Learn about Advantage+ shopping campaigns, where you can optimize your ads with the help of artificial intelligence. Discover how to increase your ad effectiveness with minimal effort while maximizing reach and conversions. This article provides a guide on how to best utilize the opportunities offered by Advantage+ campaigns, whether you are a beginner or an experienced advertiser.
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What is an Advantage+ shopping campaign?
Meta introduced Advantage+ shopping campaigns in August 2022 with the goal of enabling advertisers to achieve the best possible results with the least amount of effort. They promise that we can display personalized, higher-performing ads to more relevant target audiences, all at the most opportune times. This new campaign type follows the trend of many other AI, or Artificial Intelligence, tools, such as the Google Performance Max campaign trend, which aims to help users without deep digital marketing knowledge create effective campaigns.
It is important to note that this does not mean that the Advantage+ shopping campaign can fully take over all tasks of a digital marketing professional.
Let's see what the Advantage+ shopping campaign offers, what disadvantages it might have, and who it is recommended for!
Benefits Offered by Advantage+ Shopping
The Promise of More Effective Campaigns
When this campaign type was introduced, one of the big advantages advertised for Advantage+ was that it would allow advertisers to spend less time on campaign management, while reach, impressions, and other metrics could also increase – if all goes well.
Due to its disadvantages – which will be detailed later – advertiser opinions and experiences regarding this relatively new campaign type vary, but let's see what results Meta claims can be achieved with it!
Meta has conducted several case studies showing that businesses using Advantage+ campaigns achieved a 12% decrease in CPA (cost per acquisition) and a 15% increase in ROAS (return on ad spend) compared to manual campaigns.
One case study focuses on Terranova (an Italian clothing retailer) sales, who managed to achieve an 88% increase in sales and 85% greater reach with Advantage+ compared to their usual advertising campaigns. Instead of running multiple campaigns simultaneously with segmented target audiences, they consolidated the audiences for a given market into a single campaign structure. This significantly simplifies campaign creation and management while reducing audience overlap. Terranova seized the opportunity and, in collaboration with Visioni Agency, created an A/B test to compare Advantage+ campaigns with their original campaigns.
The campaigns focused on prospective Italian adult customers, as well as existing customers who had purchased the brand's products within the last 30 days. The Advantage+ shopping campaign automatically distributed 70% of the ads equally between Facebook and Instagram feeds. The ads included photo, video, and carousel format content.
To provide more than just one example, Meta also tracked the sales of another Italian sports brand – let's see what benefits Nencini Sport gained by using Advantage+ shopping campaigns!
Similar to the clothing brand, increasing sales was the main focus, and it can be stated that compared to Terranova, they experienced a significantly smaller but still substantial 31% increase in purchases. Nencini created 24 ads in various formats, promoting several types of products, such as backpacks and watches. The cost per order decreased by 23%, and ROAS increased by 28% compared to the original campaign settings.
#m1-y#Important: While these numbers sound very promising, unfortunately, we can never be 100% sure that we will achieve these exact results.##
Faster, simpler campaign setup
Let's see what the AI can take off your shoulders that we previously had to set up manually:
1. Placement settings
We can entrust it with deciding on which platform and in what format our ad appears – so it can show up in the Instagram feed, on the right-hand sidebar of Facebook, or even on Messenger, as these are all Meta platforms.
Officially, the AI optimizes based on where our ad is most likely to achieve its goal. Before Advantage+, we always had to make these decisions ourselves, and unless we were seasoned experts well-versed in industry trends and the advertising platform, it was easy to burn through a lot of money on placements that didn't serve our campaign objectives.
2. Creative combinations
It creates multiple variations from your creatives, up to 150 creative combinations you can test within a single campaign, allowing you to create ads that are likely to outperform competitors. You have a greater chance of achieving desired results and increasing conversions, and well-combined creatives can also attract new customers and later help build brand loyalty.
3. More precise audience targeting
Advantage+ shopping campaigns reach the most relevant target groups by considering demographic data, interests, behavior, and online activities. This enables highly precise targeting, which – presumably – means your ad will appear to users genuinely interested in your product or service, thereby increasing the chance of conversion.
Disadvantages of Advantage+ Campaigns
Listing the benefits, Advantage+ Shopping sounds great: just a few clicks, and AI handles campaign setup and optimization for us.
#m1-y#But is the story really that simple, and can we leave everything to AI?##
Now that more than a year has passed since its introduction, our PPC team has also tested this campaign type, and for now, our impressions are mixed. Let's see why!
The budget you start Advantage+ ads with matters
Since AI optimizes campaign performance and improves its ROI based on collected data, it's ideal if we can provide it with as much data as possible in the shortest amount of time.
Yes, this means we need to collect many impressions, clicks, and other interactions as quickly as possible – which in turn means that a sufficiently high budget must be allocated to campaigns so that it can learn quickly and find optimal performance in a short time, rather than over months.
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You no longer have control over optimization
Since Advantage+ is an automated advertising product, some campaign settings are predetermined and may not be adaptable to specific advertiser needs.
The idea of handing over all optimization tasks to AI can be very appealing – but it's a bit like having a new colleague who, on paper, knows everything you do – or perhaps even more – but you're not sure if you can truly trust them. And there's no way you can interfere with their work or ask for modifications.
Let's look at a few more examples:
You cannot modify the placement
- : For brands with strict creative guidelines, for example, it's important to remember that they have no control over which ad creatives appear on which platform, which can sometimes result instrange appearances .You cannot set a separate bid or targeted spend:
- The algorithm specifically optimizes to acquire the most conversions at the lowest possible cost. While this sounds good, for companies with strict CPA (cost per acquisition) goals, it's not such good news that they have no influence over the maximum amount that can be spent per click. You don't optimize – but this way you don't learn from it either:
- Unfortunately, Advantage+ often optimizes based on factors that are opaque to advertisers, thus providing much less information about what trends or risks to pay attention to in a given account, and how to reproduce the achieved results. Limited exclusion options
These campaigns currently do not exclude target audiences who have previously shown activity with your ads. For consistent and long-term growth, it is generally advisable to avoid repeatedly targeting these audiences in shopping campaigns – otherwise, you might achieve the opposite effect, and constant bombardment could deter your customers.
#m1-p#This doesn't necessarily mean that Advantage+ shopping campaigns are a bad choice – but we definitely don't recommend using only them.##
Limited access
Advantage+ shopping campaigns are not yet available to all advertisers, so before planning a strategy around them, make sure to check if they appear in your account! :)
Who do we recommend it for – and who not?
Among the advantages, we highlighted that more effective campaigns can be created with less effort, so Advantage+ Shopping can be a good choice in the following cases:
- We especially recommend it if you have a large number of products and you want to automate your advertising processes for efficiency and scalability.
- It can also be effective if you offer various products recommended for different target groupsand manual targeting setup takes up a lot of your time.
- If you're just starting to advertise your business and haven't had time to delve into the intricacies of ads and targeting, we recommend Advantage+ campaigns only if you can allocate a larger budgetfor the campaign's learning phase.
However, it is less effective in the following cases:
- If advertising your product requires a higher level of personalization.
- If building unique customer relationships and a personalized sales process play a prominent role in your company's operations. (This could include, for example, luxury brands or certain services.)
- If you're looking for a cost-effective solution – in this case, you'll likely be better off with manual campaign setup.
- If you don't operate an e-commerce store. While the AI-optimized campaign type can be tested for advertising certain services, we primarily don't recommend it for this purpose. For services (generally), fewer transactions occur compared to an e-commerce store with many products, meaning the campaign learns more slowly and at a higher cost.
- If your business requires more control and you prefer to maintain direct oversight.
- If a professional marketing agency manages your campaigns. If you wish to experiment in your account, it's important to consult with them first and seek their advice on whether this campaign type is a suitable choice for you – with their professional experience and in-depth knowledge of your ongoing campaigns, they will be able to assess this. :)
Setting Up Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns
It's worth weighing the pros and cons before diving into Advantage+ campaigns – but if you still believe it's worth a try, here's what you'll need!
Preparation: What do you need to launch Advantage+ campaigns?
Before you start creating an Advantage+ campaign, you need to set up the Meta Pixel. This is simply a code snippet that you need to place in your website's source code. In short, it's necessary because it allows Meta to measure your ad results – it can track the activity of users on your website who came from Facebook, helps monitor conversions, and even lets you retarget users who have previously interacted with your page, thereby optimizing your campaign performance.
How to Launch an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign?
- Log in to Meta Ads Manager, then click the “Create” button.
- Select the campaign objective: Sales.
- In the next step, select the Advantage+ option, then click the “Continue” button.
- Next, enter the campaign name and the conversion event.
- Specify the appropriate country for your target audience's geographical location.
- Enter the daily budget and campaign duration.
- Import the recommended creatives (you can also provide your own creatives later).
If you'd like to delve deeper into shopping campaign settings, we recommend checking out the Meta help article on the topic or the short training compiled by Meta as well!
Conclusion
In the world of online marketing, it's challenging to keep pace with constant innovations. We hope this article has helped you stay up-to-date with Advantage+ Shopping campaigns and that the information provided here proves useful!
It's worth keeping in mind that although artificial intelligence has revolutionized the world of PPC advertising , it's best to approach these tools with a healthy dose of caution and skepticism. While these new campaign types can achieve outstanding results with proper setup and a sufficient budget, AI cannot (yet) process unique marketing goals or make decisions regarding the optimal complex marketing strategy to pursue.
#promobox-szolg-ppc-en#Don't want to experiment blindly? Entrust the setup of your Meta campaigns to our expert team!##
