Tactics: check your Meta audience segment breakdowns

There's a really quick, easy, and incredibly helpful feature sitting right in your Meta ads dashboard that many advertisers overlook: the audience segment breakdown.

How to Access It

Navigate to the breakdown section in your Meta dashboard and select demographics. From there, split your spend by audience segments. This simple action will reveal exactly how your campaign budget is being distributed across different groups of audiences.

💡 [Watch here] - Learn how to use your Meta breakdown section for new insights

What You'll See

Once you apply this breakdown, you'll see your campaign spend divided across three key audience categories:

Brand New Audiences – People who have never interacted with your brand before. These are cold prospects who represent true new customer acquisition opportunities.

Existing Customers – People who have already purchased from you in the past. These are your repeat buyers and loyal customers.

Engaged Non-Purchasers – People who have engaged with your brand in some way—maybe they visited your site, clicked an ad, or interacted with your content—but haven't yet made a purchase.

Why This Matters

Understanding how your spend is distributed across these segments is crucial for campaign performance. It allows you to verify that your campaign initiatives are actually spending on the right groups of people, depending on the specific goal of each campaign.

For example:

• If you're running a new customer acquisition campaign, you want to see the majority of spend going to brand new audiences
• If you're running a retention or repeat purchase campaign, you should see spend concentrated on existing customers
• If you're running remarketing campaigns, you should see spend focused on engaged non-purchasers

One Important Caveat

For this breakdown to work accurately, these audience segments need to be defined correctly in your Meta account. Make sure you have proper custom audiences set up for:

• Website purchasers (with appropriate lookback windows)
• Engaged users (site visitors, video viewers, page engagers, etc.)
• Email/customer list uploads

Once these are properly configured, the audience segment breakdown becomes an invaluable tool for ensuring your campaigns are performing as intended and reaching the right people.

Looking for help optimizing your Meta campaigns or need an audit of your current setup? We'd be happy to take a look. Just send us a message.