One of the main ingredients to a successful Facebook advertising is better targeting techniques and you can optimize your ad targeting by understanding the profile of your target audience, especially how they think and behave. The more customer insights you uncover, the better equipped you are to convey meaningful messages to your audience.

Facebook's Audience Insights tool provides an easy access to analyze your customer data in an aggregated view of their geography, demographics, purchase behavior, and more. Basically, you can analyze data from the following sources:

• Everyone on Facebook: all Facebook users
• People connected to your page: your page's fans
• A Custom Audience: your existing customers which we have discussed earlier in the Custom Audience Targeting section.

For better analysis, we recommend that you start with your existing customers. If you have a list of newsletter subscribers or all of your customers who've purchased from your store, upload them using the Custom Audience feature of the Ads Manager (steps can be found in the Custom Audience Targeting). Once completed, you are ready to use Audience Insights.

When you first open Audience Insights, you will be prompted to select your audience source. For this case, select 'A Custom Audience'.

The good thing about the tool is it allows you to deep-dive your audience data to tell you exactly who they are, what they have been doing, and what degree of relationship you have with them on Facebook. Here are the things you can see:

a. Demographics: Age and gender, lifestyle, relationship status, education level, and job title.

b. Page Likes: Top page categories they like, and the Facebook pages they like.

c. Location: What cities and countries your audience lives, and the languages they speak

d. Activity: The frequency of your audience actions such as pages liked, comments, posts liked, promotions redeemed, and ads clicked. The devices they are using to log on.

e. Household: Household income, home ownership, household size, home market value, and spending methods.

f. Purchase: Retail spending, online purchases, purchase behavior, and automotive purchases.

The Audience Insights tool is so powerful that it directs you to the types of audience you need to start targeting. It will help you identify your buyer persona which is a representation of your ideal customer based on the analysis of your existing customers.

You can also craft better content marketing ideas based on their behavior and profile. Say, for example, all of my existing customers are women between the ages of 18-24 and have been liking Office Supplies and Health/Beauty pages.

Based on these audience insights, I can tweak my ad design to a more feminine tone. If I am a multi-product category online store, I can display ads of my office supplies and health/beauty products. The insights will be your tool to open endless possibilities to craft a better targeted Facebook ads.