Facebook hopes marketers like Audience Insights

Marketer’s have another reason to like Facebook, and it’s called Audience Insights.

In keeping with its staggering release of new tools and upgrades to existing programs over the last three months, and with chief Mark Zuckerberg swearing his loyalty to the mobile space, Facebook today has launched a new program that enables marketers to gain invaluable intel on their audiences.

Think “geography, demographics, purchase behavior, and more,” according to Facebook’s blog post announcing the launch.

Facebook is letting the post speak for itself. A spokesperson told VentureBeat that the network wasn’t issuing statements on Audience Insights. So, we’ve got little insight from the social media kingpins on this one. At least from a talking head.

And Facebook made it clear it has built Audience Insights with privacy in mind. This is logical since it’s one of the world’s biggest repositories of user data, anyway. It is this data, of course, that Facebook is building into the program to help marketers better see who to target.

According to Facebook:

“Say you want to raise awareness for your women’s luxury fashion brand, and you sell your products in-store. You’d want to know how many people on Facebook live near your stores, as well as their interests, their past purchase behavior and how they tend to shop (online vs. in-store). Using Audience Insights, you can get aggregate and anonymous information such as:

Demographics: Age and gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role and household size

Page likes: The top Pages people like in different categories, like women’s apparel or sport

Location and language: Where do people live, and what languages do they speak

Facebook usage: How frequently are people in your target audience logging onto Facebook and what device(s) they are using when they log on

Purchases activity: Past purchase behavior (i.e., heavy buyers of women’s apparel) and purchase methods (i.e., in-store, online)”

Personal data is what marketers want in order to tailor ad campaigns down to the color of your finger polish and what kind of hamburger meat you prefer: processed or free range?

Audience Insights is available now in conjunction with the company’s Ads Manager program. Facebook said it’s releasing a version available to marketers in the States first and then globally over the next few months.

In its blog post, Facebook stressed that information available to marketers using Audience Insights focuses on groups of people, not individuals. As Facebook said:

“This allows marketers to view aggregate and anonymous insights while keeping people’s personal information private.”

With over 1 billion users, it is, quite simply, a marketer’s dream.