How to Share Audiences Between Facebook Ad Accounts

Sharing a well-performing Facebook audience from one ad account to another is a powerful way to scale your campaigns and maintain consistency. It allows you to leverage data you’ve already gathered without having to start from scratch. This article will walk you through exactly how to share audiences between different ad accounts and explain the best practices to follow.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

Why Share Facebook Audiences?

Before jumping into the "how," it's helpful to understand the "why." While it may seem like a simple technical step, sharing audiences is a strategic move that can save you significant time and improve your ad performance. It eliminates the guesswork and allows you to apply what’s working in one area of your business to another.

Here are a few common scenarios where sharing audiences is a game-changer:

• Launching a New Project: If you're launching a new product or brand that targets a similar demographic as an existing one, you can share a high-performing "video viewers" or "website visitors" audience to give the new ad account a head start.
• For Marketing Agencies: When managing multiple clients in the same niche, you might build a powerful engagement audience on one client's account. While you can't share PII-based customer lists between clients, you can build an effective cold-targeting strategy for one client based on Lookalikes of another client's purchasers (with their consent, of course) or recreate the targeting parameters. More often, it’s about having an organized workflow where all assets are easily assignable.
• Account Organization: Some businesses use separate ad accounts for different regions, product lines, or business objectives (e.g., one for lead generation, one for e-commerce sales). Sharing audiences ensures all accounts benefit from the same high-quality data.
• Migrating to a New Ad Account: If an ad account gets disabled or you decide to restructure your Business Manager, sharing your invaluable audiences to the new account ensures you don't lose years of pixel data and audience-building efforts.

In short, it’s about working smarter, not harder. You’re letting Meta’s algorithm do its job based on the strong signals you've already provided it.

The Main Method: Sharing Audiences Within a Business Manager

The most common and straightforward way to share an audience is when both the source and destination ad accounts are housed within the same Facebook Business Manager (now known as Meta Business Suite). If your company manages multiple brands or ad accounts internally, this will be your go-to method.

Follow these steps carefully.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

Step 1: Verify Your Permissions

You can't share what you don't own or have control over. Before you start, make sure you have Admin access to the Business Manager that owns the ad accounts and the audience you want to share. Standard "Employee" access is not enough to share assets like audiences.

To check your role, go to Business Settings > People, find your name, and see what access level you have.

Step 2: Navigate to the 'Audiences' Section

This is where all your saved audiences live. You can find it in your Business Manager settings.

1. Go to https://business.facebook.com/.
2. Click the hamburger menu (☰ All Tools) on the left sidebar.
3. Under the 'Advertise' column, select Audiences. This will take you to a dashboard showing all audiences associated with your selected ad account.

Pro Tip: If you manage many ad accounts, use the dropdown at the top-left of the Audiences dashboard to select the specific ad account that currently owns the audience you want to share.

Step 3: Select and Share Your Audience

Find the audience you wish to share from the list. It can be a Custom Audience from website visitors or a Lookalike Audience you've built.

1. Check the box next to the audience name.
2. Once selected, several buttons will appear above the audience list, including 'Edit', 'Use', 'Delete', and 'Share'. Click on 'Share'.

If the 'Share' button is greyed out, it typically means you don't have the required admin permissions or the audience type cannot be shared (like a Saved Audience).

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

Step 4: Assign the Destination Ad Account

A pop-up window labeled "Share Audience" will appear. Here, you'll specify which ad account(s) you want to share the audience with.

• In the text field available, start typing the name or ID of the ad account you want to share the audience with.
• Select the correct ad account from the dropdown list that appears. You can select multiple accounts here if you need to.

Once you’ve made your selection, click the 'Share' button to confirm.

That's it! The audience is now available in the selected ad account(s) and can be used immediately for targeting in new campaigns and ad sets. The shared audience will continue to update in real-time as the source audience does.

Sharing Between Different Business Managers Using Partner Access

What if the ad accounts are in separate Business Managers? This is a very common scenario for agencies working with clients or companies with distinct business divisions.

In this case, you can't assign an ad account directly. Instead, you'll assign a 'Partner.' This process grants another Business Manager access to your audience.

Step 1: Get the Partner's Business Manager ID

Before you can share, you need the other organization's Business Manager ID number. The admin of the receiving Business Manager can find this by:

1. Going to Business Settings.
2. Clicking on Business Info in the left menu.
3. The 'Business Manager ID' will be listed directly under the business name.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

Step 2: Assign the Audience to a Partner

Go back to your Audiences dashboard (All Tools > Audiences), and select the audience you want to share as you did before.

1. Check the box next to the audience.
2. Click on the 'Actions' dropdown, and then 'Share'. (The workflow might vary slightly in interface updates, but look for a share or assign option).
3. Instead of selecting an account, look for an option to 'Assign Partner'. In the dialog box, you'll be prompted to enter the Partner Business ID you just acquired.
4. You will also need to define their access level: Audience only (targeting) lets them run ads, while targeting and insights also lets them view Audience Insights data. For most agency arrangements, 'Audience only' is sufficient.
5. Click 'Next' and confirm.

The partner organization will receive a notification and must accept the shared asset in their Business Settings under 'Audiences.' Once they accept, they can then assign that newly shared audience to any of the ad accounts they manage within their own Business Manager.

What Types of Audiences Can and Can't Be Shared?

It's important to know the rules. Not every audience you create can be passed between accounts.

• Custom Audiences (Sharable): This is the most popular category. You can share audiences created from website visitors (via Meta Pixel), mobile app users, video viewers, lead form submissions, or people who engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page. When you share these, they remain dynamic and update automatically as new people meet the criteria.
• Lookalike Audiences (Sharable): You can absolutely share Lookalike Audiences. When you do, the receiving ad account can use the Lookalike for targeting but cannot see the underlying source Custom Audience it was built from. This protects the original data source.
• Customer List Custom Audiences (Sharable, with a big warning): While technically possible, be extremely careful here. You must have explicit consent from your users to use their data for marketing purposes, and this applies doubly when sharing it. Always consult Meta's terms and your own company's privacy policies before sharing an audience made from a customer list.
• Saved Audiences (Not Sharable): A Saved Audience is essentially a saved set of targeting criteria (demographics, interests, behaviors). It's not a dynamic list of users. Because of this, it cannot be shared directly. The workaround is simple: open up an ad set that uses the Saved Audience and manually copy the targeting settings into a new ad set in the other account.

Final Thoughts

Effectively sharing Facebook audiences is a core skill for anyone managing multiple ad accounts. By using your Business Manager correctly, you can ensure consistency, scale campaigns more efficiently, and leverage your best-performing data sources to give new projects an immediate lift.

Once you have campaigns successfully running across multiple accounts, the next challenge becomes unified reporting. At some point, manually exporting data and stitching reports together gets old. That's why we built Graphed. We let you connect all your ad accounts into one place so you can use natural language to ask questions like, "Create a dashboard showing spend vs. purchases for my US and EU ad accounts in the last 30 days." You get back a live dashboard in seconds, saving you from the slow, manual process of platform-hopping.