If you’ve noticed a drop in performance for a Facebook ad set, it may be due to 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 saturation. But, how can you know for sure?
Luckily, there’s a way. And it’s clear that most advertisers don’t realize that it exists.
Let’s take a closer look at what audience saturation is, how you can detect it, and what you can do about it.
What is Audience Saturation?
You’ve saturated your audience when you’ve reached most of the people within a potential audience — or at least those who are most likely to convert. The audience has grown stale and those who see your ads every day have already seen them multiple times.
The potential impact of audience saturation is a drop in performance. Those who were most likely to act already did, and you aren’t reaching new people anymore.
The negative performance is directly measured by an increasing Cost Per Optimized Action (purchase, lead, etc.). But, how is Audience Saturation measured?
The Inspect Tool
If you aren’t yet using the Inspect Tool, it’s about time you start.
This tool is available for active ad setsAn ad set is a Facebook ads grouping where settings like targeting, scheduling, optimization, and placement are determined. More using link clicksThe link click metric measures all clicks on links that drive users to properties on and off of Facebook. More, 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, leads, or app installs. Of course, that comes from old documentation prior to objectives changing, but know that it’s not always available.
When you select a single ad set, click the Inspect icon (which looks like a magnifying glass) on the far right in Ads Manager.
Make sure you’re vieweing at least seven days of active data. There are several categories of helpful charts and graphs here (you may not get info for all of them):
- Bid StrategyWhen you enter an ad into the auction, Meta will bid for you. But in some cases, it may benefit you to adjust the bidding strategy to get better results. Options include Highest Volume, Cost Per Result Goal, Highest Value, ROAS Goal, and Bid Cap. More
- 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 Competition
- Audience Saturation
- Auction OverlapAuction Overlap can happen when you have two ad sets running at the same time, targeting similar audiences. When their ads are about to enter the auction, Meta first chooses the ad with the highest total value. That ad will be the one that enters into the auction. The other won't be considered. Meta does this to prevent you from bidding against yourself. When there's too much Auction Overlap, it can result in higher costs or under delivery. More
- Significant Edit History
This is all great stuff that you should dig into. But, of course, we’re here to focus on Audience Saturation.
The Charts
Here’s what you’ll see…
There are four charts. The first is Frequency. This is the number of times you’ve reached each person in the audience, on average, measured over time.
Next is First Time Impression Ratio. This tells you the percentage of daily impressionsImpressions are the number of times your ads were displayed to your target audience. Impressions aren't counted if it is detected they came from bots. More are the first time you’ve reached someone.
Next is 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. Note that this is a unique number that only increases as you reach more people. For example, if you reached 10,000 people yesterday and those same 10,000 people today, your Reach does not increase.
And finally, Audience Reached Ratio. This shows you the percentage of your total potential audience that you’ve reached.
The potential audience size is displayed in the ad set while you’re creating it.
All four of these charts help you determine whether Audience Saturation is leading to poor performance. See if FrequencyCalculated as (Impressions/Reach), Frequency is a Facebook ads metric that measures the average number of times users have seen your ad. More or Audience Reached Ratio are increasing, Reach is flatting out, or First Time Impression Ratio is dropping and if those changes coincide with an increase in Cost Per Optimized Action.
Now What?
If you’ve determined that your audience is saturated, what do you do next? Well, first you should ask whether that Cost Per Optimized Action is still acceptable. If not, it’s time to do something about it.
Duplicate and create a new ad set. You’ll need to increase the audience size or target a different audience entirely. There are always many options for increasing the audience size (countries, ages, Expansion, Lookalike percentage), or you could simply try new audiences entirely
Your Turn
Have you run into issues with Audience Saturation? How do you manage it?
Let me know in the comments below!
