After a successful beta test, Meta was launched Advantage+ Shopping campaigns in August 2022 which have since proven to be an incredibly effective way to drive traffic to your online store and increase sales with less heavy lifting.
Meta’s Advantage+ shopping campaigns can help make your ecommerce store more visible and generate more sales. In this post, we’ll take a look at what these campaigns entail and how to set them up, along with benefits, limitations, and caveats, and how you can use them in your process.
What are Advantage+ Shopping campaigns?
Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping campaigns, often abbreviated and called ASC, are automated product advertising campaigns that use machine learning to dynamically deliver your ads to the audiences most likely to convert, while making better use of your advertising budget.
ASC eliminates manual ad creation steps and automates “up to 150 creative combinations at once,” according to Meta.
How to set up a Meta Advantage+ Shopping campaign
Using Meta Advantage+ Shopping campaigns is relatively easy, which is an added benefit for those who are new to advertising on the platform or are small business owners.
First, click the “+Create” button in the Meta Ads Manager and select the sales campaign goal and then “Continue”.
Next, select “Advantage+ Shopping Campaign” above the manual setup and click “Continue”.
As you’ll see on the next setup screen, some targeting options and settings are available, but most of your regular campaign options will be missing as the purpose of the Advantage+ process is to leverage Meta’s AI and automation abilities and limit that not with manual qualifiers.
Name your campaign appropriately, select a specific ad category if necessary, select website or website and app (e.g. Shops on FB/IG) for your conversion location, geo-targeting, daily or lifetime budget, start and end dates and your attribution preference.
When you first set this up, you’ll notice the “Breakdown by Audience Type” section, which allows you to add existing customers to your account settings and view a breakdown by audience type between your new and existing customers.
You can pull customer lists from your custom audiences or create new ones in the account settings.
There is another field for suggested ads where you can view them or import all ads. Meta recommends importing any suggested ads first, which I do to see how they perform before testing other tactics.
You can also go to the Ads level to create new ads. Another tactic we often use with ASC is to add your best performing ads from other campaigns and test them here to see the results ASC can deliver in comparison.
ASC benefits
A key benefit of ASC is that it’s automated, giving you more time to focus on other aspects of your job as an advertiser or business owner.
The process is streamlined and efficient, and with the tangible improvements Meta has made on the advertising front over the past year, leveraging their AI should yield more favorable outcomes for you — even more so since the iOS14 update that removed advertising in April 2021 influenced negatively.
ASC Limits and Caveats
While ASC offers many benefits, it represents a significant shift in how we are used to advertising on the platform, but that’s also part of the excitement in our industry – it’s always evolving and keeps us busy , as we grow , learn and adapt.
A possible downside is that if you enjoy audience research and choosing who and how you want to target, ASC limits this, as described in the setup section above. There is also no ad placement control, so your ads will appear where meta decides.
Meta only allows up to 8 ASCs per account. While most brands have a customer list, if your brand has multiple product lines (for example, if you’re a shoe brand and sell boots, sneakers, and sandals), you can improve performance by segmenting your customer lists. ASC may find it difficult to convert similar but different customers with one customer list, so it may be better to segment your audiences rather than bundling all of your customers to get better returns and optimize.
ASC can be used for both prospecting and retargeting, but we’ve seen greater top-of-funnel success in driving sales, similar to non-ASC catalog sales campaigns this year, so you might find more want to spend up from your ASC budget of the funnel.
And surprisingly, despite its widespread success, as reported by many advertisers (including our own client accounts), not all accounts have access to ASC yet. If you don’t, keep an eye out, ask your Meta Ad reps, or contact chat support to see if a request can speed up access.
Benefit from ASC
Overall, Meta Advantage+ Shopping campaigns offer ecommerce brands an effective way to maximize reach and performance with less manual effort. By leveraging valuable data collected by Meta, businesses can leverage ASC to help them reach the right customers while staying within budget constraints and maximizing revenue.
If you haven’t tested them yet, consider setting up Meta Advantage+ Shopping campaigns in the new year to see what automation can do for you—and if you’re already up and running, keep testing new creatives and scaling in 2023.
A version of this post was first published on Akvertise Inc.’s blog.
