Intro to Facebook Advantage+ Campaigns

Early in 2022, Facebook introduced Advantage+ campaigns, a fully automated, AI-fueled campaign type that uses “advanced technology” to maximize performance with minimal effort from advertisers. 

Using machine learning, Advantage+ campaigns are designed to deliver personalized, higher-performing ads to more relevant audiences on more effective placements at the right time. 

When the functionality was released, Facebook was mere months into processing the impact of iOS14, which immediately stripped tons of mobile conversion data and led to advertisers pulling budget from the platform. Notably, Advantage+ campaigns do not rely on user-level data, which means they represent a step toward better performance in today’s murky tracking landscape.

In this post, we’ll dig into the specifics of Advantage+: campaign options, set-up, and recent enhancements.

Advantage+ Campaign Options

There are three basic campaign options available with Advantage+:

1. Advantage+ App (formerly known as Automated App Ads)
2. Advantage+ Shopping
3. Advantage+ lead campaigns (formerly known as automated lead ads)

It’s important to note that Advantage+ is not (yet) a required campaign choice. When you create your campaign, you can choose to automate the full campaign creation process (using one of the campaign types above), or you can choose the manual campaign creation process and opt in to any of these Advantage+ options:

• Advantage+ campaign budget (formerly known as Campaign Budget Optimization)
• 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)

How It Works

The setup is very simple and minimal, as intended. Essentially, all advertisers need to access Advantage+ functionality are ad creatives + messaging, a conversion goal, and a daily budget. Meta takes care of the rest. 

Recent Advantage+ Enhancements

In May 2023, Meta released new features for Meta Advantage, a portfolio of AI and machine learning ad automation products. Among the new features:

• One-click switching from manual campaigns to Advantage+
• The ability to use both video and static creative in catalog ads
• Performance Comparison tools to help compare existing manual sales campaigns to Advantage+ Shopping campaigns (essential when you’re testing where to invest your budget)
• Advantage+ Audience suggestions that let you suggest audiences to Advantage+ to help guide the system to find more relevant potential customers – which is highly recommended if you have robust data that can help guide Facebook’s algorithm

So how important is it to test the functionality of Advantage+? I’d say brands that have had past success with Facebook should make it a priority. In my next posts, I’ll break down pros and cons of Advantage+ campaigns and best practices for harnessing their AI-driven power.

Contact Jordan Digital Marketing to request an audit for your paid search strategy!