Advertisers often complain that their ads reachReach measures the number of Accounts Center Accounts (formerly users) that saw your ads at least once. You can have one account reached with multiple impressions. More people beyond the selected age, gender, or location. This is usually because they received comments from people who shouldn’t see their ads.
There are reasons this can happen, and it’s possible you’re not paying to reach these people.
But you can find out.
Use the breakdown dropdown menu and use one or both of the following:
- Demographics: breakdownBreakdown is a way to get insights into your ad performance related to time, delivery, action, or dynamic creative element. More by age or gender
- Geography: breakdown by country
This will generate separate rows based on various age groups, genders, or countries you’re paying to reach and the results for each group. This allows you to confirm whether you’re paying to reach some of these people.
It’s possible that your results won’t unveil any surprises. But understand that there’s an organic element of your ads, too.
Someone you paid to reach could share your ad or their engagement could bring in their friends. You will not pay for these impressionsImpressions are the number of times your ads were displayed to your target audience. Impressions aren't counted if it is detected they came from bots. More, and they won’t be reflected in your Ads Manager results.
Of course, this has always been a complaint of mine. While organic engagement shouldn’t be included in the base reporting, there should be a breakdown for it. It would be amazing to view results that came from organic engagement with our ads to get a fuller picture of impact.
If the breakdown report confirms your suspicions and you’re paying to reach people beyond your targeted age or gender, it’s probably because you’re using Advantage+ Audience. You can only set minimum age and there’s no option for gender in Audience ControlsAdvertisers aren't able to exclude locations or customize age targeting from directly within the ad set of an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign. But Audience Controls within the Ad Account Settings allow the ability to make these adjustments account-wide for all Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. More.
If you’ve reached people who live outside of your geographic targeting, it’s likely because Ads Manager location targeting now includes anyone “living in or recently in” a location.
If you don’t like that change to location targetingDefault location targeting will include anyone living in or recently in your home country. You can target and exclude locations by country, state, region, city, zip code, and more. In 2023, Meta removed options to target people only living in, traveling in, or recently in a location. More, you’re not alone.
