This is a common mistake advertisers make…
The reporting breakdown feature allows advertisers to break down results by things like age, gender, placement, platform, location, and more.
It’s incredibly valuable, but most advertisers incorrectly apply what they learn from these results.
The Mistake
They’ll see cheap results based on age, and they’ll remove other ages. They’ll see fewer results from stories and reels, so they’ll remove those placements. They think that this will improve results, but it almost never does.
This is an old school “optimization” approach, which assumes that we can manually trim away waste to force Meta to spend more efficiently. It may have worked at one time, but those days are in the past.
Meta wants you to get more results based on your performance goal. You don’t need to remove ages or placements to get more results.
A Troubleshooting Tool
Instead, breakdowns should be used as a troubleshooting tool. This is where they’re most valuable.
Because Meta wants you to get more results, they’ll exploit weaknesses related to your performance goal. And this is where you can uncover a high number of cheap, low-quality results by demographic group or placement.
Thanks to breakdowns, you’ll be able to detect a concentration of ad spend on the audience network because it’s leading to a high number of cheap clicks.
Or on people aged 65 and up, because they’re leading to a high number of cheap leads.
I also recently documented how I used breakdowns to troubleshoot a weird drop in performance. Read about this weird problem and how I solved it here.
