Nov 15 2022
8 minute read

What are Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns?

As digital marketing evolves to fit consumer preferences and follow privacy changes, advertisers continue to witness changes from their advertising platforms. In this article, we’ll explain Meta’s 2022 rollout of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns.

What is Advantage+?

First it’s important to understand what Advantage+ is. 

Advantage+ is a group of improved products offered by Meta that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate the entire, or part of, the campaign creation process (Audience/Targeting, Bids/Budgets, Creative, Destination, and Placements). 

The goal of Advantage+ is to offer advertisers:

  • Optimisation: Get better, more sustainable campaign results.
  • Personalisation: Form deeper connections with audiences by matching the right people with the right ad at the right time.
  • Efficiency: Save time and energy on campaigns. Automation means simplified ad creation, decision-making, and optimisation, ultimately resulting in better overall performance for businesses.

Advantage+ products consist of:

  • Advantage+ Catalog Ads (formerly “Dynamic Ads”)
  • Advantage+ App Campaigns (formerly “Automated App Ads”)
  • Advantage+ Lead Campaigns (formerly “Automated Lead Ads”)
  • Advantage+ Placements (formerly “Automatic Placements“)
  • Advantage+ Creative for Catalog (formerly “Dynamic Formats and Creative”)
  • Advantage+ Creative (formerly “Dynamic Experiences”)
  • Advantage+ International Catalog Ads (formerly "Multi-country and Language Dynamic Ads")

In August 2022, Meta launched another initiative to replace “Dynamic Ads for a Broad Audience (DABA)” called Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, an automated solution for Facebook and Instagram Shopping ads.

What are Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns?

In the past, e-commerce advertisers had to manually test different campaign elements such as audiences, visuals, and budget to find the best combination to reach their business’ goals. 

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns aim to remedy this by using AI and new machine learning models designed to reach the right audiences at the right time and place in Facebook and Instagram Shopping campaign ads, driving better results for advertisers.

Image from Meta

As Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns do not limit audiences or placements, advertisers can now find new audiences and placements they most likely wouldn’t have manually looked for or found previously. 

The adoption of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns gives AI the power to reach any Meta user, on any Meta platform, in any allocated country, thus enabling AI to decide the perfect people to see an advertiser’s Shopping ads.

This allows marketers to quickly learn what ads are working, while getting the most out of their advertising budget.

In addition, by shifting toward automation, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns establish a smoother, quicker campaign creation process than what came before.

What are the benefits of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns?

As Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are Meta’s biggest innovation since Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs), there are plenty of reasons to hop on board.

Benefits of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns include:

  • A quick and simplified campaign creation and implementation process
  • AI and machine learning designed to forge the best ad combinations for your objectives
  • Recommendations for elements that were successful in your past campaigns
  • Optimising budget spend to achieve your business goals
  • Allowing 150 ads to exist at once within one ad set
  • Prospecting, retargeting, and retention enabled within one set, with control over the budget allocated between new and existing customers
  • Continuous learning and optimising based on individual user preferences

How ROI Hunter can enhance Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

ROI Hunter is paving the way for a new marketing category called Product Performance Management by creating the first-ever Product Performance Management (PPM) platform

The PPM platform aims to enable top-level retail marketers to gain better insights into how products perform on the individual level across all of their channels, so they are better equipped to make more informed, data-backed business decisions.

Some major benefits of using ROI Hunter to complement Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are as follows:

  • Gain signals from other channels: As a Google Premier Partner, use Google Shopping, trends, and other business data to optimise Meta campaigns.
  • Maintain control over products: Although audience targeting is done by AI, you still have the power to control which of your products get promoted.
  • Enhanced campaign performance: See better results with more precise product and business info added into Meta’s algorithm.
  • Quick, dynamic creatives: Create engaging dynamic ads in minutes, without needing a graphic designer.

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns in practice

Although Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are still fairly new, we've already seen clients achieve significant results since its inception.

For example, we tested an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign for one of our clients in September.

The goal was to compare the client’s business as usual (BAU) dynamic ads for broad audience (DABA) campaign against an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign promoting their bestsellers.

After just one month of running these campaigns, the client’s DABA campaign resulted in a return on ad spend (ROAS) of 0.6, while their Advantage+ Shopping Campaign achieved a ROAS of 5.8.

Additionally, the client’s DABA campaign had a click-through rate (CTR) of 2.3, while their Advantage+ Shopping Campaign’s CTR reached 4.8.

Final takeaway

In summary, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns simplify and speed up campaign creation, drive better performance through AI and machine learning, and enable advertisers to better achieve overarching business goals. 

While Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns is still a new solution, it’s clear as day that adoption of this initiative has immense potential.

ROI Hunter uses Product Performance Management (PPM) data to further improve your Meta Shopping campaigns’ creation process and drive greater results.

Download this free cheat sheet about how product performance data can enhance your Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns.

Find out how ROI Hunter can add value to your business.
Contact sales