How to Find Facebook Ad Demographics

You’re watching your Facebook ad budget disappear every day, but do you know who is actually clicking and converting? If you’re just letting your campaigns run without checking the demographics of who they’re reaching, you’re likely wasting money. Understanding the age, gender, location, and even the devices of your most profitable audience segments is key to optimizing your ad spend. This guide will walk you through exactly where to find this data inside Facebook Ads Manager and, more importantly, how to use it to get better results.

Why You Need to Check Ad Demographics (Routinely)

Checking your performance by demographic isn't just a "nice-to-have" - it's a critical part of running successful ad campaigns. Your initial targeting assumptions might be completely wrong, and the data will tell you the real story. Regularly reviewing these breakdowns allows you to make your campaigns smarter and more efficient over time.

Optimize Your Ad Spend: Why spend money on an age group that clicks but never buys? When you discover that, for example, women aged 35-44 convert at half the cost of any other group, you can shift your budget to focus on them for a higher return on ad spend (ROAS).
Refine Your Ad Creative and Messaging: If you find that younger audiences are engaging with your video ads while older audiences prefer static images with different copy, you can tailor your creative. This data helps you speak your audience's language, leading to higher engagement and a better connection with your brand.
Discover Untapped Audiences: You might be targeting big cities but discover that a specific campaign is performing surprisingly well in a smaller, unexpected region. This insight could reveal a new market you never considered, allowing you to create dedicated campaigns to capture that audience.

Finding Demographics in Facebook Ads Manager: A Step-by-Step Guide

Facebook makes this information fairly easy to access, but the dashboard can be a bit overwhelming if you don’t know where to look. The primary tool you’ll use is the “Breakdown” feature. You can apply breakdowns at the campaign, ad set, or ad level to get as granular as you need.

Here’s the simplest way to get a quick overview.

The Main View: Using the Demographic Breakdown Menu

This process will give you the most common demographic splits and performance metrics in just a few clicks.

Step 1: Navigate to Your Ads Manager

Log in to your Facebook Business account and head over to the Ads Manager dashboard where you can see all your campaigns.

Step 2: Select a Campaign, Ad Set, or Ad

Choose the level you want to analyze. For a broad view, click on the campaign you're interested in. To see the performance of a specific audience you’ve built, select an ad set. If you want to see how individual creatives are performing across demographics, choose a specific ad.

For this example, let's start at the Ad Set level.

Step 3: Click the "Breakdown" Dropdown Menu

Look for a dropdown menu with a small triangle icon labeled "Breakdown" located just above the right side of the main reporting table. Clicking this reveals several options for slicing your data.

Step 4: Choose Your Desired Breakdown

The "Breakdown" menu has a section called "By Delivery" which contains the most useful demographic report options. The most common ones you'll use are:

Age: This will show you performance across different age brackets (e.g., 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, etc.).
Gender: Splits performance between men, women, and unspecified categories.
Age and Gender: A combination of the two, giving you a very specific view (e.g., Women aged 25-34).
Location: Useful for seeing performance by region, country, or even more specific targeting areas.

Step 5: Analyze the Results

Once you select a breakdown (e.g., "Age"), your main reporting table will update. Instead of one line for your ad set, you'll see multiple lines, each representing a different age bracket. Now you can compare key performance metrics across these groups.

Look at columns like:

Reach & Impressions: Who is your ad actually being shown to?
Cost per Result: How much are you paying for a key action (like a purchase or lead) in each demographic? This is often the most important metric.
ROAS (Return On Ad Spend): If you’re an e-commerce store, this tells you which demographics are generating the most revenue for every dollar spent.
CTR (Click-Through Rate): Which groups are most engaged by your ad creative?

For instance, you might see that the 25-34 age group has the most impressions, but the 45-54 age group has the lowest Cost per Purchase and the highest ROAS. That’s a powerful insight!

Digging a Little Deeper: Advanced Insights

While an Age + Gender breakdown is a great start, there are other ways to slice your data to get a clearer picture of your audience and their behavior.

Location-Specific Breakdowns

Knowing where your best customers are is incredibly valuable. In the "Breakdown" menu, under "Location," you can view performance by:

Country: Essential if you're running ads internationally.
Region: In the U.S., this equates to the state level. Elsewhere, it may be provinces or territories.
Impression Device: This is an interesting one. It tells you if the person was located in their home area or was traveling when they saw the ad.

Placement & Device Breakdowns

While not a traditional "demographic," understanding which devices and platforms perform best is equally important for optimization. Under the same "By Delivery" breakdown option, you can see:

Platform: Is performance better on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or the Audience Network?
Placement: Drills down even further. Is it Feeds, Stories, Reels, or In-Stream Videos that are driving results? You may find Instagram Reels are great for engagement, but Facebook Feeds drive all your sales.
Device (Impression): Are most of your sales coming from mobile users or people on a desktop? If 95% of your conversions happen on mobile devices, your landing page better be perfectly optimized for smaller screens.

From Data to Decisions: How to Act on Your Findings

Finding the data is only half the battle. The other half is using it to make smart strategic decisions. Here are a few common scenarios and the actions you might take.

Scenario 1: You discover one age group and gender has a far lower Cost Per Purchase.

You’re selling skincare products and find that women aged 35-44 are converting at $10 per purchase, while all other groups average $35.

Action: Duplicate your best-performing ad set. In the new ad set, narrow the targeting to only women aged 35-44. Allocate a larger share of your budget to this proven, high-performing audience. You can let the other one run with a smaller budget to keep exploring, but put most of your money where it's already working.

Scenario 2: Your ads get high engagement from younger audiences, but no sales.

You see tons of likes and comments from the 18-24 age bracket, but your sales are all coming from the 30+ crowd.

Action: Assess if your ad creative matches your buyer persona. The younger audience may love the ad visuals but isn't in a position to buy. You might decide to create separate campaigns: one for engagement targeting the younger audience (brand awareness) and another for conversions targeting the older, buying audience (direct sales).

Scenario 3: One placement (e.g., Instagram Stories) has a much higher CTR but a lower conversion rate than another (e.g., Facebook Feed).

People love tapping through your Story ads, but they aren't completing the purchase. Facebook Feed ads get fewer clicks but more sales.

Action: First, check the post-click experience. Is your website difficult to navigate on mobile after clicking from a Story? The fast-paced environment of stories might not be conducive to a long checkout process. Perhaps your Feed ads are reaching a more purchase-intent-driven audience. You could test Stories ads that push for a lower-commitment action, such as an email signup, while keeping Feed ads focused on direct sales.

The Limitation of Looking at Facebook Data in Isolation

Analyzing demographics in Ads Manager is an excellent first step, but it doesn't give you the full story. Facebook's platform only shows you what happens before and immediately after the click. It doesn't easily connect actions to your entire customer journey.

For example, a customer might click a Facebook ad on their phone, browse your site, and then come back three days later on their desktop via a Google search to finally make a purchase. Facebook's reporting might not fully capture this, while Google Analytics might attribute the sale to organic search. You're left trying to piece together two different versions of the truth by manually exporting CSVs and wrestling with spreadsheets.

To truly understand performance, you need to see your Facebook ads results alongside data from Google Analytics, your Shopify store, your email marketing platform, and your CRM. This unified view is where you can start answering the really important questions, like which campaigns are truly driving revenue, not just clicks.

Final Thoughts

Mastering the "Breakdown" feature in Facebook Ads Manager is a non-negotiable skill for anyone looking to go beyond just "boosting posts." By regularly reviewing performance by age, gender, location, and placement, you can move from guessing what works to making data-driven decisions that will significantly improve your campaign results and stretch your ad budget further.

The real challenge is connecting your Facebook ad performance to what happens next - like a product purchase on Shopify or a demo request that ends up in Salesforce. We built Graphed to solve this problem by eliminating the manual grunt work of data analysis. Instead of hopping between platforms and spreadsheets, you can connect all your data sources in one click and use simple, natural language to ask questions like, "Show me my Facebook ad spend vs. Shopify revenue by campaign for last month." We turn hours of reporting into 30-second conversations, giving you a full-funnel view of your performance instantly.