With Meta, we always have many changes and updates, including the campaign objectives or even new features that promote AI technology.
There has been a continuous journey to deliver campaigns and find the right customer at the right time. For Meta, using automation is the key to ensuring its solution is optimized to leverage how advertisers sell their products online with the most efficient process.
What is an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign?
Shopping ads have been gaining more popularity for those e-commerce accounts, and they are constantly involved now. Back in 2023, Meta started to promote more this new campaign type, which is a new solution that combines machine learning with proven best practices to optimize campaigns for the entire customer journey, saving advertisers time and budget.
In simple words, it is a new automated product that is designed to reach valuable audiences with more efficiency and reduced setup time. The ads will be dynamically shown across all placements and for those audiences most likely to convert, being handled by AI.
With this type of campaign, you’ll maintain a full-funnel approach with the sales objective while expecting optimizations based on the best practices from Meta. You can use the Advantage+ Shopping campaign to:
- Mix and match prospecting and current customers under one single campaign while customizing the ads with catalogs or customized created ads.
- Leverage machine learning to identify high-intent audiences with minimal effort.
- Test up to 150 creatives and combinations to deliver the top-performing ad for you.
- It is designed to drive more online sales with more efficiency for performance-focused advertisers.
With this in mind, Meta shared a case study where a business improved their CPS by 17% and their ROAS by 32%
How to Create an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign
- Go to ads manager
- Click Create and select Sales > clicks continue
- Select advantage+ shopping campaign
- Select the pixel and event you want to focus on
- Define your budget, location, and schedule
- Define your audience (existing or new customers)
- Select your ads
- Click on Publish
Elements You Will Loose Using an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign
Even though you have great options with this new campaign, you also have some limitations once you start building it:
Limited targeting options
This is limited only at the country level, which means we don’t have the option to target narrowed locations.
Audience tracking
You can only use one UTM at the campaign level, which means the best option is to specify the type of campaign.
Audience definition
You can only divide it into two audience groups, which in this case, are prospecting and existing customers.
Placements
You can’t customize placements for the campaign. This means the ads will be shown across the different placements: Instagram, Facebook, and the audience network.
E-commerce accounts
This campaign is only for e-commerce accounts, those where you have products to show on Facebook and a website with an E-commerce platform.
Bid Strategies
The default bid strategy is the highest volume (if maximizing the number of conversions) or the highest value (if maximizing value). Advertisers have the option to set a cost-per-result goal (when maximizing conversions)
Audience Budget Cap
Once you set up your audiences in your ad account setting, and you define your budget you can also add a % cap for your existing customers.
This option will allow you to decide how much you want to spend on your existing customers since the campaign will reach them as well as the prospecting. For instance, if you really want to focus on new customers and spend the minimum on existing ones, you can set up between 5% – 10% of your daily budget on them. This way, you can control a little more how much you’re spending on existing customers and let the algorithm know it needs to find prospecting customers.
Focus on Creatives
When talking about meta, we know the visual part is important. In this case, don’t focus only on one format for the ads. You have the option to test up to 150 creatives at the same time, and the machine learning will eventually find the top-performing one. Use different text options and also use catalog ads.
This is your time to shine and define how creative you want to be!
Key Takeaways and Next Steps
We learned that Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns offer a remarkable range of benefits but also have some limitations. However, you are not only making the campaign setup smoother, but the cases have shown that your ads and results can get better by complementing your manual sales campaign with the ASC.
Remember toanalyze your data to apply any changes across all your active campaigns. Keep in mind that this type of campaign shouldn’t replace your current active one but complement your current strategy to leverage performance. Are you using them already? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Are you planning to use them and don’t know how to start? Make sure you hit us up! We’ll be happy to help.
