- Facebook Audience Insights went away,
but Facebook told us, don't worry, don't worry.
We're going to put that information
in Business Suite Insights,
and when Business Suite Insights came along,
they were nowhere to be seen.
But, what's this?
Mrs Hat was browsing through
her Business Suite Insights and something appeared.
What is this potential audience tab?
This brand new addition to Facebook Business Suite Insights
does do some of the things the Audience Insights used to
and I'm going to show you around.
I'm going to show you what you can do with it
and what you can't do with it
that you were able to do with Audience Insights.
Let's start by looking at what it does show you.
Under that potential audience tab,
it tells you you've got a potential audience of
well, it's going to vary, but for me, it's 3,500,000 people
and it says that this is including
people on Facebook and Instagram in Ireland, the country,
and two other filters selected.
And if I hover, I can see what those filters are,
so all genders, age 18 to 65.
And this gives me kind of a generic picture
of the people in Ireland on Facebook.
If I scroll down,
I can see their age groups,
whether they're male or female and where they live,
I can also see the top pages for Ireland.
So we've got things like Lidl and Penney's
and LADbible, and Aldi and RTE.
So this is a good gauge of
what's popular in general with people in Ireland
who use Facebook or Instagram.
Let's scroll back to the top.
What's interesting is this has given me data
for people on Facebook and Instagram.
As far as we were aware,
Audience Insights only gave you information
of people who were on Facebook.
Now here's the fun bit: filters.
If I click into filter,
this has given me some of the options
that I used to get on Audience Insights.
So you can see,
I can filter by location,
maybe instead of Ireland, I want the United Kingdom.
And you can see that the audience has gone to 50 million.
I could change my age group.
So for me, my age starts around 34
and I'm interested in people maybe
up to around the age of 60.
Now we can see my audience has gone down to 22 million.
I can choose a gender, 12 million,
and I can choose interests.
So this is where the fun bit is.
This is where this becomes most like Audience Insights.
If I type in entrepreneur, let's see what happens.
We'll go for entrepreneurship.
We're down to three million,
which is a much better size of an audience.
Let's get rid of that gender for a moment
and see the gender split.
So 35 to 44,
still mostly women in that age group and mostly women here.
So that's interesting.
I can see my top cities,
which include London right at the top,
and goes all the way down to Nottingham.
If I scroll down again,
it's not showing me the top pages
and I'm not quite sure why that is.
Let's get rid of this age filter
and see, does that make a difference?
And now we can see it's back,
and again, we've got the big pages on Facebook.
We've got LADbible,
we've got Amazon, we've got UNILAD,
Tasty, BBC News, Facebook app, which is interesting, right?
So here we can see the sort of pages
that they're interested in.
Let's see if I get rid of entrepreneurship,
how much that changes.
And yeah, look, it's almost exactly the same,
and this, I think, is where this isn't as good
as Audience Insights,
because the nice thing about Audience Insights
is it would give you a real deep dive
into some of the more interesting
pages and interests that people would have.
One thing I do like is if you click on this export button,
you have the option to export this data,
which will make it easy to share with customers.
So I can export it as an image,
which would make it really handy to slot into presentations.
I can download it as a .CSV file,
which I can open in Excel,
or I can export it as a PDF.
And this is better than Audience Insights.
Audience Insights didn't use to give us that option.
Click back into filter,
and you can see once I've added all my pieces,
so I'm going to put entrepreneurship back in.
I can click on create audience,
give it a name and it should appear in my ads manager.
I can also just click on create ad
and that brings me into my ads manager,
but weirdly, the wrong one.
It's bringing me into my personal ads manager,
rather than my business ads manager,
and there's nothing happening here to do with that audience.
So I find it slightly weird
that it's giving me that option.
Maybe that is still in development.
(intense music)
One thing that I used to love about Audience Insights
is that I could plug in some interests
like entrepreneurship or female entrepreneurship,
and it would stop changing
and it would offer me up new interests that they may have
and it would offer me up random locations in small towns
where hubs of these people
that were interested in that would reside.
Now, it just shows me big pages like LADBible
and amazon.co.uk.
It hasn't got that full suite of interests
and location-wise,
it is almost impossible to knock London off that top spot.
Why is this the case?
Is it because Facebook no longer have access to that data
because of privacy updates,
because of things like the Apple iOS 14 update?
They just don't know that much
about their audiences anymore.
There's no hint of the devices that my audience uses.
So I can't find out how many people
are actually iPhone users or Android users,
which could really help
when I'm measuring the results of my ads.
There's also a whole missing section about
what people do on Facebook.
I like to be able to see were the people I was targeting
likely to click ads?
Were the people I was targeting liking Facebook pages,
engaging with content on Facebook?
And the reason this has disappeared isn't clear because
surely Facebook still knows what people
are doing on Facebook.
That's not data they're gathering from somewhere else.
And then there's the big one,
the big thing that is missing
is the ability to analyze your own audience in this way.
I can see the demographic information.
I can't see what Facebook pages they like,
what their interests are,
like I could in Audience Insights.
As you can see, Business Suite Insights
are still a long way from what Audience Insights used to be.
Why is this?
Well, as I've said already,
it could be because of all those privacy updates.
It has to be, because I can't see
why Facebook would want to limit this tool
that helps us create better performing ads
that would make us more likely to create Facebook ads.
As soon as there's an update, I'll let you know.
So, don't forget to subscribe to the channel.