story Engagement, Desktop App Uses, Credit Spends, Mobile App Sessions, Mobile App Registrations Completed, Mobile App Content Views, Mobile App Searches, Mobile App Ratings Submitted, Mobile App Tutorials Completed, Mobile App Adds to Cart, Mobile App Adds to Wishlist, Mobile App Checkouts Initiated, Mobile App Adds of Payment Info, Mobile App Purchases, Mobile App Levels Completed, Mobile App Achievements Unlocked, Mobile App Credits Spent and more.
Now tell us your own side of this story.
We would also like to hear what you feel about the topic we discussed today. Your feedback is very important to us. Feel free to drop your comments and recommendations. If you have a contrary opinion, you can drop that too.
You can also join our Facebook Page CRMNigeria for more updates. You can do that by clicking on the link or searching for our page on Facebook.
You can also join our WhatsApp Group Here.
Work from Home. Work for PropellerAds.
Finding the right Long-tail Keywords? Start your journey here.