When to duplicate Facebook ad sets: Trick to 10x performance

Duplicating an ad or ad set is a very useful tactic to have in your toolbox as a Facebook advertiser. In this article, I'm going to show you how to duplicate ads and ad sets (into the existing or different campaigns) and in what scenarios you should use duplication.

First let's talk the how.

How to duplicate a Facebook ad

1. Login to Facebook Ads Manager.
2. Open the Campaign and then the Ad Set.
3. Hover over the Ad you want to duplicate.
4. Click the "duplicate" link that appears.
5. Choose the Campaign you want the new Ad to appear in.
6. Choose whether to keep the engagement metrics for the new ad.

Once you click "duplicate" you'll have a few options to choose from for where you want your newly duplicated ad to go. You also have the option to keep existing post engagement metrics (likes, comments, reactions, etc).

Although not exactly the same as duplicating an ad, you can take an organic Facebook post and transform it into an by creating an ad using the post's "post ID."

You can also take an existing ad, grab its post ID, and create another ad from the original ad, which keeps all the engagement. You can do this manually in Facebook ads manager, or you can use Revealbot Post ID Export tool to streamline the workflow.

How to duplicate a Facebook ad set

1. Login to Facebook Ads Manager.
2. Open the Campaign with the Ad Set.
3. Hover over the Ad Set you want to duplicate.
4. Click the "duplicate" link that appears.
5. Choose the Campaign you want the new Ad Set to appear in.
6. Choose whether to keep the engagement metrics for the new ad.

After clicking "duplicate" you'll have a few options similar to when duplicate a Facebook ad. You'll be able to choose the campaign you want your newly duplicated ad set to go into and whether you want to keep the post engagements on the ads inside the ad set. Additionally, with ad set duplication, you can choose whether you want to create a test with the original ad set.

When to duplicate a Facebook ad set

There's a variety of reasons why you'd want to try duplicating an ad set to scale your Facebook ad campaigns. I'll show you a few I use often and how to automate it with Revealbot.

Note: the hour when a new ad set (or campaign or ad) is launched matters. In our experience, it’s best to launch in the morning in the timezone of your Facebook ad account for the ad to gain traction.

Use duplication to fix an ad set not delivering

It's not uncommon for a new ad set to just not take off. Sometimes it’s really not your targeting and creatives - it could just be Facebook's algorithm that's keeping your ad from converting.

Here’s how we know this is even a thing: This has happened to us plenty of times and we couldn't figure out anything wrong with our target, our ads, optimization settings, or anything else. So I just duplicated an ad set and relaunched it with exactly the same targeting and ad creatives inside it made it work.

The theory is that if an ad set doesn't get any traction early on, Facebook's algorithm prematurely decides it's not going to deliver it. So simply relaunching it pushes Facebook to retry the ad set out.

So if you ever have an ad set just not getting any delivery, duplicate it and see if that does the trick. If you're running a lot of campaigns on Facebook, you may want to automate this process with Revealbot's Facebook ad automation tool.

This is an automated rule built in Revealbot. It's set up so that if in a 24 hour period, an ad set has a reach less than 50, it will duplicate the ad set and pause the original. Unfortunately, Facebook's native automated rule tool doesn't allow "duplicate" as an action for a rule - that's one of the differences between Facebook's Automated Rules and Revealbot.

Pretty cool, right? By the way, we have a 14-day free trial if you want to put this to the test yourself.

In order to make sure your ad sets are duplicated at the right time, just be sure to create the ad set duplication rule itself at that exact time. Set it to run daily, and all your ad sets (or just the ones you choose to run it against) will be checked at that moment every day forward.

So don't worry if an ad set is not performing well until several duplication events fail to bring in good results.

Duplicate a high performing ad set to increase and extend an ad set's performance

You may have heard about audience overlap and how you don't want to compete against yourself. The problem is, this isn't always true. Let me explain.

There are five to six million advertisers across Facebook and Instagram. Chances are there are thousands of advertisers targeting and competing for the same users you are in some way. In this sense, for large audiences, it's unlikely you'll actually be competing against yourself if you have more than one ad set targeting the same exact audience.

It's been mentioned in Facebook advertising circles and we've tried it - duplicating a successful ad set can create a big boost in performance. This is partially due to how the Facebook algorithm tends to kickstart a new ad set. And since you know your ad set is performing well, the kickstart will only make it perform better. So here's how I set this up to happen automatically in Revealbot.

The rule for this is simple: If an ad set has a desirable cost per purchase (or whatever your goal is) and has spent enough to have several purchases in a day (my example uses 8x), then duplicate it. This automated rule is also set up to keep the original ad set live so there will more two of the same exact ad sets live if this rule fires.

So on any given day, when performance is high, the ad set will be duplicated, you can also pair this tactic with other tactics to scale Facebook ads, like slowly increasing daily budgets over time.

If you like the idea of using automated rules like this, Facebook does have a native automated rules tool that you can use for free to get started and Revealbot has even more functionality to make rules very powerful for day-to-day management and for scaling. Check out our guide on Facebook automated rules to learn more about Facebook ad automation.