How to Use Audience Insights to Refine Your Facebook Targeting

Published on 30.11.2025 by Chizoba T

While user demographics on Facebook have changed in recent years, the platform remains the most popular social media site, with over 3 billion active monthly users. With such a vast audience, you want to ensure that your Facebook ads target the right audience, thereby avoiding wasted ad spend. 

If your ads are reaching too broad an audience, it will dilute your message and result in a lower conversion. The good news is that you can use Facebook analytics tools to determine the most engaged segment of your audience, and use the data to optimize your campaign using strategic audience testing. This article will show you how to utilize audience insights to refine your Facebook targeting more effectively. 

Why Your Facebook Audience Matters

The most apparent benefit of understanding your Facebook target audience is that it will save you money. Additionally, it can serve as a guide for your social media strategy. When you implement the insights gained from Facebook targeting, you can create impactful campaigns that receive high engagement and result in a higher ROI. It can be an essential step for creating a Facebook video ad that converts.

According to statistics, as of October 2025, 43.5% of Facebook users were female, and 53% of all Facebook users were aged between 18 and 35. However, the platform remains popular among older audiences, as studies show it’s the most popular among Baby Boomers and Gen X.

These numbers demonstrate that you can utilize audience data to gain critical insights into your current audience, enabling you to pinpoint your target audience. With the right audience insights data, you can make more informed and customer-centric decisions that will result in high-impact campaigns, improved advertising efforts, and better partnerships with creators.

How to Get Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook allows you to view the audience insights in two different ways. If you have a business account, you can see your organic audience data, such as:

  • The people who like your page are divided by their location and gender.
  • Total follower count
  • Engagement metrics and reach.

To see your business profile data, go to the Meta Business Suite and click Insights. This will provide you with insights into the general performance of your account. You can then click on Audience. This will display the data of your followers on Facebook and Instagram, including the top countries and cities they originate from.

When looking at the Audience tab, you will see two different options:

  • Current audience. These are the people who are connected to your business in any way, whether it's following your Instagram profile or page, or if they have engaged with your ads or content.
  • Potential audience. These people are yet to connect with your business, but may have an interest in your brand. This can be a good insight to help you identify new customers to target because they share the same characteristics as your current audience or any other criteria you define.

Another way to access your audience data is by running an ad campaign. This will provide organic data on :

  • Age.
  • Device usage.
  • Content preference (top-performing videos and posts).

To view this data, you can go to the Meta Ads Manager and use the Audience tabs and Ads reporting under the main navigation. You can also explore the performance of your Facebook ad campaign with different audience types.

Understanding the Different Types of Facebook Audiences

When running a Facebook ad campaign, you can target four different audiences to reach your target audience. Each of these audiences offers a unique way to connect with potential customers. By understanding how to leverage these audiences, you can drastically improve your campaign performance. The four audiences are:

New Audiences

The default Facebook setting allows you to connect with new audiences. These are the new customers who are yet to interact with the brand. You can refine the audience by choosing categories:

  • Location, such as city and country.
  • Demographic factors, such as educational life events and financial status. 
  • Interests, such as fitness and leisure, and family and relationships. 
  • Behaviors, such as the use of mobile devices. 

Custom Audiences

Through custom audiences, you can connect with an audience that already has an interest in your brand. This utilizes the identifier information that you have collected about your customers, such as their phone number, email address, and address, which you have provided to Meta. This audience could have engaged with your brand in different ways, such as : 

  • Engaging with your content.
  • Visiting your site.
  • Installed your app.
  • Bought a product recently.
  • In your email list.

Lookalike Audiences

This refers to the audiences that have similar characteristics to your audience, but have yet to patronize or interact with your brand. Facebook gives you an option to create lookalike audiences. Once you have a source, the tool will automatically generate audience segments that look like your ideal customers. You will also choose a percentage of which you would like your new audience to match the source audience. 

When you have look-alike audiences, they will save you time compared to when you start from scratch. This is so because you can use the same audiences you used in your most successful campaigns or content. 

Saved Audiences

Facebook allows you to save the custom audiences you have made for your future use. However, you shouldn't forget to save the audience for your future use. When doing that, you can retrieve the location each time. 

How to Use Facebook Audience Insights

Through Facebook Audience Insights, you can get insights into your ideal customers and how to target them well. Here are the steps to follow when using the tool and the data to look for more actionable insights:

Choose Your Ideal Audiences

When using Facebook audience insights, start by choosing the audience you want to view the content for. You will have two options: 

  • Facebook users. This refers to all Facebook users. This data can provide a more general overview of the broad interests, so use filters to narrow this data. 
  • Those with connections to your page. These are the people who either follow or like your Facebook page. This option will provide important insights into your current audiences to market better to them. 

Filter Your Audience

After getting insights into your audience, you can start filtering it for a more detailed look. Let's assume you want to reach those with connections to your Facebook page (we will focus on it for the rest of this article). This option will be helpful as it will provide you with insights into people with an interest in your brand. 

Audience Filtering

When using Facebook Audience Insights, you can filter using three characteristics:

Age and Gender

Your first focus in the filter should be on the age and the gender. Select an age range and see if you are attracting these prospects in your filter. Alternatively, you can filter according to genre. For instance, you can compare the number of males patronizing your business to the number of females.  

Interest

Another filter option for Facebook audience targeting is based on interest. This offers you good insights into the area where your target audience is interested. You can also use this filter to determine if there is a consistent interest in the people who follow your page. The interests are grouped in different categories, such as: 

  • Food and drinks.
  • Shopping and fashion.
  • Family and relationship.
  • Fitness and wellness.

Location

Facebook also allows you to filter your target audience by location, including country, region, and city. Through the filter option, you can focus on reaching a particular city or state. If your business only attracts local traffic, you can then concentrate on nearby towns to learn more about the people in those areas. 

These three filters are available in Facebook Ad Insights. However, it also contains more filter options to refine your audience further, using metrics such as age, occupation, relationship status, political affiliation, parental status, and live events. This can help you gain better insights into your page's followers, allowing you to have a deeper understanding of them.

Check Engagement Details

Now you need to use the filters set earlier to determine your audience interactions and behaviors on Facebook. At the top of the Audience Insights page, you will see this information broken down into:

  • Page likes.
  • Activity.
  • Location.

Location

The location can be a valuable element in helping you understand your audience better. Remember that the filters you choose in the previous steps will determine the data you will see. Therefore, if you use a location filter, you will be provided with the data for that location. That means you will get insights into the people in those cities who interacted with your business.

After checking the cities, if you realize that the people in the location aren't engaging with your page, you need to dig deeper into where your audience is coming from. It may also be a good indicator that you need to adjust your marketing strategy to better appeal to the people in that city. 

Page Likes

Page likes are also a valuable way to analyze your target audience and gain a deeper understanding of their interests. For instance, you can find that many people in your target audience are interested in baseball. You can, therefore, consider getting involved in a baseball tournament to connect better with your target audience. 

When you understand who your target audience is, you can gain a clearer picture of their interests and create a more effective marketing strategy.  

Activity

The Facebook ad insights will also provide insights into activity, which is basically how your target audience interacts with Facebook. It will show you metrics such as the page they visited, the search query, the comment, the shared post, the ads they clicked, or the promotion they showed interest in. You will also see the devices the target audience uses, which can help you tailor your marketing according to the brands or device type. This information can be key to creating an effective marketing strategy and getting better results for your business. 

In Conclusion

Facebook audience insights can provide you with tons of data to help you better understand your audience. It will give you data on your audience's behaviors, interests, and demographics, which can be key to improving your marketing. 

You can use these insights to create highly relevant content, improve your ad targeting, and optimize your campaign, which can lead to a more effective ad strategy and a higher ROI. If you are getting started with Facebook Audience Insights, our guide will prove helpful. You can read our detailed guide on effectively A/B testing Facebook ads.