How to Manage Audience Fragmentation with Automated Rules

If your Facebook ad ads are struggling due to audience fragmentationAudience Fragmentation is the potential result of running multiple ad sets that target different groups of people but are optimized in the same way to promote similar ad creative. When it becomes problematic, you should combine ad sets. More, there’s a way to manage them with automated rules.

Let’s discuss…

Scenario

Let’s say that you have multiple ad setsAn ad set is a Facebook ads grouping where settings like targeting, scheduling, optimization, and placement are determined. More running at the same time that are targeting different audiences. These could be ad sets within the same or different campaignsThe 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.

Each ad set promotes similar ad creative with a similar setup. For example, each uses the Sales objectiveWhen you create a campaign, one of the first things you'll do is select an objective. The campaign objective is your ultimate goal. Your selection will impact options, including optimization and delivery. Options include Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, and Sales. More, uses the same performance goalThe 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, and features ad images that utilize a similar image and copy.

This can result in 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 fragmentation, which leads to poor performance and inefficient ad spend. Facebook believes that you can overcome audience fragmentation, in some cases, if you combine the impacted ad sets

The belief is that it will help optimize performance faster, allowing you to spend the budgets more efficiently.

Manage with Automated RulesAutomated Rules allow advertisers to set automated processes (pausing, adjusting budget, or adjusting bid) based on performance. More

Luckily, you can manage audience fragmentation with automated rules.

Automated rules allow you to set up automated processes to make changes to your advertising based on certain benchmarks. You can create a new automated rule in Ads Manager by clicking the Rules dropdown.

Within automated rules, there’s a template to “Reduce Audience Fragmentation.”

Here’s how it works…

When you turn this automated rule on, it will apply to all of the ad sets in your account. It is triggered if Facebook detects audience fragmentation between ad sets. The ad creative and setup would need to be similar, with different audiences and ad sets.

You’ll have two options:

1. Combine ad sets, audiences, and budgets automatically.

When you do this, Facebook will keep your best-performing ad set (measured by lowest Cost Per Action). The other ad sets will be turned off, but the audiences and budgets will be combined into the surviving ad set.

2. Send notification only.

In this case, you’ll simply be notified that Facebook thinks audience fragmentation is an issue, and you’ll receive recommendations to combine ad sets. It will be up to you whether you combine these ad sets or not.

Personally, I tend to prefer the notification option, but feel free to test this out. Maybe you’ll see over time that combining ad sets automatically keeps your performance more efficient.

Find what works best for you!