Ad set
An ad set is the middle level of a Meta ad campaign, where the budget, schedule, audience and placements for a group of ads are defined.
On Meta's ad platform, campaigns have three levels. The campaign sets the objective, such as sales. The ad set defines who sees the ads, where and for how much, with settings such as budget, schedule, audience, placements and the optimisation event. The ads inside the ad set hold the creatives. TikTok calls its equivalent level an ad group.
Advertisers use ad sets to test. A common pattern is to put several creatives into one ad set and let the platform find the best, or to run the same creative in several ad sets with different audiences. Once something works, they raise the budget or duplicate the ad set to scale.
You cannot see a competitor's ad sets, budgets or audiences in public ad libraries. What you can see are the ads themselves, when they started, and sometimes their reach. Several near-identical ads launched on the same day often come from one ad set test. When most of them stop after a few days and one keeps running, that survivor is likely the winner.
RivalSonar's AI score, in beta, sorts ads into testing, scaling or winning to help you spot this pattern faster.
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