Automated ad management
The campaign type is designed to make setup easier and faster for advertisers, as creative configuration and targeting are removed from the equation. You simply choose the time period for the campaign to run, your budget, and upload your creative assets — then Meta's machine learning algorithm takes care of the rest.
Meta themselves state the following about the Advantage+ format:
“Rather than manually testing many campaigns and parsing through separate targeting, creative, placements and budget setups, advertisers can now more quickly and efficiently create up to 150 creative combinations at once by setting up a single Advantage+ shopping campaign.”
The format can thus generate up to 150 ad combinations based on your existing creatives on the account, and assembles the variations most likely to perform across different placements.
How do you set up an Advantage+ Shopping campaign?
When creating a new campaign, you simply need to:
- Select Sales as your objective
- Select Advantage+ Shopping campaign
- Create a catalogue under Advantage+ catalogue ads
You choose your own product catalogue and define your audience in an Advantage+ shopping campaign. This gives you control over which products are shown and to whom. Meta's algorithms then use these inputs together with historical data and creative assets to generate different ad combinations and test them to find what works best. The algorithm adapts messages and images based on what is most likely to convert for each individual user.
While you retain control over basic settings such as catalogue and audience, you hand over a large part of the day-to-day optimisation and the specific composition of ads to Meta. This means you cannot precisely control how a specific ad is shown to a specific user, as the algorithm automates this to improve performance.
It is a balance between maintaining control over the strategic aspects of your campaign and letting the algorithm handle the tactical decisions to optimise results.
Although it can be difficult to relinquish control, it works. Meta states:
“We’ve found that 52% of surveyed consumers want to find brands and products they haven’t heard about that also align with their shopping preferences while 60% of online shoppers want shopping experiences to be personalized based on their unique interests and preferences. Advertisers can use Advantage+ shopping campaigns to personalize ads at scale through machine learning and show people personalized products from your catalogs in a privacy-safe way.”
Meta also points out that this campaign type has resulted in businesses reducing their spend while achieving increased conversions. The average CPA is 15% lower than manually set up conversion campaigns, while ROAS is on average 15% higher.
Benefit from our experience with Advantage+ Shopping
To maximise the algorithm's ability to deliver optimal results, it is essential to feed it comprehensive data about the audiences you want to reach. This means you should load as much relevant information as possible, including retargeting and customer lists, as the campaign's effectiveness depends on historical data accumulated via Business Manager. Experience from tests across different accounts has shown that accounts with a thorough setup of retargeting and customer lists generally perform better. This underlines the importance of a well-informed approach to campaign setup in order to achieve the best results.
We ran a 10-day test on an e-commerce client in the fashion segment, which showed the following results (measured against a standard conversion campaign):
- 128% increase in ROAS.
- 83.97% increase in CTR.
- 51% decrease in cost per purchase.
- 42% cheaper CPM.
The results of this specific test speak for themselves, clearly in favour of Advantage+. However, there are still a number of considerations you need to make regarding whether this campaign format is right for you. We have listed these below.
Pros and cons of Advantage+ Shopping
To give you an in-depth understanding of Advantage+ Shopping and its applicability to your advertising strategies, we have compiled an overview of the most significant pros and cons of this campaign type:
Pros
- Rather than the algorithm starting from scratch for each new campaign, Advantage+ campaigns draw on historical data from the entire lifetime of the ad account.
- As a new feature, you can break down the results of Advantage+ campaigns and see the distribution of purchases from new and existing customers.
- Campaigns are more tailored to the individual user and can result in significantly higher ROAS than manual campaigns.
Cons
- There is still considerable variation in which accounts this campaign format performs on. Our experience is that accounts with a long history perform better with Advantage+ than newer accounts.
- You lose some control over audiences, as you hand responsibility over to AI and the algorithm. This means you need to weigh up when Advantage+ makes sense for your strategy: if, for example, you want to reach a different audience than usual, manual setup is the way to go.
- You have less control over how creatives will appear to individual users.
Is Advantage+ Shopping a good choice for your business?
Meta has been leveraging their advanced machine learning and Power 5 technology for several years, which means control is increasingly handed over to algorithms. Although these algorithms are powerful, certain types of advertisers will find that Advantage+ Shopping suits their needs better than others:
- If your business already has an established campaign structure with documented results, integrating Advantage+ Shopping can be advantageous. This campaign type draws on historical data from your Business Manager, meaning the more data you have available, the greater the potential for success.
- It is important that you as advertisers are comfortable with handing over a degree of control to Meta, which will automatically adapt creative content and messages to your target audience. Not all businesses are willing to surrender so much control to a 'black box' algorithm, so this consideration is central before implementation.
- It is crucial that you have robust API tracking in place to maximise the effectiveness of your campaigns, whether you use Advantage+ or traditional conversion campaigns.
Ultimately, Advantage+ Shopping should be seen as an opportunity to save time, giving you more room to focus on developing creatives and working on the strategic elements of your business.
If you would like further information about Advantage+ Shopping and how it can be integrated into your marketing strategy, please feel free to contact us.
