Audience Fragmentation can hurt your Facebook ad performance. Here’s why…
If you’re like a lot of advertisers, you have multiple — maybe several — ad setsAn ad set is a Facebook ads grouping where settings like targeting, scheduling, optimization, and placement are determined. More within the same 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. Each ad set represents a different targeting segment. All ad sets optimize for the same action and promote the same ad creative.
When that happens, 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 is a very real risk. By spreading your audiences out like that, Meta says your ads will be less efficient. Meta prefers that you combine these audiences, and ad sets, when possible.
That doesn’t mean it always makes sense to combine them. But if you’re creating several ad sets targeting similar audiences, that’s where this can be an issue.
There is an Automated Rule that you can use for this. When you select the 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 template, you’ll have the option of either having Meta automatically combine ad sets when this is an issue or sending you a notification.
I prefer the notification since sometimes there may be a reason to keep the ad sets separate. Unfortunately, there’s no other easy way to monitor Audience Fragmentation. You may otherwise see messages about it when it’s a potential issue.
Overall, be aware of this. It’s another reason to combine Lookalike Audiences or interests, if not go completely broad. But it also doesn’t mean you necessarily need to be afraid of creating multiple ad sets targeting different audiences either.
Hope this helps!