Your very first Facebook ad (or 10th Facebook ad) has completed its run. You can see the total amount spent, dates that the ad campaign ran, and count of and price per action (Link Clicks, Landing Page Views, Video Views, etc), but can you see other types of data about your ad campaigns? Like where the actions on your ad campaign came from and who the people are who engaged with your ad?

And what about other actions on the ad like things you didn’t necessarily optimize for?

The good news is there’s a lot of hidden ad performance data available inside your Ads Manager dashboard. You just need to know where to look.

How to See your Facebook Ad Performance Data Breakdowns

The Facebook Ads Manager dashboard has a default view. And that default view includes the default columns of data you see when you open your Ads Manager. But you have lots of ways to dig further into that data as well as customize the columns of the data you are viewing.

Enter: The Performance and Breakdown drop-down menus seen on the right side of your Ads Manager dashboard.

Clicking on either of these two drop-down menus reveals loads of ways to break down your ad campaign data so much further than the way the data is displayed your Ads Dashboard’s default view.

Here’s a look at what’s included under the Performance menu:

And here’s a look at what’s included under the Breakdown menu:

Just a quick glance at the two menus above shows you how many ways you can look at the data. Clicking on each one is the best way to understand what that breakdown of the data means and if it’s relevant to you. To highlight a few common ways to breakdown the data, let’s first start with the Performance drop-down menu.

Access Performance and Clicks Data from your Facebook Ads

Choosing to add Performance and Clicks data to your reporting will insert a handful of new columns that shows unique and total counts for link clicks, landing page views, and the costs for each. Your CPM, too.

Customize your Columns in Facebook Ads Manager

Near the bottom of the Performance drop-down menu, you’ll find the Customize Columns option. When you click on it, you’ll have the ability to add or remove every type of data point Facebook provides for its ads. On the right side, you can also drag and drop data points/columns into whatever order you’d like for your reporting view. You can save any customizations you make as a preset, too.

Within the Customize Columns section is how you can add other conversion events to your data reporting view. One challenge small business owners face with running conversion ads relates to small audience sizes and/or small budgets. Facebook recommends at least 50 conversions a week from the same campaign before it’s going to know who the right Facebook users are who are likely to convert for you. And if you can’t get enough conversions, Facebook may have difficulty optimizing your conversion ad as well as it otherwise would be able to. So when this happens, it’s advisable for small business owners to optimize for landing page views, which is much more doable. That way you at least know you are optimizing on getting people to your landing page, and it’s likely that some of them will convert for you even though you aren’t running a conversion ad. Adding in any standard event or custom conversion data points to your reporting will show you how many conversions you got on ads that weren’t set up as conversion ads.

Next, let’s look at what Facebook ads data is available from the Breakdown drop-down menu.

Access Age, Gender, and Location Data from your Facebook Ads

Selecting Age, Gender, Age and Gender, or DMA Region are excellent ways to look at your Facebook ad campaign’s performance data. Looking at age, gender, or age and gender together will help you to see things like men ages 45-64 tend to convert best on your ads, or women ages 25-34 tend to watch your videos. DMA region is great for small businesses that are advertising to more than one city or metro area. For example, if I was advertising to Memphis, Chicago, and Boston, I could look at my ad’s performance by DMA Region and find out that I got more landing page views from people in the Boston area.

Even though your ideal customer type(s) might be broader than what you are seeing in these demographic breakdowns, modifying your age, gender, and location data for future Facebook ads can get you more bang for your buck.

Access Placement Data from your Facebook Ads

Placement means a breakdown of all the places on and off Facebook, Instagram, Stories, Marketplace, In-Stream, Watch, etc., that your ad was shown. If you chose more than 1 placement when you created your ad, you can see how each placement performed for you when you choose this option. When you look at the data this way, you’ll be able to see if showing your ad in a certain placement gets you better results than other placements. You’ll also note that Facebook does not evenly disperse your budget across placements. This type of insight is helpful to you in building future ads.

More access to data means more helpful knowledge for you, and will help you to effectively modify and refine your Facebook Ads strategy.

Interested in more training so you can feel confident in running your own Facebook ads? Check out our Facebook Ads Training service.