How to see audience overlap on Facebook Ads (Step-by-Step Guide 2025)
One of the strongest points of the Facebook ad system is its flexibility in reaching target customers. Advertisers can easily launch campaigns based on interests, behaviors, remarketing, or even targeting those who have liked a Fanpage. However, this very diversity poses a significant risk of audience overlap. In many cases, the same person can be in multiple different audience segments. For example, they might have liked a Fanpage, visited your website, and also matched the interests and behaviors you’re targeting. As a result, your ad sets compete with each other, leading to higher costs and reduced effectiveness. So, does audience overlap really harm your campaigns, and how can you check and handle this situation? In this article, BHW will provide a detailed guide on how to check and fix audience overlap in Facebook ads.
The problem of audience overlap often occurs when running Facebook ads.
During ad deployment, many advertisers often encounter a common situation: audience overlap. Simply put, this happens when the same user appears in multiple audience sets that you are targeting.
The concept of audience overlap
Let’s say we create an audience set A with a certain number of people. At the same time, we also have audience B. When these two sets run in parallel, there will definitely be a group of people who are in both A and B. This group is the overlap.
When that happens, Facebook will not be able to differentiate which ads a user has seen. As a result, a customer may repeatedly see the same ad sample, or many different ads from the same brand. This causes the budget to be wasted on the same person too many times without expanding the new customer base.
Practical example of overlap in Facebook advertising.
Let’s imagine:
- One audience set has 1.8 million people.
- Another audience set has 5.7 million people.
At first glance, these two numbers seem separate and independent. But upon closer inspection, we found that there is a percentage of users who appear in both sets. It is this group that constantly sees the ads, while many new potential customers have not been reached yet. This overlap is why, after a period of running, you will see the ads gradually lose their effectiveness:
- Users feel bored when ads are repeated too often.
- Facebook ad costs increase because the budget is spent on the same person instead of expanding reach.
- Decreased performance: the number of orders or conversions is lower than the cost spent.
This is a very noteworthy issue because if not handled promptly, your ads will quickly fall into a “money-burning” situation without achieving the expected results.
Audience overlap causes customer annoyance and wastes ad budget.
When talking about audience overlap, many people only think about increasing costs. In reality, this issue is much more complex, especially when considering the customer experience and the wasteful spending of the ad budget. Let’s analyze this in more detail through two important aspects:
Excessive ad frequency annoys customers.
One of the important metrics in Facebook advertising is frequency, which is the number of times a person sees your ad within a certain period. If I only see your ad once today, the frequency is 1; if I see it 3 times, the frequency is 3.
When we launch a campaign, we often see that a frequency that’s too high will make customers feel “overwhelmed.” And when there is audience overlap, this situation becomes even more severe:
- If a person is in two different audience segments, they may see the ad twice as often as normal.
- If they are in three or four segments at the same time, the number of impressions can increase by 3 to 4 times within the same period.
- When the display frequency is multiplied many times (5, 10, or even 15 times), users will experience “ad over-saturation.” Instead of a positive impression, they will feel annoyed, frustrated, and may even want to hide or block your ads.
This means that advertisers not only waste their budget but also harm the customer experience, reducing brand credibility in their eyes.
Misaligned ad messaging causes customer distrust
Usually, when building multiple campaigns, you won’t use the same image or offer for every audience file. For example:
- For remarketing, you might offer a 15% discount.
- For a behavioral audience, you might offer customers a 1-month free trial.
- For an interested audience, you apply a $10 discount.
- For a lookalike audience, you simply introduce the brand.
This sounds reasonable, but if a customer falls into multiple audience files at the same time, they will be “bombed” with various messages: sometimes a 15% discount, sometimes a 1-month free trial, sometimes just a brand introduction. This leads to customer cognitive dissonance, making them unsure of what the real offer is. In many cases, they even lose trust in the brand, thinking that you lack transparency or “say one thing and do another.”
So, audience overlap not only makes you spend more money on ads but can also ruin the entire customer experience and trust which is extremely dangerous in today’s fierce competitive landscape. If you are looking to expand your brand’s advertising campaigns, please contact BlackHatWorld via Telegram: @bhw_agency
Black Hat World is proud to be a leading reputable brand in the field of renting Facebook ad accounts. For over a decade, we have been a trusted partner, supporting numerous businesses in the online training industry to successfully implement a range of campaigns, resulting in impressive revenue figures.
We are committed to providing our customers with high-quality accounts that have high trust, stable performance, and consistent spending history. Our entire account system is operated in a dedicated Proxy/VPS environment with a clean IP, ensuring safety and gaining the trust of Facebook. As a result, the accounts minimize the risk of being checkpointed or flagged, allowing businesses to confidently scale their advertising without worrying about interruptions.
How to see audience overlap on Facebook Ads (Step-by-Step Guide 2025)
When multiple ad sets accidentally target the same group of customers, they will compete with each other in the auction system, which increases costs and reduces efficiency. Therefore, knowing how to check audience overlap is an extremely important skill for optimizing your campaign. Below is a detailed guide for advertisers on how to do it. Specifically:
Save the audience files before checking.
For example, we have two ad sets:
- Ad set 1: Targets Fashion and Shopping interests.
- Ad set 2: Targets Beauty and Cosmetics Brands’ interests.
The first step is to save these audiences so you can compare them.
With Ad set 1, we click on edit, go to the audience section, and select Save this audience. If you do not see this option, it is most likely because you are using the Advantage+ audience, so switch back to the original audience. Then, we name it Ad set 1 – Fashion & Shopping and click Save As New. That’s it.
Next, we do the same with Ad set 2, saving the target audience based on cosmetic brands. We name it Ad set 2 – Beauty & Cosmetic Brands and click Save as audience.
Performing an Audience Overlap Check
After saving both audiences, go to the Audiences section in Ads Manager. A list of your saved audiences will be displayed here.
We select both audiences, click on the three dots (…), and then choose Show audience overlap.
Immediately, Meta will show the overlap percentage between the two audience groups. For example, Ad Set 1 – Fashion & Shopping and Ad Set 2 – Beauty & Cosmetic Brands have an overlap of up to 72%.
This means that nearly three-quarters of the people in these two ad sets are actually the same group, and if they are allowed to run in parallel, they will “compete” directly with each other, causing ad costs to increase.
Limitations when checking Audience Overlap
Some of you must be wondering: “Can we check for overlap between an interest audience and a custom audience like Website Visitors or Facebook/Instagram engagers?”
The answer is: you cannot. When we try to select a custom audience file (for example: all website visitors) and an interest audience file, then click on show audience overlap, the system will show a notification that, for data security reasons, groups like Website Visitors, Facebook Engaged, or Instagram Engaged cannot be used to estimate overlap. In other words, you can only check the overlap between Interest-based audience groups, while Custom Audiences do not support this feature.
Checking for audience overlap on Facebook ads is a must-do step if you want to optimize costs and improve campaign effectiveness. With just a few simple steps, we can detect overlapping audience groups and make timely adjustments before they start competing against each other. Apply this regularly to make your ads run more smoothly and bring sustainable profit this year!
Frequently asked questions
You can use the Audience Overlap tool in Ads Manager to compare multiple audience files. Facebook will show the percentage of overlap between the files, making it easy for you to identify which groups are overlapping and make optimal decisions.
Yes. When two or more audience groups overlap, your ads can “bid” against themselves, leading to increased costs and reduced effectiveness. Detecting and eliminating this overlap helps save budget and improve campaign performance.
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