Meta announced a test of a new streamlined Advantage+ campaign creation for sales, app, and leads campaigns. There is a lot to digest about these pending changes, and there will surely be misinformation.
Allow me to clarify what is happening. I am not part of this test, which puts me at a disadvantage. But I have dug through every piece of official documentation to make sense of it all.
The outrage cycle will beg for reasons to make these changes something they are not. I had several initial concerns when hearing about this, but the changes don’t appear to take anything away. This is about streamlining and repackaging more than anything.
I believe these are good changes. Let’s dig in…
Streamlined Campaign Setup
The current campaign creation process begins with a decision: Automated or Manual.
That initial choice will now be made for us. When creating a new campaign using the Sales, App, or Leads objectives, Advantage+ will be on by default.
That sounds scary, but it’s not. You will retain access to all of Meta’s tools to customize your campaign that you had before.
Advantage+ will be “on” by default, which applies to the following audience, placement, and budget optimizations:
But you can still make customizations to override these settings. When you do, Advantage+ may be turned “off.” This GIF from Meta’s documentation gives us an idea of what that will look like…
Targeting Options
As far as I can tell, your options do not change (though I have some questions about Leads campaigns that I’ll get to later). Advantage+ Audience is automatically on by default.
The following are audience controls:
- Location
- Age Minimum
- Excluded Custom Audiences
- Languages
You can also provide audience suggestions. Meta may consider these before going broader:
- Age Maximum
- Gender
- Custom Audiences
- Detailed Targeting
I have doubts regarding how much Meta cares about these suggestions, but that’s a whole separate topic.
In the original format, this may not give you enough control so you’d switch to original audiences. Instead, you can now uncheck a box to remove suggestions for the following audience types:
- Age
- Gender
- Custom Audience Inclusions
Any of these changes would turn Advantage+ off.
Advantage+ Shopping is Now Advantage+ Sales
This may actually be the most surprising change from the announcement.
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns will be renamed Advantage+ Sales Campaigns “to better reflect the full range of advertisers that can benefit from this product.” Although, this change is far more than a rebranding. Much of what has made Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns unique will be going away.
1. Unlimited Ad Sets.
In the past, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns allowed for a single ad set, which was built into campaign creation. You can use multiple ad sets now, but Advantage Campaign Budget (now Advantage+ Budget) will need to be on to retain Advantage+ status.
2. Up to 50 Ads Per Ad Set.
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns allowed you to provide up to 150 ads. However, that was mostly because these campaigns utilized a single ad set. You can still provide up to 150 ads (or more), but it will require multiple ad sets to accomplish.
3. Advantage+ Audience is Available.
This might be the best news for advertisers who otherwise use Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. While the idea is to trust the algorithm, there are times when some additional targeting input may be desired. Advantage+ Sales Campaigns will have access to audience suggestions and custom audience exclusions.
4. No Existing Customer Budget Cap.
I discussed this change recently, and now it’s evident that it’s tied to the rollout of Advantage+ Sales Campaigns. Advertisers using Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns could control the percentage of spend on existing customers.
That’s no longer the case. But you’ll be able to recreate this cap using multiple ad sets.
Questions About Advantage+ Leads
Meta first teased an Advantage+ Campaign option for leads in late 2023. Now that it’s officially coming, I have some questions.
1. What About Quality?
I’m curious if including Leads campaigns in this Advantage+ rollout is just about streamlining campaign creation or if there’s special leads optimization power that’s coming from it. This quote is at least encouraging:
In early testing, leads campaigns that had Advantage+ ‘on’ in this setup were delivering on average 10% lower cost per qualified lead compared to campaigns with Advantage+ ‘off’.
The “qualified lead” portion is what caught my attention. Is this optimization any different now? Lead quality using Advantage+ Audience can be a problem, particularly because you can’t set gender or age limit as a control. The (hopefully “old”) algorithm focuses on finding inefficiencies to get you the most leads, rather than making sure they are high quality.
2. What About Instant Forms?
When creating Leads campaigns the old way, you could avoid Advantage Detailed Targeting when using instant forms. Your audience is automatically expanded when using performance goals that maximize conversions, value, links, or landing page views — but not leads from instant forms.
Will that still be the case? It would clearly turn Advantage+ off, but I’m curious if that option will remain.
About Original Audiences
These updates are consistent with what I’ve been predicting for some time. While the functionality of original audiences remains, it is no longer a separate process. It’s an integrated option now.
But this also seems to eliminate the use of Advantage Custom Audiences, Advantage Lookalike, and Advantage Detailed Targeting, at least for Sales, App, and Leads campaigns. And that mostly confirms something I’ve long believed, but Meta’s never come out and said it.
It didn’t matter whether you used Advantage+ Audience with detailed targeting or original audiences with Advantage Detailed Targeting on. Your inputs were treated the same either way.
Because of that, Meta was creating unnecessary confusion with multiple options that were virtually or literally doing the same things. Moving this direction helps advertisers understand that more clearly.
What About Other Objectives?
This is great, but I do find it interesting that these Advantage+ Campaigns only apply to Sales, App, and Leads objectives (or at least the test does). Why not Traffic, Engagement, or Awareness?
My theory is that Meta knows what we know: Performance for top-of-funnel optimization is deeply flawed, particularly when using broad audiences. You will get great surface-level results, but the algorithm is driven to find quantity, not quality.
I assume that Meta knows that forcing or encouraging broader audiences for these types of campaigns is not advisable. That could be fixed, of course, if Meta found a way to address that glaring problem with top-of-funnel optimization.
Opportunity Score
This is secondary, but it does tie everything together. Meta first started testing Opportunity Score about a year ago. I didn’t realize I was part of a test when I had it. Then it disappeared (at least for me).
Well, it’s coming back — officially this time. Opportunity Score gamifies your ability (or willingness) to implement Meta’s optimization opportunities with a score of 0 to 100. The closer to 100, the more optimized your advertising (in theory).
This will become a big part of Advantage+ campaigns. There will be visual cues all over the place to encourage you to better optimize your ads. More often than not, suggestions will be around implementing some sort of Advantage+ optimization.
Resources
Since I am not part of this test, I’ve relied on Meta’s new documentation on Advantage+ Campaigns. Feel free to dig in for further reading:
