How to Check My Facebook Ad Campaign

Your Facebook ad is live and racking up impressions, but the real question is - is it actually working? Knowing how to check your campaign's performance is the difference between guessing with your budget and making smart, data-driven decisions. This guide will walk you through exactly how to navigate Facebook Ads Manager, identify the most important metrics, and translate that data into actionable insights to improve your results.

Finding Your Way Around Facebook Ads Manager

Before you can analyze performance, you need to know where to look. Facebook Ads Manager is the central hub for all your advertising activity.

Here’s the quickest way to get there:

Log into your Facebook account that is connected to your business page and ad account.
Navigate directly to facebook.com/adsmanager.

Once you're in, you’ll see a dashboard with a table of your campaigns. It can feel a bit overwhelming at first, so let’s break down the main hierarchy you need to understand.

Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads: What's the Difference?

Your advertising efforts are organized into three levels. Understanding this structure is fundamental to checking your performance properly.

Campaigns: This is the highest level. You set your primary advertising objective here. Are you trying to get newsletter sign-ups (Leads), drive website traffic (Traffic), or make sales (Sales)? Your entire campaign is built to achieve this one goal.
Ad Sets: Nestled inside each campaign, ad sets are where you define your targeting, budget, schedule, and placements. You can have multiple ad sets within a single campaign, each targeting a different audience (e.g., an ad set for "women aged 25-34 in California" and another for "men aged 35-44 in Texas").
Ads: This is the final level, living inside each ad set. The ad level contains your creative - the actual images, videos, headlines, and copy that people see. You can A/B test different visuals or messages by creating multiple ads within the same ad set.

When checking your campaign, you can click through these tabs at the top of your dashboard to analyze performance at each level. For example, you can see the overall results at the Campaign level, then click into the Ad Sets tab to see which audience is performing best.

The Key Metrics You Absolutely Must Check

Ads Manager is filled with hundreds of potential data points, but you don’t need to watch all of them. For most campaigns, performance boils down to a handful of core metrics. These can be grouped into three main categories: delivery, engagement, and conversion.

Delivery Metrics: Are People Seeing Your Ad?

These metrics tell you how your ad is being delivered by Facebook's algorithm.

Impressions: The total number of times your ad was displayed on a screen. If one person sees your ad three times, that counts as three impressions.
Reach: The number of unique people who saw your ad at least once. If one person sees your ad three times, that still only counts as one in Reach.
Frequency: The average number of times each person saw your ad (calculated as Impressions ÷ Reach). A high frequency (e.g., above 5-7) can sometimes lead to ad fatigue, where your audience gets tired of seeing the same creative and stops engaging.
Amount Spent: How much of your budget has been used so far. It's crucial for keeping an eye on your spending pace.

Engagement Metrics: Is Your Ad Grabbing Attention?

Once your ad is seen, you want to know if it's compelling enough for people to interact with it.

Link Clicks: The number of clicks on links within your ad that lead to your website, landing page, or app store. This is one of the most important engagement metrics because it shows active interest.
Click-Through Rate (CTR %): The percentage of times people saw your ad and performed a link click. A higher CTR generally indicates that your ad creative and targeting are well-aligned. A low CTR might signal that your creative isn't resonating with your audience.
Cost Per Link Click (CPC): The average amount you’ve paid for each link click. It’s calculated by dividing the total amount spent by the number of link clicks. This helps you understand how efficiently you're driving traffic.

Conversion Metrics: Is Your Ad Driving a Business Outcome?

This is where the rubber meets the road. These metrics show whether your campaign is achieving its ultimate business goal.

Results: This metric is tied directly to your campaign objective. If your objective is "Leads," the Results column will show you the number of leads generated. If it's "Sales," it will show purchases. It’s the single most important number to confirm your campaign is doing what you asked it to.
Cost Per Result: Also known as Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), this shows the average cost for each result. For a lead generation campaign, this is your Cost Per Lead (CPL). For an e-commerce campaign, it's your Cost Per Purchase. You should have a target CPA in mind to know if your campaign is profitable.
Return On Ad Spend (ROAS): For e-commerce businesses, this is the ultimate metric. It tells you the total revenue generated for every dollar you spent on advertising. A ROAS of 3x means you made $3 in revenue for every $1 you spent.
Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who clicked your ad and then took the desired action on your website (e.g., made a purchase, filled out a form). This metric helps you understand the quality of the traffic your ads are driving.

How to Customize Your Reporting View for Better Insights

The default "Performance" columns in Ads Manager are a good start, but they often don't show the full picture. Customizing your columns allows you to focus only on the metrics that matter most for your specific goals, saving you from information overload.

For example, if you're running an e-commerce campaign, you'll want to see metrics like "Adds to Cart," "Checkouts Initiated," and "Purchase ROAS" right next to your ad spend.

Here’s how to create a custom report view:

In Ads Manager, look for the "Columns" dropdown menu (usually set to "Performance" by default).
Click it and select "Customize Columns..." at the bottom of the list.
A window will pop up with a searchable list of all available metrics. Check the boxes for the metrics you want to include (e.g., CTR, ROAS, Adds to Cart).
You can drag and drop the metrics on the right-hand panel to reorder them as you see fit.
Once you're happy with your selection, check the box at the bottom that says "Save as preset" and give your view a name, like "E-commerce Overview."
Click "Apply."

Now, your custom column set will be a permanent option in the "Columns" dropdown, allowing you to get to your most important data in just one click.

Using Breakdowns to Uncover Hidden Opportunities

Sometimes, the overall campaign numbers don't tell the whole story. A campaign might look like it's performing averagely, but hidden within the data is a pocket of exceptional performance. The "Breakdown" tool is how you find it.

Next to the "Columns" dropdown, you'll find a "Breakdown" button. Clicking this lets you segment your campaign data by different variables.

Most Useful Breakdowns:

By Delivery → Age & Gender: Find out which specific demographic segments are driving the best results. You might discover that women aged 35-44 have a cost per purchase that's half of any other group. You can use this insight to create new ad sets focused heavily on this high-performing audience.
By Delivery → Placement: See where your ads are showing and how each placement performs. You may find that Instagram Stories are driving cheap clicks but no conversions, while Facebook Feed is where all your sales are coming from. This tells you where to allocate more budget.
By Delivery → Device: Breakdown your data by Desktop and Mobile. This can reveal important user behavior patterns. For example, users might browse products on mobile during the day but prefer to complete their purchases on a desktop in the evening.

By regularly using breakdowns, you move from just checking your campaigns to actively analyzing them for optimization opportunities.

A Quick Checklist for Reviewing Your Campaign

Ready to put it all together? Here's a simple, repeatable process for checking any Facebook ad campaign.

Start at the Campaign Level: What is the primary objective of this campaign? Look at the "Results" column. Is the campaign generating the right kind of outcome (e.g., leads, sales, traffic)?
Check Your Efficiency: How much is each result costing you? Look at the "Cost Per Result." Is this number profitable or sustainable for your business? For e-commerce, directly check your "Purchase ROAS."
Move to the Ad Sets Tab: Compare your different ad sets. Which audience is delivering the best Cost Per Result? Pause any low-performing ad sets and consider moving their budget to the winners.
Analyze the Ads Tab: Within your best-performing ad set, which ad creative has the highest Click-Through Rate (CTR) and the lowest Cost Per Result? This tells you what message and visual is resonating most with your audience.
Apply a Breakdown: Use the breakdown tool (start with Placement or Age) to search for further optimization opportunities within your top-performing ad set. Can you refine your targeting even more?

Answering these questions gives you a clear picture of what's working, what's not, and what you should do next.

Final Thoughts

Regularly checking your Facebook ad campaigns is essential for avoiding wasted spend and scaling what works. By navigating to Ads Manager, focusing on the key delivery, engagement, and conversion metrics, and using tools like custom columns and breakdowns, you can get a clear and accurate picture of your performance.

We know that jumping between multiple platforms like Facebook Ads Manager, Google Analytics, and Shopify just to get a clear view of performance can be draining. That's why we built Graphed. It connects to all your data sources so you can get real-time answers and build comprehensive dashboards in seconds by just asking questions in plain English instead of manually chasing down data across endless tabs.