The Scenario
You are a media planner building a targeting strategy for a fitness brand. The brief calls for reaching people interested in yoga, running, and nutrition across three campaign phases. Before configuring ad sets, you need to know what Meta has in its interest library — audience sizes, exact interest names, and IDs.
The strategy deck is due Monday. It is Friday afternoon.
The bad version of Friday:
- Open Ads Manager, go to Ad Set creation, open the Detailed Targeting field
- Type "yoga" and browse the dropdown — but you cannot export what you see
- Screenshot the results, type them into an Excel workbook by hand
- Repeat for "running" and "nutrition"
- Try to find audience sizes — they appear on hover but cannot be bulk-exported
- You have a partial list with no audience sizes by 5 PM.
One prompt builds the full reference workbook before you pack up.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that queries the Meta Ads targeting search API directly, pulling interest names, IDs, and audience sizes into the workbook without touching the Ads Manager UI.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Search Meta Ads targeting for interests matching 'yoga', 'running', and 'nutrition'. For each result, write the interest name, interest ID, and estimated audience size into this workbook. Group results by search term with a header row for each group.
SheetXAI runs three targeting searches, collects all results, and writes them grouped by keyword. You have a complete interest reference with audience sizes before you leave the office.
What You Get
A structured targeting reference workbook:
- Interest name — exact spelling as it appears in Meta's targeting system
- Interest ID — the ID your media buyer uses when building ad sets via API
- Estimated audience size — the reach number Meta returns for each interest
- Grouped by search term — yoga results, then running results, then nutrition results
The interest IDs are the handoff artifact. When your media buyer configures ad sets, they paste IDs, not names — IDs are exact, names can be ambiguous.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Targeting research rarely stays at three keywords.
When you need location targeting options alongside interests
The campaign targets three specific metro areas. You need the Meta location keys.
Look up Meta Ads location targeting options for New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Write the location key, location name, and type (city/region/country) into columns A through C. Then search for interests matching 'fitness' and 'gym' and write interest name, ID, and audience size into columns E through G.
When the brand wants to target competitor brand audiences
Check if competitor brands appear as targetable interests in Meta.
Search Meta Ads targeting for interests matching each brand name in column A of this workbook. For each search, write the best-matching interest name, ID, and audience size into columns B, C, and D. If no match is found, write 'no match' in column B.
When you want to filter interests by minimum audience size
Small audiences are not viable for the campaign scale. You only want interests above 500,000.
Search Meta Ads targeting for interests matching 'yoga', 'running', and 'nutrition'. Write all results with interest name, ID, and estimated audience size. In column D, write 'viable' if the audience size is above 500000 and 'too small' if below. Sort by audience size descending.
When you need the full targeting research document in one workbook for the strategy deck
The Monday deck needs a complete targeting appendix across interests and locations.
Run the following research and write results into separate tabs: (1) Search for interests matching the keywords in column A of the Keywords tab — write name, ID, audience size into a tab called 'Interests'. (2) Look up location keys for the cities in column A of the Locations tab and write location key, name, and type into a tab called 'Locations'. Sort both tabs by audience size descending.
The pattern: instead of building the targeting reference manually from hover tooltips in Ads Manager, you describe the research and SheetXAI runs it end to end.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull Meta Ads targeting data into any Excel workbook you have open. The Meta Ads integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related work, see how to launch bulk campaigns from a targeting brief in Excel or the Meta Ads in Excel overview.