Meta, aka Facebook, recently announced they are consolidating all their automation products into one unified suite called Meta Advantage. The intent is to allow advertisers to automate parts or all of their campaigns in one place. So what’s the benefit of using Meta Advantage and why should we care? Let’s break it down.
The Meta Advantage Suite
Meta Advantage is a combination of current and upcoming features within the ads platform that helps advertisers automate the setup of campaigns. This includes detailed targeting expansion and automated app ads. These automated ad products help improve the performance of your ads by relying more on machine learning. It includes a range of campaign creation workflows and optimization tools designed for the ad or ad set levels.
The Meta Advantage suite is divided into two parts:
Advantage: Products that work to improve manual campaign setups, such as selected Detailed Targeting options within your target audience
Advantage+: Products that automate an entire campaign flow from end to end of a manual campaign setup, such as placements or creatives.
The Benefits of Meta Advantage
If you’ve already worked in Ads Manager, you probably won’t’ find much that’s new. This change was more of a rebranding and consolidation effort by Meta to help advertisers navigate better and use the tools more effectively. In fact, Meta announced that more than 75% of advertisers who tested these tools saved several hours per week as a result of the suite’s capacity to streamline campaign creation and optimize ad delivery.
According to Meta, the benefits of using Meta Advantage are:
Optimization: Achieving superior campaign results and sustainability over time
Personalization: Matching the right audiences with the right ads at the right time to create and cultivate a deeper connection between them and your brand
Efficiency: Saving advertisers time and energy so that can concentrate on strategic, bigger picture work.
In addition, this update became a response to the substantial challenges many marketers faced since early 2021 when the major digital privacy changes related to iOS 14.5-related tracking issues and the decline of cookies. While these updates are a complete fix to the privacy issues, the automation and machine learning tools can help alleviate some platform-specific issues by helping marketers improve their results.
Meta Advantage Product Features
As stated above, Meta Advantage is divided into two products: Advantage and Advantage+. Each of these products has its own subproducts to help advertisers reach a wider audience and improve performance.
Advantage
Advantage has two subproducts: Advantage Lookalikes and Advantage Targeting
Advantage Lookalikes
Formally known as Lookalike Expansion, Advantage Lookalikes are automatically enabled for new, duplicated, or draft ad sets using a “lookalike” audience when optimized for conversion, value, or app events. For example, if Advantage found a target group that did better than the defined group, it would expand to the new audience. When you select a lookalike audience you have the option of using between 1% and 10% of people most similar to those within the seed audiences. Internal tests have shown that Advantage Lookalike can decrease costs substantially, especially when paired with seed audiences.
Advantage Detailed Targeting
Advantage Detailed Targeting is the rebranded version of Meta’s Detailed Target Expansion Tool. This feature allows Meta to expand ad targeting beyond the audience you’ve defined at the ad set level, such as interests or location. Like Advantage Lookalikes, Advantage Detailed Targeting is automatically enabled for conversion, rate, value, and app event optimization. The one difference is that you can opt-in when using other optimization features. Another difference is that it will expand the detailed targeting that you provide. ADT will look for higher performance opportunities outside your defined audience. If it finds such opportunities, it will make dynamic updates to optimize performance for those new audiences.
Advantage+
The Advantage + subproducts currently consist of the following:
- Advantage+ App Campaigns
- Advantage+ Placements
- Advantage+ Creative
- Coming Soon: Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns
Here is a brief breakdown of each:
Advantage+ App Campaigns
AACs increase the performance of marketers with real-time learning and use this learning to adjust ads across audiences, placements, and creatives. This campaign subproduct includes a series of preset options designed to sustain performance over an extended period of time. Besides this tool is a huge time saver, the automated app ads have the ability to deliver better CPA (cost per action) per install compared to manual app ads.
Advantage+ Placements
As the name suggests, this rebranded tool determines the optimal placement for every ad channel opportunity. Placements are channels such as Reels, Stories, Feeds, and so on. Meta suggests using at least six placements when utilizing the APs feature. More placements give AP more room to make dynamic improvements. Tests by Meta have also confirmed that campaigns with at least 6 placements outperformed those with four or fewer by 73%.
Advantage+ Creative
This is a relatively new feature to the Ads tools. When turned on, Advantage+ Creative will automatically create multiple variations of your ad, showing the version that people are most likely to respond to. These enhancements include adjusting the image brightness, applying artistic features, varying aspect ratios, and adding templates to a feed image. It will also make composition change to the ad such as swapping out text combinations, displaying relevant comments below your ad, and so on. These automated creative assets work to make changes here and there to your ad in order to generate the best response from your audience.
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns
Rebranded from Meta’s Shopping Ads, this subproduct is designed to optimize results from sales campaigns. ASCs use targeting, placements, and budget to help drive more conversions. This subproduct is currently in beta and is expected to roll out later this year.
Final Thoughts
The consistent theme of all of these product features is more automation. Meta Advantage is all about simplifying, streamlining, and automating whatever is possible to help advertisers that just don’t know what levels to pull to create an ad, or simply don’t have the time or energy to put it together.
Need help designing your own ad campaign to improve conversions? Contact our team to schedule a free consultation to discuss your business goals.