Meta Advantage+: What marketers need to know

Meta is getting bold when it comes to automated features for digital marketers, and Advantage+ is its most innovative move yet for PPC experts taking on shopping campaigns and app installation campaigns. Or is it?

As a marketer, you need to be in the know of what new features are serving your campaigns, and where automation needs to be kept in check. It’s all about visibility, control and strategy. The most savvy marketers will use Advantage+ to scale at speed, with less time spent manually building out and optimising campaigns. 

In this article we’ll take you through the features of Meta’s Advantage+ so you have a comprehensive understanding of the pros and cons of working with this new marketing suite.

• Automations speculations
• What is Meta Advantage+?
• Pros and cons of using Advantage+ campaigns
• The importance of creative strategy with Meta Advtange+
• How to guide the automation strategically
• When not to use Advantage+

Automation speculations

Meta keeps shrinking the distance between “idea” and “live ad” with Advantage+; its most automated campaign type yet. 

Automation promises speed and scale, but it also hides many of the elements of manual control that seasoned advertisers rely on. The primary concern for the most experienced marketers is the lack of manual optimisation provided, with many speculating the efficiency of these campaign types being so automated.

The challenge for the modern marketer is knowing when best to use Advantage+, and when your manual expertise will produce better results. To unlock that deeper understanding, you need to fully understand the advantages and disadvantages of the ad type.

What Is Meta Advantage+?

Meta Advantage+ is a suite of products powered by AI, designed to help marketers optimise their campaigns without the need for hours of manual intervention. It takes the budget optimisation and audience expansion features of Advantage, and puts the focus squarely on campaign creation and beyond. Using machine learning, it helps create similar audiences, optimise your budgeting and bids, assist with shopping and ad campaigns, elevate the placement of your ads, and improve your ad quality overall.

Much like Google Performance Max, advertisers provide the campaign objectives, creative assets and conversion signals, while Meta handles the rest.

There are two primary types of Advantage+ campaigns: shopping (for ecommerce catalogue sales) and mobile app promotion. Both types serve a mix of prospecting and retargeting within the same campaign.

What’s automated - and what isn’t
Before anyone assumes that robots are entirely taking over PPC, let’s get a reality check. Here’s what’s automated with Meta Advantage+ ads, and what you need to supply and control manually.

Automated:

• Placements are automatically selected across feeds, stories, reels, in-stream and the audience network.

• Your audience selection and expansion are fully automated based on performance signals.

• The budget that you set is dynamically allocated across ad groups, placements and audience types, based on your goals and what the algorithm believes will best perform across your campaign.

• Your creative components like headlines, text and visuals are automatically mixed and matched, and are generated from a very small amount of input from your manual copy writing in the ad creation process.

Still manual

• You must supply creative assets: images, videos and copy.

• Your ad copy for lead generation campaigns is based on your chosen, hand-written 5 options of ad copy titles and headlines. You also choose the call to action, and add a description for your campaign and manually select the generated headlines and titles that fit your preferences.

• When ad variations are first generated during the initial setup, you can deselect any ads that don’t match your marketing goals or tone of voice to prevent them from showing or informing ad variations in the future.

• Catalogue feeds need to be set up manually for ecommerce campaigns, and any errors in the feed may be carried through to the final ads without being flagged, so manual checks are very important.

• You must select your conversion events or app goals, based on your marketing objectives.

• Brand-safety settings and account-level exclusions must be manually configured.

Pros and cons of using Advantage+ campaigns

Let’s cut to the chase. Beyond the initial setup, here’s what worlds, and what to bear in mind.

Pros:

• Advantage+ delivers high efficiency when trained with conversion data and diverse creative. Basically, when it works, it works well, based on an informative and relevant data set and assets that really encapsulate everything that makes your brand great.

• You’ll benefit from sheer scale and variety, with up to 150 creative ad combinations being tested at once, to quickly find the best performing options for your brand.

• The other benefit is the time saving simplicity of your campaign setup. It does this by reducing the complexity of your account structure, and requiring a very minimal amount of creative input from you when you first create your campaign.

• Post-ad creation, it also combines your prospecting and retargeting ads into one campaign. This further simplifies the act of creating and building out your campaigns at scale.

Cons:

• The main drawback of Meta Advantage+ is its lack of control for the marketer. As much as letting AI do the heavy lifting can seem like a great idea, it’s not always the most useful if you’re a savvy marketer who really knows how to get the best out of a campaign.

• There’s limited transparency into Meta’s targeting and budget decisions within your campaign, so you have to draw conclusions yourself based on the results from each ad set.

• If you’re used to more traditional PPC, you may struggle with optimisation, as there’s no way to segment your audiences or run layered tests, it’s all handled by AI internally.

• Some automated creative combinations can go off-brand if not monitored, so don’t set up your campaign and leave it unattended, assuming that AI isn’t going to make basic mistakes and inaccurate assumptions. You still need to guide it to success.

• Finally, there’s a slight risk of campaign overlap or cannibalisation if there are errors in your shopping feed, or simply another manual campaign running that covers the same ground as your Meta Advantage+ campaign. So, plan accordingly, and be sure to double check that you’re not pushing similar content into almost identical campaigns elsewhere.

The importance of creative strategy with Meta Advantage+

With so much being controlled by AI within this suite, your creative assets are still the biggest performance lever in Advantage+.

This means you can still hold the cards to your campaign’s success and relevance to your target audience. Upload a variety of assets: videos, carousels, static images based on the campaign type you’re looking to run. Then include tone and messaging variations to broaden your campaign’s appeal and drill down into what you know resonates with your audience.

Use your creative assets to your advantage, placing a focus on creating the very highest quality possible, and inform every creative decision with your expertise in your brand, your audience, and your products. Anything that you can relate back to your audience preferences needs to be reflected in your creative strategy.

How to guide the automation strategically

AI doesn’t need to feel like it’s running away from you; you can guide it manually.

Use first-party data like email lists or site visitors to feed the algorithm, and take everything you’ve learnt about your audience and use it to inform your manual copywriting. This takes the hand of AI and points it right at what you know works, long before you press the button to set your AI-created campaign live.

Set up account-wide exclusions to prevent audience overlap between your AI campaign and any existing manual campaigns. This prevents wasted ad spend, and keeps your most niche, manual ad copy reaching the right audience segments.

Monitor any data you gain from Advantage+ campaigns by placement, creative and geography to find out what’s working, then refine as you go. You don’t need to set and forget an Advantage+ campaign just because it’s informed by AI.

When not to use Advantage+

It pays to know when not to use a more automated campaign, and Advantage+ is no exception. Avoid Advantage+ if you need strict audience control, such as for B2B or niche offers. 

If you’ve got a bespoke audience that you want to market to, Advantage+ isn’t the right campaign for you. It lacks the controls over audience segmentation and demographic exclusion to be really effective at targeting smaller groups.

If your brand, campaigns or shopping feed requires hyper-specific messaging in its ad copy, skip Advantage+, you’ll be better served by a campaign where you have more manual control over your copy and creative assets. 

Closing notes

Advantage+ isn’t about taking your hands off the wheel when marketing; it’s guided automation. It has the power to scale your campaigns quickly, while simplifying the complexity of your marketing management. But it only works when fueled by sharp creative assets, clear strategy and precise product feeds.

The best marketers will treat it not like a silver bullet, but a smart marketing assistant. The key to success lies in your hands, with your expertise leading the way.