Meta’s ad ecosystem has been a game-changer for businesses from Toronto to Tokyo, and with the release of Advantage Plus, the possibilities have expanded even further. While the automation features might seem straightforward, getting the most out of them requires an expert helping hand.
In this guide, we’ll explain how Advantage Plus lifts your campaigns to new heights, from better shopping ads to refined audience targeting and smarter remarketing.
Let’s show how these tools can help you engage more customers and sharpen your marketing strategy.
What is Advantage Plus?
Meta introduced Advantage Plus in 2022 as a response to Apple’s iOS 14 privacy changes, which limited how advertisers could track and target users. This shift hit businesses hard, especially those relying on precise targeting for ads.
Advantage Plus stepped in to solve that problem, initially focusing on eCommerce. It uses machine learning to handle tasks like building campaigns, choosing the right audience, and adjusting ads as they run.
The results have been fantastic. Meta reports that businesses using Advantage Plus saw up to a 32% boost in return on ad spend (ROAS).
While it started with shopping campaigns, it’s now available for other types of ads, making it more versatile. However, it’s not a complete “set it and forget it” tool. Regular adjustments and fine-tuning are still needed to make sure it’s consistently working well.
How Does Facebook Advantage Plus Work?
Advantage Plus uses machine learning to manage the heavy lifting in your Facebook advertising campaigns.
Here’s what’s under the bonnet:
- Real-Time Monitoring: The system keeps track of your campaign performance and adjusts on the fly to ensure the right audience sees your ads.
- Creative Testing: It functions like advanced A/B testing, rotating between different creative elements—images, headlines, and text—to discover what works best with your audience.
- Automated Adjustments: Based on live data, the system refines ad placements and formats, saving you from manual tweaks while improving engagement.
- Targeting Accuracy: Advantage Plus uses AI to fine-tune audience targeting in real-time, ensuring that your ads reach the most relevant segments.
Pro Tip: Meta Advantage+ automates tasks like creative testing and real-time targeting adjustments – but it requires first-party data integration for better performance, specifically via the Conversions API.
We don’t blame you if that last sentence made your eyes glaze over – it’s all quite technical, isn’t it? API in the what now?
We suggest you leave the tech headaches to the experts so you can get back to doing what you love.
Understanding Advantage Campaigns
Advantage+ offers several campaign types designed to help you meet your business goals—whether that’s driving sales, increasing app installs, or attracting new customers. Each type focuses on making the most of your budget.
But these campaigns aren’t fully automated. To achieve the best results, you’ll need clear objectives and a deep understanding of your target audience. While AI takes care of the more technical aspects, having an experienced human fine-tuning things ensures everything stays on track.
Types of Advantage Campaigns
Meta Advantage+ offers campaign options to suit different needs—whether focused on sales, generating leads, or expanding brand reach. The platform adapts to performance data in real-time, keeping your marketing efforts efficient.
Here’s how Advantage Shopping Campaigns can help eCommerce businesses grow.
Advantage Shopping Campaign
Advantage Shopping Campaigns help eCommerce businesses by automatically delivering relevant products to potential customers using Dynamic Product Ads. These ads adjust in real-time based on inventory updates, ensuring that your ads always reflect available stock.
Key Metric: Conversion Rates
The primary goal is to improve conversion rates by experimenting with product placements, ad formats, and creative elements. For instance, if your current conversion rate is 2%, these campaigns could potentially increase it to 3-4% by optimizing the ad content.
Example: Let’s say you own a shoe store, and a specific model of running shoes sells out. The system will replace that item with another available product, ensuring your ads stay relevant without wasting impressions.
With an Advantage Shopping Campaign, you can also monitor the Event Match Quality score, which measures how well your customer data matches Facebook’s user data.
A higher score (above 8) ensures that your ads reach the most relevant potential buyers, maximizing your return on ad spend.
Facebook Advantage Plus Shopping Campaigns
With Facebook Advantage Plus Shopping Campaigns, the platform’s AI tests different creative formats—such as video ads and static images—in real-time. The goal is to find out what drives better engagement and conversions.
Key Metric: Click-Through Rate (CTR)
When testing different formats, focus on the CTR. If video ads are driving a CTR of 1.5%, but static images are lagging behind at 1%, the AI will prioritize the format that gets more attention.
Here’s an example of how it works:
- Video Ads: If you’re launching a new kitchen appliance, the AI will compare how a 30-second demo video performs versus static images of the product. The ad format that generates more clicks will be prioritized.
- Creative Variations: The system tests different combinations of headlines and images. For example, it may compare “Upgrade Your Kitchen” with “Transform Your Cooking Space,” and based on the results, it will automatically favor the version that leads to higher engagement.
Meta Advantage Audience
Meta Advantage Audience refines your ad targeting using interest-based and lookalike audiences, ensuring you reach potential customers who are most likely to engage with your products.
Key Metric: Audience Overlap
Audience Overlap measures how often your ads are being shown to the same users. If this rate exceeds 20-30%, you risk wasting ad impressions. Keeping track of this helps you avoid unnecessary repetition and improve reach.
Example: Let’s say you’re selling skincare products. The system identifies users who’ve interacted with related beauty brands and adds them to your lookalike audience, helping you expand your reach while keeping your ads relevant.
Targeting with Advantage
Advantage+ offers powerful tools for businesses to reach their intended audiences. However, ensuring that these tools perform optimally requires expert guidance and a thoughtful strategy.
Let’s look at them in more detail.
Advantage Remarketing Solutions
Advantage+ is designed to help you reconnect with previous customers through Reminder Ads and Dynamic Product Ads. These ads play a significant role in increasing customer retention by showing relevant products that users have already shown interest in – driving them back to your store.
The system also identifies broader audiences, automatically targeting potential new customers. With expert management, you can fine-tune your audience options and strike a balance between finding new leads and re-engaging existing customers.
Pro Tip: During the learning phase of this having an expert on hand will help ensure timely adjustments and reduce your cost per acquisition.
Advantage Detailed Targeting
Advantage+ allows businesses to use detailed targeting options that help you segment your audience by specific factors such as age, gender, and location. This gives advertisers the flexibility to craft more bespoke ads for different demographic groups.
However, precision in audience targeting doesn’t come solely from the platform. A digital marketing expert can guide audience segmentation to ensure that your ads reach the right groups, while manual adjustments in campaign setup will allow for more control over the message.
Pro Tip: Although broad audiences can be effective in some cases, focusing on refined segments will often lead to stronger results.
How to Turn Off Advantage Detailed Targeting
If you’re looking to disable AI-driven detailed targeting in Advantage+, follow these steps:
- Open Facebook Ads Manager: Navigate to your Ads Manager dashboard.
- Select Your Campaign: Pick the campaign where you want to disable detailed targeting.
- Go to Audience Settings: In the Audience Controls section during the campaign setup, locate the detailed targeting toggle.
- Turn Off Detailed Targeting: Uncheck the box for detailed targeting options. This will allow you to set your own target audience manually.
- Save Changes: Make sure your settings are saved before continuing with the campaign.
Meta’s AI Advertising
Meta’s AI tools extend beyond Advantage Plus, offering a broader set of features designed to improve campaign performance and help digital marketers save time.
Here’s a breakdown of how Meta’s tools work:
- AI advertising: Meta’s AI uses real-time data to adjust campaigns, ensuring your advertising efforts reach the right audience consistently
- Machine learning models: These models test various creative elements, such as video ads, static images, and product videos, to figure out which formats capture attention best
- Creative variation: Meta’s AI tools, like the AI Sandbox, allow advertisers to quickly generate text variations and backgrounds, offering a range of creative options without manual work
(Source)
- Image resizing: The AI Sandbox includes image outcropping, a feature that automatically resizes images to fit formats like Stories, Reels, and the main feed, reducing creative production costs and time spent on adjustments
Keep in mind again that – while AI manages the technical aspects – a skilled and savvy team is essential to fine-tune the tools and make sure your ads hit the right audience.
Meta advertising examples
Now that we’ve seen how Meta’s AI tools operate, let’s look at some real-world examples:
Example 1 – KIDLY
KIDLY – a UK-based children’s retailer – used Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns to improve their online ad campaigns. By allowing Meta’s machine learning to test up to 150 creative variations, KIDLY saw a notable increase in ROAS.
This automation allowed them to focus on other aspects of their online store, driving increased online sales while their ads ran efficiently.
Example 2 – Monos
From the UK, let’s go to Canada for Monos, a luggage brand that used Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns to improve their campaign performance.
During a case study by Facebook, some amazing growth was discovered:
Example 3 – Jenny Bird
And Jenny Bird, a jewelry brand, adopted Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns to improve their audience targeting and improve conversion rates.
As a result, they achieved a 14% reduction in cost per purchase and a 17% increase in conversions, making the campaign a success in meeting their campaign objectives while staying within their advertising budget
Facebook Advertising Updates
Now, we’ve already covered a lot of ground, but it’s important to stay updated with Meta’s newest developments. Here’s what’s changing or has changed that you should know about.
- AI-Powered Flexible Ad Formats
Meta’s AI-Powered Flexible Ad Formats were introduced in November 2023. This feature dynamically optimizes ad formats—whether it’s a single image, carousel, or video—based on the best performance for each user and placement. It helps advertisers by automatically selecting the most engaging format without requiring manual adjustments.
This flexibility allows brands to create up to 10 images or videos, and Meta’s AI will pick the best combinations to display across different placements like Facebook Feed, Instagram, and Reels.
- Collaborative Campaigns for Retail Media Networks
Meta’s Collaborative Ads tool now works with retail media networks, allowing businesses to reach new customers through partner channels, like grocery or hardware stores. By accessing custom audiences and integrating in-store data, this update improves campaign performance across both physical and digital sales. - Manual Ad Campaign Options
While Meta is advancing its automation tools, businesses that prefer more control can still benefit from expanded manual campaigns. These updates provide advertisers with increased precision in targeting and creative elements, making it ideal for brands that require more granular control.
Advantage Enhancements in Ads
Finally, let’s look at some new ad-level improvements that are making waves this year and beyond. These features focus on creative optimization and improved targeting tools.
Creative Automation Tools
We already touched on Meta’s AI Sandbox earlier, which lets advertisers experiment with creative variations like text and background changes. Now, with Creative Automation Tools, Meta takes it a step further.
These tools are production-ready and help you quickly adjust high-quality images and generate automated videos for different formats, such as Facebook Feed, Reels, and Stories. The idea is to maintain consistency across platforms without spending hours on edits.
Indeed, SEO bible Search Engine Land was as impressed with these new tools as we were:
Think of these tools like Batman and Alfred. The AI Sandbox is your Batman—out in the field, testing different approaches and taking creative risks. Then, Creative Automation steps in as Alfred, polishing up those ideas and making sure they’re sharp, refined, and ready for action across all your channels.
Custom Audience Enhancements
Do you remember earlier – with our first Pro Tip – we mentioned how Meta’s Conversions API helps Advantage+ work better by using your own customer data?
Now, Meta has improved this even further. You can build custom audiences based on the latest interactions your customers have had, making your ads more relevant and timely. It’s a more direct way to ensure you’re speaking to the right people, all while keeping privacy in check, so you don’t have to stress about compliance.
Improved Reporting
Advertisers can now access detailed insights at the campaign level, including region-specific data that helps optimize daily budgets and overall performance.
Final Thoughts
If you don’t know your ROAS from your API, or your Advantage+ campaigns from your lookalike audiences – we’ve got you covered.
Let us at Nomadic Advertising handle all the complexities of the Meta maze for you.
Book a free 30-minute consultation and let’s supercharge your campaigns together.
Key Takeaways
- Meta’s Advantage+ uses AI to optimize ad campaigns, improving targeting and making real-time adjustments, potentially increasing return on ad spend by up to 32%.
- The system offers various campaign types, including Advantage Shopping Campaigns and Advantage Audience, each focusing on specific business goals like sales or lead generation.
- While automated, Advantage+ still requires human oversight for setting clear objectives and fine-tuning strategies to achieve optimal results.
- Meta’s AI tools extend beyond Advantage+, offering features like creative testing, automated image resizing, and AI-powered flexible ad formats.
