How To Avoid Audience Overlap In Facebook Ads

In this article, I’m going to show you how to avoid audience overlap in Facebook Ads.

Facebook audience overlap is when you have the same people in different audiences.

For example…
If you have an Instagram audience, Facebook page engagements, or even website visitors, and then you create custom audiences for retargeting each of these.

And let’s say you run the same ads, which leads to each ad sets with these different audiences, then this is called audience overlap.

Because there's a probability some people who have visited your website go to Instagram or even go to like your Facebook page and end up in these different audiences.

Why You Should Avoid Audience Overlap

Facebook will show the same ad you're running in each ad set and since these people are being shown that same ad over and over again.

This causes you to pay for the same person to see the ad twice, driving your ad cost up and fatiguing your ads faster.

what can you do to avoid this

Now, the best way to avoid Facebook overlap is to use Campaign budget optimization (CBO) Campaigns containing ad sets with audiences that have the probability to overlap.

Such as retargeting your website and social media visitors.

If you were to use separate budgets in the automatic budget optimization (ABO) Campaigns with an audience that could overlap.

Facebook can't navigate and stop this from happening as opposed to with CBO campaigns.

The CBO is designed in a way that you can put multiple ad sets into the campaign and it won’t affect any audience overlap.

It’s one of the reasons why Facebook recommends you use CBO Campaigns over ABO.

So you want to make sure you set your budget at the campaign level, as it doesn’t matter which ad sets you put them in.

avoid this mistake

Let’s say you create two separate CBO campaigns, and you separate the budgets across these campaigns with overlapping audiences.

Since the budget isn’t centralized in one single CBO campaign this again will overlap and fatigue your ad fast.

So Put these overlapping audience ad sets in ONLY ONE CBO campaign.

But with that said…

If you’re running multiple variations of offers and different ads, then it’s fine to run separate campaigns.

Because essentially your prospects are seeing different ad creatives and going to different offers that won't fatigue.

Avoiding overlap with exclusions

Avoid complete audience overlap by creating exclusions in the custom audiences.

Excluding…

• Website visitors.
• Email subs.
• Purchases.
• Social engagers.

Doing this will make sure that your ads are only in front of people who have never seen or heard of you.

Discover more pro facebook ad tips

Now you know how to avoid Facebook audience overlap, you may also be interested in knowing how to retarget.

You may also be interested in learning more about Facebook ad targeting.