Have you ever wondered if your audiences are targeting the same people but you don’t have a way of knowing for sure? Well, I just discovered a way you can tell on Meta Ads. I’ll show you how quick and easy it is. Well, most of the time.
Once you’re in the Audiences section, select up to 4 audiences. Click the three dots, then choose “Show Audience Overlap”.
You’ll see different results, depending on the number of audiences you select, but it’ll look something like this:
If we have these different audiences in different ad sets, we would have a 45% overlap rate…not great! If that’s the case for you, make sure you exclude one of the Lookalike audiences in one of the ad sets to avoid overlap.
See the drop-down box in the top right-hand corner of the above screenshot? You can switch out which audience is the primary one for the comparison. That’s pretty convenient!
What’s the downside?
Well, there are a few things I don’t like about this:
- You see how there is an option to add another audience, however, it’s not searchable. You can’t type in part of the audience name and see what comes up; you must know the exact name of the audience.
- Not all audiences are available. If your audience size is listed as Below 1000 or Not Available, this feature won’t work.
- Even if your audience sizes are large enough, sometimes Meta won’t show you the overlap rates, especially if the base comparison list is one you uploaded compared to others you uploaded. It will happily compare with a Lookalike though.
Now, you can build all the custom audiences you are interested in, and can see the overlap rate! The key is that the audience size must be large enough (over 1k) and be available (IE not have a status of pending or Not available). This is a pretty neat feature and is definitely helpful to improve the quality of your audiences.
