If you’re a devoted reader of the JDM blog, you’re familiar with the basics of Facebook’s Advantage+ campaigns, and you know the pros and cons of using the functionality.
Today, we’ll cover our recommendations for how to get the most out of Advantage+. (And yes, we do think most brands should be dipping a toe to see how it works relative to more manual campaigns.)
Our top five recommendations are as follows:
Limited targeting and audience options leave your messaging to do most of the heavy lifting. Do your best to produce creative and messaging that tells high-value audiences that your product or service is for them – and tells irrelevant users that they shouldn’t bother engaging. The more effectively you can do this, the faster Facebook’s algorithm will learn to recognize the right (and wrong) users on its own.
Advantage+ is so easy to set up and maintain that it may lull you into a false sense of security – but fight that urge. You may not have many controls, but you can readjust budget and shift things back to manual if/when needed (or vice versa, if Advantage+ performance takes off).
Don’t adopt Advantage+ for every campaign out of the gate. Start out with a small test, and increase spend if and when results merit. Continue to test other “manual” campaigns, and use Facebook’s performance comparison tools to see which type of campaigns is winning.
Facebook pools its audiences for Advantage+, which means you only have one real way to control who’s seeing your ads. Set limits to control how much traffic you want going to “new” vs “existing” users to assume some control over the budgets going to prospecting and retargeting.
As mentioned in our previous post, Advantage+ asks advertisers to give up A LOT of control This could be palatable for many brands or products that have a pretty wide target audience, but for businesses that are more niche or have very specific ICPs, turning over the reins to Advantage+ is something that should give you pause.
Ultimately, Advantage+ is a big signal that Facebook is leaning hard into AI, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Even brands resistant to testing should monitor how Advantage+ is performing and evolving – no matter how long it takes to become a prerequisite.
Contact Jordan Digital Marketing to request an audit for your paid search strategy!