Modify & Manage Audiences

Question 1

Discuss Audience Overlaps

Answer 1

• When you have two or more audiences selected, you can check the overlap between them using the Auctions drop-down.
• Overlap means the percentage of people that are in both audiences.
• Overlap is not inherently bad but can become problematic if the percentage of overlap and the budgets of the overlapping ad sets are high enough, and the audiences are being used at the same time. This can cause ad sets to end up in the same auction. We don’t allow ad sets from the same Page or app to compete against each other because that could lead to advertisers driving up costs on themselves. So we remove the ad set that has a worse performance history from the auction. However, if we have to remove duplicative ad sets from auctions a lot, that can reduce delivery.
• While it’s useful to be aware of how much your audiences are overlapping, we recommend using the Delivery Insights metric “auction overlap” to know for sure if the overlap is actually affecting ad performance in a negative way.

If you think overlapping audiences are affecting the performance of your ads, try these strategies:

Craft different ads targeted to different audiences to segment audiences more specifically. If you’re looking to create awareness for cooking classes, customize different ads for each audience. For example:

Females, ages 20–35: Cooking classes are a great date night activity

Males, ages 20–35: Learn to make simple, five-ingredient meals

Busy families, ages 36–50: Master fast and healthy dishes even picky eaters will love

This strategy not only helps create more relevant messages but reduces targeting overlap and under-delivery.

Consolidate audiences with high percentages of overlap into single larger audiences.

Evaluate the timing of ad sets and decide if they can be run at different times.

Exclude similar audiences.