Meta (formerly Facebook) started developing and launching its Advantage Suite in 2022 as part of its broader effort to simplify and automate advertising on its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. The Advantage Suite comprises tools like Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, Advantage+ Creative, and other automated solutions designed to help advertisers improve ad performance through AI and machine learning.
However, despite the shared “Advantage+” branding, each tool serves a different purpose and operates independently.
This blog post explains each Advantage+ feature, including our insights and recommendations based on practical experience.
What does Meta's Advantage suite offer?
Meta’s advertising suite includes Advantage+ and Advantage features, both of which aim to simplify and enhance advertising through automation and AI.
However, they serve slightly different purposes and have distinct functionalities:
According to Meta, Advantage features help boost your ad performance using AI, making each ad impression more valuable. The benefits of using Advantage are:
- Get better results with fewer, more effective campaigns.
- Reach more people interested in your business.
- Create personalized customer experiences that drive actions.
- Save time and focus on the bigger picture.
Advantage+ Campaigns
Advantage+ Campaigns are designed to simplify campaign management by automating much of the decision-making process, such as audience targeting and budget allocation.
These campaigns blend prospecting and retargeting audiences into a single campaign, making them less transparent and harder to manage.
Advantage+ Placements
Advantage+ Placements allows Meta to automatically choose where your ads are shown across its platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and Audience Network.
The feature aims to maximize performance by showing ads where they are most likely to be effective. Including more placements helps you find wider audience. The more places your ad is shown, the more chances your target audience has to see it.
OUR RECOMMENDATION
Advantage+ Creative
Advantage+ creative uses AI to automatically optimize your images and videos to versions that your audience is more likely to interact with. Meta claims this can significantly improve ad performance, particularly for advertisers who may not have strong creative assets.
Different creative enhancements will be available to you, depending on the ad format or placements you select.
While the feature can be beneficial for advertisers lacking in creative expertise, it can be problematic for brands that have specific creative standards and brand guidelines. Meta aggressively ushes Advantage+ creative, often auto-applying it when changes are made to ad sets, which can be frustrating and counterproductive for brands with a strong creative identity.
OUR RECOMMENDATION
Advantage+ Audience
Meta Advantage+ Audience leverages Meta’s advanced AI to identify the best audience for your campaign. It is one of the easiest and most effective automation options available.
In Meta’s tests compared to other audience options, Advantage+ Audience has consistently delivered better performance across all campaign objectives.
Here are the results of using Advantage+ audience:
- 13% lower median cost per product catalogue sale
- 7% lower median cost per website conversions
- 28% lower average cost per click, lead, or landing page view
We also have found that this feature works well in practice, often improving overall campaign performance by identifying and targeting additional high-value users.
Advantage+ Audience helps ensure that ads are shown to users with a higher likelihood of conversion, even if they fall outside your original targeting parameters.
OUR RECOMMENDATION
Advantage+ Catalog
Advantage+ Catalog is essentially a rebranded version of Dynamic Product Ads (DPA), allowing for automated product promotion based on your product catalog. When someone expresses interest in a product from your catalog, Meta can dynamically generate an ad for that person and deliver it automatically on mobile, tablet, or desctop.
It functions similarly to DPA but is somewhat less transparent in its operation.
Advantage+ catalog usually performs well and is good for dynamic retargeting (showing ads to people who have already interacted with your products). However, if there are problems with your product catalog (such as errors or missing information), the feature may not work properly.
Also, the automation provided by this Advantage+ catalog is useful, but if there are issues with the product catalog, it can cause major problems. This makes it harder to manage and fix the issues, potentially affecting the effectiveness of your campaigns.
OUR RECOMMENDATION
Advantage Campaign Budget
At the end of this blog post, we like to mention the Advantage budget optimization. Advantage campaign budget automatically allocates your budget across ad sets within a campaign based on Facebook’s algorithm.
This feature is intended to maximize the efficiency of budget spending across different audiences and ad sets.
The lack of control is a notable downside of Advantage campaign budget optimization, as it doesn’t distinguish between prospecting and retargeting audiences. This can lead to budget misallocation and make campaign management challenging, particularly for advertisers who require precise budget control.
While it might be suitable for smaller teams or those who don’t regularly monitor their ad accounts, it’s less ideal for advertisers needing detailed budget management.
Overall, from a ROAS perspective, Ad Set Budget Optimization (ABO) performs better, delivering an average ROAS of 94% for prospecting ads compared to 81% with the Advantage Campaign Budget.
OUR RECOMMENDATION
Summing Up
The Advantage+ suite offers a range of tools designed to automate and optimize various aspects of your Meta ad campaigns. While some features, like Advantage+ placements and Advantage+ audience, can significantly enhance performance, others, like Advantage campaign budget and Advantage+ campaigns, may reduce control and transparency.
