How many ad setsAn ad set is a Facebook ads grouping where settings like targeting, scheduling, optimization, and placement are determined. More should you use per campaignThe campaign is the foundation of your Facebook ad. This is where you'll set an advertising objective, which defines what you want your ad to achieve. More?
This is a question that comes up a lot, and the answer depends on two things that are often tied together:
- OptimizationThe Performance Goal is chosen within the ad set and determines optimization and delivery. How you optimize impacts who sees your ad. Meta will show your ad to people most likely to perform your desired action. More
- Overlap
Understand that this is something that has changed in the past few years because of targeting expansion and Advantage+ Audience.
Auction Overlap is when you have more than one ad set targeting similar audiences that attempt to enter the same auctionFacebook uses an ad auction to determine the best ad to show to a person at a given point in time. The winner of the auction is the ad with the highest total value, based on bid, estimated action rates, and ad quality. More. You’ll want to avoid significant overlap because it will make your ad spend less efficient and will increase costs.
If you optimize for any type of conversion, your detailed targeting and lookalike audiences can be expanded.
If you’re using Advantage+ AudienceMeta's AI-powered targeting option. Meta will attempt to find your audience for you based on pixel activity, conversion history, and ad engagement. You can also provide targeting suggestions that Meta will initially prioritize before going broader. More, your targeting inputs are only suggestions.
In other words, if you have five ad sets in the same campaign, you could potentially reachReach measures the number of Accounts Center Accounts (formerly users) that saw your ads at least once. You can have one account reached with multiple impressions. More the same person with any of those ad sets.
That’s not ideal.
We’re overthinking this because in the past we always set up multiple ad sets. If you’re optimizing for conversionsA conversion is counted whenever a website visitor performs an action that fires a standard event, custom event, or custom conversion. Examples of conversions include purchases, leads, content views, add to cart, and registrations. More or using Advantage+ AudienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. More, you only need one ad set for cold targeting per campaign.
It’s what Meta recommends. But it’s also the most logical approach because of how everything works now.
You could theoretically use multiple cold audience ad sets when optimizing for other actions if you turn off expansion because it would limit overlap. But this is an approach that will likely be phased out eventually, and it’s debatable whether it’s even worthwhile.
Otherwise, limit overlap by limiting your cold targeting ad sets. Try it out, you may get better results.
