Solved: Facebook Ads Audience Overlap with $200-$600 Budget

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I had a look at your situation. It's a good problem to have – campaigns working so well that you're worried about touching them. But that fear of the learning phase and audience overlap is probably what's holding you back from scaling properly. Let's get that sorted.

First off, let's talk about audience overlap...

Honestly, with a budget of $200-$600 a day and Advantage+ campaigns, you shouldn't be losing sleep over audience overlap. It's a bit of an old-school concern that doesn't apply in the same way anymore. The algorithm is pretty good at managing this on its own, it conducts an internal auction to prevent your own ad sets from bidding against each other too much.

The real danger isn't overlap; it's over-segmentation. When you split your budget across loads of different campaigns and ad sets for each country, you're actually starving the algorithm of data. You give it tiny little sandpits to play in instead of one massive beach. This makes it much harder for it to find pockets of customers efficiently, which ends up driving your costs up and making the learning phase last forever. Your idea of a new campaign with all countries together is actually closer to the right approach than you think.

The myth of avoiding the 'learning phase'

I see this all the time. People get a campaign out of learning and then they're terrified to touch it. But here's the thing: creative fatigue is real. The ads that are working brilliantly today will stop working in a few weeks or months. If you don't have a constant stream of new creative to test, your performance will eventually plateau and then decline. Fact.

You have to see the learning phase as a cost of doing business, a necessary step to find the next winning ad. The goal isn't to *avoid* learning, it's to get through it as quickly as possible with good data. And you do that by feeding the algorithm enough budget and a big enough audience to learn from, which is exactly what a simplified structure does. Adding new ads into your existing, well-performing Advantage+ campaign is a valid strategy, but can sometimes disrupt what's already working. A better way is having a clear system.

A simpler account structure I'd recommend...

Instead of thinking in terms of countries, I'd suggest thinking in terms of the customer journey: prospecting (finding new people) and retargeting (talking to people who already know you). This gives you the best of both worlds – the power of Advantage+ for acquisition and the control of a standard campaign for your warm audiences.

Here’s what that looks like visually:

You'll need to look at your prospecting strategy...

For finding new customers, you want to give Meta's AI as much room to work as possible. I'd set up one single Advantage+ Shopping Campaign and put the bulk of your budget into it (maybe 70-80%).

Inside this campaign, you group your countries by similarity. For example, create one campaign targeting the "Big 5" english speaking countries (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). Then maybe another for top-performing European countries. This consolidation gives the algorithm a huge audience pool to optimise within, which is exactly what it needs to perform at its best. This is also where you should be testing all your new ads. Let them run, see what the algorithm latches onto, and double down on the winners.

When you're trying to figure out what you can afford to spend, you need to understand the relationship between what you pay for a click and how well your landing page converts that click. Here’s a simple calculator to play with those numbers.

I'd say you need a dedicated retargeting campaign...

This is where you claw back all the low-hanging fruit. I would set up a seperate, standard conversions campaign for this, not Advantage+. This gives you more control over who you're targeting and how often they see your ads. Here, you'll put the remaining 20-30% of your budget.

Your audiences here should be based on intent. You want to group people by how close they got to buying from you. I usually structure it like this, from warmest to coolest:

You'd use your proven, best-performing ads in this campaign. The message here is different – it’s about reminding them, overcoming objections, or maybe showing them a testimonial or a specific offer to get them over the line. You don't need to constantly test new creative here in the same way you do for prospecting.

But how does this affect my returns?

This kind of structure is built for one thing: profitable scaling. By giving the prospecting algorithm what it needs (budget and data) and treating your retargeting with a bit more surgical precision, you create a stable system. We've used this exact approach for numerous eCommerce clients. One subscription box company we worked with hit a 1000% Return On Ad Spend. Another apparel brand, which was struggling with fragmented international campaigns, saw a 691% return after we consolidated their structure. The principles are sound.

At the end of the day, it's all about your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). If you know your numbers, you can make much better decisions. This calculator can help you see how changes in your ad spend and revenue affect your overall return.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This is a lot to take in, so here it is broken down into actionable steps.

Why you might want an expert eye on this

Look, the ideas I've laid out are straightforward, but making them work in the real world can be tricky. Knowing how to allocate budget between the campaigns, what creative angles to test, how to interpret the data to make the right decisions... that all comes from experience. It's the difference between a good account and a great one that can scale profitably month after month.

Getting an expert to review your setup can often uncover opportunities you might have missed and prevent costly mistakes as you start to push your budget higher. If you'd like, we offer a completely free, no-obligation strategy session where we can go through your account together on a call and I can give you some more specific pointers.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh