When running cold and warm campaigns together on Meta, exclude warm audiences from cold ad sets. Otherwise both campaigns compete for the same users, making cold campaigns look better than they are by stealing easy conversions from warm audiences.
This is one of those things almost nobody teaches, but it makes a big difference once you see it. If you're running cold campaigns and warm campaigns at the same time, your warm audiences should be excluded from the cold campaigns. A lot of advertisers never do that. So what ends up happening is their cold and warm campaigns are both competing for the same people, and that creates a really misleading picture. Because if you do not exclude warm audiences, Meta is usually going to grab the easiest conversions first. That means your so-called cold campaign starts spending money on people who already know who you are. Past website visitors, people who engage with your content, video viewers, people on your email list. So of course the cold campaign looks better than it really is. It's not actually finding new people. It's just harvesting the warmest part of the audience. But the whole point of a cold campaign is to bring in brand new eyeballs, people who have never heard of you, never clicked anything, never been through your funnel before. That's what actually grows the business. So the fix is simple. In every cold ad set, you exclude the people who already know you— website visitors, social engagers, meaningful video viewers, email list uploads, and past buyers. Once you do that, the Your cold campaign can finally do the job it was supposed to do. And the nice part is your warm campaign gets better too, because now it is not fighting with cold for the same impressions. Each campaign has its own audience, its own job, and usually its own creative strategy too. It's a small change, but it can completely change how you read performance across the whole account. Because if you've been running cold and warm side by side without exclusions, there's a good chance your cold campaign was never really cold in the first place.
