The Scenario
You are a performance marketer. You have 20 active ad sets running and your targeting review is Wednesday. Before that meeting you need to know which demographic segments — by age bracket and gender — are delivering the best CPA.
The data is in Meta Ads. You want it in an Excel workbook so you can sort, filter, and build a pivot table before the meeting.
The bad version of Tuesday afternoon:
- Open Ads Manager, navigate to Ad Sets, set the breakdown to Age and Gender
- Set the date range to the last 7 days
- Export CSV
- Open it and discover the compound "age/gender" column needs splitting into two separate columns
- Spend 40 minutes cleaning headers and building the split formula in Excel
- Build the pivot, realize you forgot CPA, go back to Ads Manager to re-export
- The pivot table is not done before Wednesday morning.
One prompt cuts that to minutes.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that queries Meta Ads at the ad-set level with any breakdown you need, so you never touch the export button.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Get Meta Ads insights at the ad set level for the last 7 days broken down by age and gender. Write ad set name, age range, gender, impressions, clicks, spend, and CPA into columns A through G. Sort by CPA ascending so the most efficient segments appear first.
SheetXAI calls the Meta Ads API with the age-and-gender breakdown, writes results with clean separate columns for age and gender, and sorts by CPA. You open the workbook Wednesday morning and the pivot takes three minutes.
What You Get
A demographic breakdown workbook tab ready for analysis:
- Column A — ad set name
- Column B — age range (18–24, 25–34, etc.)
- Column C — gender (male, female, unknown)
- Columns D–G — impressions, clicks, spend, CPA
Age and gender arrive as separate columns, not a compound string that needs an Excel formula to split. That alone saves the cleanup step.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Demographic breakdowns surface edge cases that aggregate data hides.
When some ad sets have very low impression counts
A few ad sets had fewer than 200 impressions in the window. Their CPA numbers are not reliable.
Fetch last 7 days ad-set insights by age and gender. Exclude any age/gender combination with fewer than 200 impressions. Write the remaining rows into columns A through G sorted by CPA ascending.
When the team wants a placement breakdown instead
Same ad sets, different cut. The targeting meeting pivoted to placement.
Fetch last 7 days ad-set insights broken down by placement (Feed, Stories, Reels, Audience Network). Write ad set name, placement, impressions, spend, CTR, and CPA into columns A through F. Sort by CPA ascending.
When you want to compare this week to last week
A week-over-week view for the same demographic segments.
Fetch ad-set insights by age and gender for the last 7 days. Then fetch the same breakdown for the 7 days before that. Write both periods side by side: columns A through G for the recent week, columns H through K for the prior week's spend and CPA. In column L, calculate CPA change percentage.
When you only care about the top 20 ad sets by spend
You manage 80 ad sets. The meeting covers the 20 that drive most of the budget.
Identify the top 20 ad sets by total spend over the last 7 days. Then fetch their insights broken down by age and gender. Write the full demographic breakdown for those 20 ad sets into this workbook — ad set name, age, gender, impressions, clicks, spend, CPA — sorted by spend descending within each ad set group.
The pattern: narrow the data pull to what actually drives decisions, then break it down the way the analysis requires.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull ad-set demographic insights into any Excel workbook you have open. The Meta Ads integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related work, see how to export creative-level performance into Excel or the Meta Ads in Excel overview.