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Facebook Ads – Why duplicate adsets instead of doubling budget?
Hey guys, rookie here trying to learn FB ads
Why is it common for people to duplicate adsets multiple times, instead of duplicating them once into another CBO and increasing the budget?
For ex, this is a common dropshipping/Shopify scaling method:
CBO 1 – 10 adsets (5 of them are successful)
CBO 2 – 10 adsets (the same 5 successful adsets from CBO 1, but duplicated twice)
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Why do people duplicate them again, instead of just doubling the budget on CBO 2? Is it so people will see your ad twice?
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4 Replies
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There’s a few reasons.
One reason is to avoid the “learning phase” of the algorithm.
If you have a successful ad set that’s optimized and getting conversions, then you double the budget, the algorithm had to restart and learn because you changed a major aspect of the adset. This could reduce conversions for a time or forever.
Another reason would be to A/A test.
We hear a lot about A/B tests but A/A tests are just as important. You should always be skeptical of any success you’re having online. There’s a lot going on. Just because an adset is working, doesn’t mean you’re a genius. It could be luck.
For complicated reasons, you could dupe the adset and get worse results with nothing changed. So it’s important to test this.
So usually this is why people duplicate ad sets instead of increasing the budget.
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Not sure if other people are using the Duplicate feature this way, but I usually use it to copy something I’d like to make some small changes to.
For example, say I have a campaign that targets California, but now I’m ready to target New York also, and say I decided to do this by using two different campaigns. Ok, easy as pie, duplicate the campaign, rename it accordingly, find the location targeting in my ad sets, remove Cali, add NY, publish. You can build a new fully populated campaign in under a minute.
95% of the time I don’t need to start a new campaign or ad set or ad completely from scratch, I want to keep most of my settings and just make a simple change or two for the new iteration. Duplicating makes this process incredibly fast and easy.
Also, there’s a copy/paste feature now that works great for copying an ad from one ad set and dropping it another dozen ad sets in just a couple of clicks. These features are a lifesaver when you’re pressed for time.
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u/Luc_Flynn had a great response – if I may just add something to accent the idea behind duplicating the same ad sets:
Facebook’s algorithm on an ad-set level works a bit like this:
Every day, a bucket of your audience is assigned to an ad set inside a campaign. This audience bucket is testing an array of dynamically generated criteria as for which portion of your entire audience is responding to your ad.I.e.: If I’m using an ad set to serve ads to an audience with a single interest – phone cases – then on the first day Facebook may assign that ad set a bucket of people inside that audience who like phone cases AND like dogs and see how the performance looks. The next day, Facebook may assign a different bucket of the audience such that now its not people who like phone cases + dogs, but instead it’s people who like phone cases + cats.
Depending on the performance difference of each bucket, facebook starts optimizing your ad and working with your pixel data to hone in on which bucket of your audience is most susceptible to your ads.
So… that’s how facebook does their optimization testing on an ad set level. It’s definitely not as simple as testing criterias one-by-one such as the example I laid out where fb tests +dogs first then +cats second, etc etc. But you catch my drift.
Now to answer your question –
People duplicate ad sets in order to not lose the accumulated daily batch learning that facebook’s done to your ad set. If it did, it would enter the “learning phase” again as per u/Luc_Flynn’s comment.
If you took your $50 spent ad set and duplicated it into a different campaign and raised the budget to $500, facebook would have to go through the daily batch testing again until it reaches similar stats (which it may not, due to the local maximum fallacy of localized optimization)
That was a lot of writing. Basically it saves your progress on your ads.
Much like saving progress on video games.
I’m gna go play video games now.
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Simply follow this:
1. Don’t fuck with what is working
2. Duplicate what’s working and play with it (whether an ad set in the same campaign or into a new campaign)If you mess with an ongoing ad set, you’ll restart the learning phase.
Facebook is fickle as hell.
Launching the same thing 10 times will give you 10 different results so you gotta duplicate and re-test as well.
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