Troubleshoot Overlapping Audiences

If audience overlap is causing you problems:

• Consolidate your overlapping ad sets. If some ad sets are targeting very similar audiences, you could see better results by consolidating them into one with a larger budget.
• Refine your targeting. Take advantage of location, age, gender, interest and/or behavior-based targeting to ensure each ad set has a specific and distinct audience. You can also try creating separate Custom Audiences (from a pixel or your customer data) or Lookalike Audiences (of people similar to your best customers) for each ad set.

Consolidation and refinement are opposite ways of solving the problem. (One makes an audience larger, the other makes an audience smaller.) The best choice is different for each situation. However, a useful idea to keep in mind when deciding is: If two audiences are distinct enough that you set different bids for ad sets targeting one compared to the other, try keeping them separate and refining them further. If not, try consolidating them and combining their budgets.

If you're still having trouble, check out this general troubleshooting guide.

If you're having trouble with this in relation to lookalike audiences, consider trying out the advanced options for lookalike audience creation.