As marketing strategists, it has been our job to stay toe-to-toe with the latest advancements in digital advertising, and one such helpful release has been the Meta Advantage+ campaigns. To be more specific, the Advantage+ is an initiative by Meta to help entrepreneurs streamline and optimize their ad campaigns. Your ads will be dynamically adjusted to reach the most responsive and relevant audiences across all of Meta’s platforms.
To fully help you grasp the concept of this new Automated Ad Suite, we’re going to walk you through how to set it up, and what benefits it can potentially bring your future endeavors.
Requirements for Meta Advantage+ Ads
To create an ad, you will need to have a few pre-requisites completed, which if you’ve been running campaigns for a while now, you probably have.
For Your Website
- Install a pixel, to get details about how people view and interact with your items.
- Set up the pixel event and parameter for the Advantage+ ads.
For Your App
- If you have an app, you will want to install the Facebook SDK in your mobile app.
- Set up the Facebook SDK App Events for Advantage+ Ads.
Once you’ve got both of those, or either of those covered (depending on how and what you’re marketing), proceed to the steps below:
- Connect the pixel or SDK to your catalog.
- Create the Advantage+ catalog ad using the method shown below.
How to Set Up Meta Advantage+ Campaigns
Before we start diving into the ‘why’, we’d like to get the ‘how’ out of the way. You’re curious, we know, and if you have access to the Meta Advantage+ Campaigns, this is how you can get started with automating your marketing on Meta’s platforms.
- Start by going to your ad account, and click on ‘Create’.
- Select ‘Sales’ and hit the ‘Continue’ button.
- Click on ‘Sales’, and you’ll be brought to a new dialog box.
- Here, you can select either of the two options, either manual or the Advantage+ campaign.
- To start the setup, you’re going to name your campaign, and select the Pixel.
- You can pick the location that you want to target by ‘Country’, and Advantage+ will determine the best people that are most likely to convert.
- Feel free to set the budget as you see fit, a higher amount will allow you to gather more insights.
- Within these settings, you can also set a cap on how much you want to spend on marketing to existing customers. If you do not want to, you can just set the amount to 0.
- Schedule it however you like, and put your best creatives into these campaigns to see how each of them work out.
Best Practices for Advantage+ Campaigns Determining a Bid
When you’re deciding on a bid for your campaign, initially, you want to go for the smallest amount for the cap. Although this does limit results, it’ll allow you to test the waters. Advantage+ campaigns will usually receive more results and will spend their entire budget when they are using the lowest cost without a bid cap.
Selecting and Updating Creatives
As discussed before, you’re able to add up to 50 images or videos at one time. With Meta Advantage+, campaigns will automatically determine the best ad combinations based on what people are most likely to respond to. Our recommendation? Try to upload a high volume of assets and make sure to refresh them a few times every month.
Avoid Overlapping Audiences With Manual Ads
Should you be targeting similar audiences through manual ads, then there is a chance of poor delivery. Avoid running the two simultaneously. Once you know which one works better for your business, feel free to shift your budget entirely to either one.
How to Find Your Advantage+ Campaigns
As of now, you can’t really filter out your Advantage+ campaigns out of your list, so you might want to name them accordingly, and add some identifier text that shows these are the campaigns you’ve started with Advantage+.
What Benefits Can I Expect from Meta Advantage+?
With the release of Advantage+, there are now two groups of Advantage products. The Advantage ones you already know about, and the Advantage+ options that allow you to create a completely automated campaign or just one of the 5 steps (Audience, Destination, Placements, Creatives and Budget/Bidding).
Personalized and Continuous
Through Meta’s AI, they’re able to deliver relevant content to consumers based on their behaviors and interests, making sure people who need to see your product, get to see it. Moreover, the campaign will continuously optimize itself and promote all of your items, without you having to configure it every step of the way as you did before.
Retargeting and New Customers
No need to worry about retargeting, as you’ll be able to show the ads to potential buyers that just couldn’t make it to the final step through the Advantage+ features. Besides retargeting, the campaign will actively seek out shoppers that show interest in products similar to yours using broad audience targeting.
Organic Reconsideration
As a way to encourage potential customers to revisit your product catalog, product details from your ad campaign may appear in organic reconsideration experiences, potentially leading to increased conversions and sales.
Ad Creatives
There is no limit to the amount of creatives you can upload through the Advantage+ campaigns. You will be free to upload up to 50 images or videos at one time and automatically create your ads. The campaign also allows you to pick images from your catalog when creating an ad set.
Reporting
Reporting is made simple, and there are no breakdowns at the campaign level for placement, demographics or age. These options aren’t given to you when setting up the campaign, and are also not available for reporting.
Is it Worth It?
It’s still too early to decide whether the Advantage+ campaigns provide any sort of advantage, or if they even are worth it. However, Meta’s own pilots reported a 12% lower cost per conversion in their early tests.
This can be further backed up by BYLT Basics utilized the Advantage+ campaigns and saw a 12% higher return on ad spend for Advantage+ shopping campaign, compared to their usual campaigns. There was also a 12% lower cost per purchase for these campaigns.
We’ll let you decide. But, personally, we don’t like to give up too much control at Fetch & Funnel. While automating certain aspects of these campaigns may prove to be productive, there are still certain things that we like to keep under our own supervision to ensure good conversions.
If it’s any indication from Google’s PMax campaigns, AI-based campaigns are here to stick around. But, there’s still a bit of time left before they gain a certain level of mastery.
Advantage+ Products
- Advantage+ app campaign (formerly known as automated app ads).
- Advantage+ lead campaigns (formerly known as automated lead ads).
- Advantage+ placements (formerly known as automatic placements).
- Advantage+ creative for catalog (formerly known as dynamic formats and creative).
- Advantage+ creative (formerly known as dynamic experiences).
- Advantage+ catalog ads (formerly known as dynamic ads).
- Advantage+ international catalog ads (formerly known as multi-country and language dynamic ads).
