New Meta Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns: How do they work and how to use them?

Artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation have been on the radar of almost every industry lately. Companies offering ad placement present various tools that use artificial intelligence. In this article, we’ll introduce one of these tools – Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns.

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are part of Meta’s Advantage+ products and use machine learning and automation to streamline and optimize ad serving. This makes it easier for companies to reach more Facebook and Instagram users who are likely to buy their products. Advantage+ campaigns are designed to be the most effective solution for performance-driven advertisers looking to increase online sales.

Currently, they are only available to e-shop owners for accounts that have Event Purchase set up. Compared to manual ad setup, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns require less input when creating a campaign, simplifying audience options and streamlining the creative management process. The system generates many variations of ads, evaluates how well they resonate with the audience, and then delivers to the audience the variations that work best.

How to create an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign

Deploying campaigns in Advantage+ is relatively easy, which is a big advantage for small business owners who want to manage their ads themselves. When creating a new campaign, you must select the campaign goal – Sales.

Choosing a campaign objective when creating an Advantage+ shopping campaign.

Next, select the Advantage+ shopping campaign option. Selecting this option will take you to the campaign settings. We can customize a few things here, however, many of them are set automatically.

How to create an Advantage+ campaign.

You are already in the campaign settings. You choose a campaign name, select where you want Facebook to send customers for conversions, and set up Pixel to track conversions. Next, select the location of your campaign (for example, country) and then click Go to account settings.

Click into the settings to add publics.

This is where you then add existing audiences to your Advantage+ campaign that you have already created and have data from. For example, existing customers, website visitors or people who have interacted with your Facebook or Instagram posts.

Adding publics to the Advantage+ campaign.

The last thing you do is set the budget, or the start and end date of the campaign, which you already know from other types of campaigns. If you set a total budget instead of a daily budget, you can also add a schedule of ads, so that they will only appear in a specific time range.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

Advantage+ shopping campaigns contain several significant advantages and disadvantages. Thanks to automation, the campaign is easier to set up, but at the same time we don’t have as much data from it as from a classic campaign.

Benefits of Advantage+ campaigns

1. Consolidating campaigns is an effective way to remove audience overlap and achieve consistency across all media. This process ensures that the ads and their content are precisely targeted and contribute to the synergistic effect of the campaign.
2. Thanks to advanced machine learning and AI, we can optimise and evaluate up to 150 inventive ad combinations. This enables accurate data analysis and identification of the best strategies, leading to more efficient use of the advertising budget and better results.
3. The introduction of simplified campaign management speeds up the setup process considerably. By making campaign creation simple and intuitive, small business owners in particular can create, monitor and edit campaigns quickly and efficiently, saving time and increasing their productivity.
4. A sales-focused campaign is key to improving performance and client growth. These campaigns are designed to reach a relevant target group and create an impulse to buy.
5. The best results can be achieved through budget adjustments and AI recommendations. These recommendations are based on the analysis of performance data and can identify the optimal distribution and allocation of the advertising budget. Other factors, such as time constraints, trends and target audience preferences, are also associated with them and contribute to the effectiveness of campaigns.
6. The new AI brings performance-based enhancement capabilities to campaigns. Such improvements are the result of the analysis and interpretation of campaign data and allow dynamic adaptation of strategies and tactics. With this technology, it is possible to optimise campaigns in real time and ensure that ads deliver the best results in relation to their objectives.

Disadvantages of Meta Advantage+ campaigns

1. There is no customization or bidding strategy. You can only set the budget, audience and location. Facebook does everything else automatically and based on data.
2. Audience definition and monitoring control are severely limited
3. Advertising campaigns are only targeted by location, which may be inappropriate if the target audience is made up of people from different locations or if there is a need for geographically targeted campaigns.
4. These campaigns are not suitable for larger-scale advertising campaigns that require third-party monitoring and management and site-specific targeting. The lack of such features can lead to poor campaign optimization and lower efficiency in achieving the set goals.

What mistakes accompany Advantage+ shopping campaigns.

What to avoid when setting up an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign

One of the main mistakes of the Advantage+ Shopping Campaign is the incorrect setup of Pixel for conversion tracking. The pixel should be an essential element of your campaign because it helps you track the performance of your ads and determine which ads are bringing in the most conversions. Make sure you have it set up correctly and optimized for the purchase action.

Nor should you ignore the budget limit of an existing customer. Facebook introduced it to help advertisers control how much they spend on existing customers. This feature is only available if you have added audiences as shown in the image above. Make sure you use the existing customer budget limit so you don’t spend unnecessarily too much of your budget on existing customers.

It may be that the ads you have chosen for this campaign are not tested. So before you run a campaign, make sure you test the ads you’re going to use to make sure they work as expected. If you avoid these mistakes, your shopping campaign will achieve the desired results.

Who are Meta Advantage+ campaigns suitable for?

Thanks to personalisation based on customer behavioural analysis, Advantage+ shopping campaigns deliver a wider range of relevant content and offers that match each customer’s individual preferences and needs. This greatly increases the likelihood that customers will discover new products that they might otherwise miss.

They also make the work of marketers and small e-shop owners much easier, because creating this campaign is very simple and brings significant results. On the other hand, it doesn’t offer as many settings and data reporting options as campaigns with manual settings. It’s still a relatively new concept, and Meta will certainly be expanding and updating this tool in the future.

Compared to other campaigns, Advantage+ has a lower cost per thousand impressions (CTZ) because several advertisers have not yet adopted it. This leads to higher conversion rates, better customer acquisition costs and higher return on advertising investment. Now you have an overview of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and how they can help you grow your business. If you are looking for reliable campaign management partners, contact us.