How to Use the Facebook Audience Profile to Sharpen Targeting

You create a brilliant ad, your ad creatives are on point, your copy is tight… but the results just don’t add up.

More often than not, it’s not your ad that’s the problem. It’s who you’re showing it to.

That’s why you need to really understand your Facebook audience profile.

If you’ve ever wondered:

• What exactly does ‘audience profile’ even mean on Facebook?
• Am I targeting the right people?
• What does a strong audience profile actually look like?
• How can I use Facebook’s tools to learn more about the people I’m reaching?

…you’re in the right place.

We’ll walk you through the Facebook audience profile, show you where to find it, how to interpret the data, and how to use those insights to tighten up your targeting, so you’re not just throwing money at the algorithm and hoping for the best.

Where to view Facebook audience profile data

Meta changed things around in 2021. What used to be called 'Facebook Audience Insights' is now part of Meta Business Suite under a tool simply called 'Insights'. 

It’s still just as useful. In fact, it now combines audience data from both Facebook and Instagram.

Here’s how to find it:

• Make sure you have a Facebook Page linked to your Meta Business account
• Then, head over to business.facebook.com
• From the left-hand menu, click on 'Insights'
• Then click on the 'Audience' tab

If you’re already logged into your Meta Business Suite, you can also jump straight to the audience insights page using this link> Audience-insights

You’ll now be able to see your current audience data and your potential audience data. 

These two sections give you insights to understand who you're currently reaching and who else you could be reaching if you adjusted your targeting.

We'll break down both next.

Current audience profile

Once you're inside the 'Audience' section of Meta Insights, the first thing you'll see is a snapshot of your current audience.

This includes key details like:

• Number of followers
• Age and gender distribution
• Top cities and countries
• Page growth trends (follows, unfollows, returning views)

A snapshot of your current audience.

This data tells you who's seeing and responding to your content on Facebook, not just who you think you're targeting.

As a media buyer, this insight is super helpful when launching a new Facebook campaign. 

If your data shows that your page skews heavily toward women aged 25 to 34 in New York or Brussels, you can rework your messaging, visuals, and even your offer around what matches that specific group. This way, you’ll be speaking your audience's language.

There’s also a ‘Trends’ section, which shows how your audience is behaving over time and shows you data such as:

• What days and times they are most active
• Whether your follower count is going up or down
• How engaged your audience is

A snapshot of the ‘Trends’ section

If you’re planning a campaign, this data, although a bit surface level, tells you when to publish, what patterns to monitor, and where you might be losing people.

Overall, your current audience profile helps you level your strategy in key audience demographics, which you can supplement with data from other sources such as your website, store, or other social media platforms. 

Understanding the potential audience insights

Your current audience shows you who you're already reaching. But what if you're trying to scale? What if you want to reach new people who are likely to care about your offer but haven’t seen it yet?

Then you need to analyze the Potential Audience data.

Potential Facebook audience profile

This section gives you a broader view of people who match your targeting filters, even if they’ve never interacted with your Page. You’ll see:

• Estimated audience size
• Age and gender breakdown
• The top countries and cities where they are most likely to live
• Pages this audience commonly engages with

These insights are more of a blueprint for who your future customers could be. When you’re planning a prospecting campaign, this data will help you make smarter decisions about who to target and why.

For example, let’s say you run a women’s fashion brand and are launching a new line of summer dresses. You want to reach women in the US who love casual style and follow other fashion-forward brands. In that case, you’d go into Potential Audience, apply filters such as:

• Location: United States
• Gender: Women
• Age range: 25–45
• Interests: Dresses, casual wear, Zara, H&M

Potential audience with the filters on

As you set these filters, Meta updates the graphs automatically to show you where this audience is located, which cities they’re most active in, and what pages they’re already following.

You can also compare different audience segments. 

For instance, how does an audience interested in fast fashion differ from one interested in sustainable clothing? 

This kind of segmentation will enable you to create different angles for different ad sets, so you're not saying the same thing to everyone.

And when you’re happy with a segment, you can take the next step by saving it as a new audience. 

However, note that even though the Facebook audience profile is quite detailed, you still require a lot more market research to understand and target your audience beyond the demographics. 

Creating a new audience based on potential audience insights

Once you’ve explored your potential audience and found a segment that feels like a strong fit, it’s time to create a new audience you can actually use in Ads Manager.

You’ll see the ‘Create Audience’ button after applying your filters. But before you hit it, pause and double-check:

• Is this audience size realistic for your budget?
• Are your filters too broad or too niche?

The goal in this case isn’t to create a perfect audience. It’s to create a testable one that is specific enough to be relevant but flexible enough to gather learnings from.

Let’s assume you filtered for women in the US, aged 25 to 45, who are interested in sustainable fashion. You noticed they’re mostly located in California, New York, and Texas, and they follow brands such as Everlane and Reformation. That’s a great foundation for a prospecting audience.

When you hit ‘Create Audience’, you’ll give it a name (for example: ‘US Women 25–45 – Eco Fashion’) and save it to your Meta account. From there, it becomes available inside Ads Manager, where you can:

• Use it as a cold audience for prospecting
• Pair it with specific creatives based on the interests you selected
• A/B test it against other segments
• Build lookalike audiences from it

This process will help you build audience layers based on patterns, behavior, geography, and brand affinities, and increase your chances of showing up to the relevant target audience. 

You can always come back, adjust the filters, compare results, and create multiple saved audiences based on different goals.

How to use Facebook audience insights

You’ve seen the data, filtered through demographics, and even saved a custom segment. The question is, now what?

Below are #4 ways you can use Facebook audience profile insights to improve your campaigns:

1. Refine your targeting
   Before you launch a new audience segment, take time to explore both your current and potential audience data. The gender information, top cities, and interest clusters can give you a good clue about who’s already engaging with your content.
2. Adjust your creatives to match on-the-ground audience interests
   Use the top pages they follow, the language trends based on location, and even the common age brackets to customize your ad visuals, tone, and offers so your content feels more familiar and relevant to the people seeing it.
3. Improve campaign timing with behavioral trends
   If Meta Insights shows that your followers are most active on Tuesday evenings or that engagement spikes over the weekend, you have your posting window. There’s now no need to guess or follow generic best times to post advice.
4. Build smarter lookalike audiences
   When you've identified a well-performing audience segment, use that as a seed for creating lookalikes. Because your original audience was built with interest, location, and behavior filters, your lookalike pool ends up being more qualified, not just demographically similar but contextually relevant too.

FAQs

Final thoughts

Your Facebook target audience is one of the most significant determinants of whether your Facebook ad campaign succeeds or flops. 

Fortunately, the Facebook Audience Profile gives you an excellent starting point to understand your audience and their age, interests, and the cities they’re most active in.

However, that shouldn’t be the end of your search. 

Pair these audience insights with other Facebook Ads Spy tools that often include the demographics and psychographics data of winning ads.

And when you're ready to turn that insight into high-performing creatives, Cropink can help you build enriched Facebook Catalog ads that speak directly to the people who care about your solutions. 

Book a free demo today to see how we can help!

Sources

1. Meta Business Help Center. How do I view audience insights in Meta Business Suite?
2. Meta Business Help Center.  Create an audience from Meta Business Suite Insights.