AI-Driven Insights: Strategies to Supercharge Meta Advantage+ Campaigns

You already know that AI has the power to revolutionize everything. But the big news in marketing and artificial intelligence has focused on search, content, and creative.

That same power is now transforming advertising on social with Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC).

These campaigns use AI-powered optimization to give brands new opportunities to increase advertising efficiency and performance. To make a long story short: if you’re not adapting your strategy to incorporate these new campaign types already, you risk losing out to competitors who are. 

Our social experts have joined forces to reveal the most important tactics that will help you give Advantage+ a spin or take your strategy to the level.

Understanding Meta Advantage+ broad targeting

Meta Advantage+ shopping campaigns will mean going against a lot of the traditional wisdom underpinning paid social strategy. One of the biggest differences between traditional campaigns and ASC campaigns is that ASC targeting is intentionally broad.

ASC campaigns consolidate audiences previously split across three campaign types: prospecting, retargeting, and previous customers. This might seem counterintuitive to marketers used to having more control over their campaigns, but broader targeting gives Meta the leeway to decide which ads resonate best with your audiences.

But it means giving up some control and trusting the algorithm.

“This can probably sound a little bit scary and different from what we have always said is a best practice as performance marketers. Instead of breaking out campaigns as separate layers of the funnel so we can control creative and budget for those audiences, ASC takes all of those and merges them together.”

This consolidation lets different algorithms talk to each other using Meta Lattice, the company’s new model that combines multiple smaller transformer models to predict ad performance. Wider targeting meansmore inputs coming in and more outputs coming out, which increases the speed of learning and condenses setup time. 

Building ASC campaign foundations and trying new creative

Creating an ASC campaign is a little like building your dream house in the real world—you have to start from the ground up.

The foundation of your ASC campaign is critical. Don’t go in without a plan in place that takes key levers that will define your campaign’s success into consideration, including:

• New existing customer budget cap
• Audience inclusions and exclusions
• Post-click conversion points
• Placements and bidding
• Attribution
• Budget allocation

Once you have the right structure in place, it’s time to maximize the impact of your creative. This is where the real benefits of Advantage+ kick in. ASC uses machine learning to figure out your most powerful creative, then favors that creative while de-accelerating other options. 

“Targeting is no longer the connective tissue between campaign and audience saturation: targeting is now done at the creative level.”

You can’t be stingy with your creative if you want to win with Advantage+. For these campaigns, you should stack your ad volume closer to ten to twenty ads versus the traditional best practice of six. That’s because, unlike traditional A/B testing which pits two different types of creative against one another, ASC’s testing mechanisms will test multiple ads at once and typically accelerate one above all others.

Budgeting for the best Advantage+ results

Once you’ve got the basics down, it’s time to think about budget. When it comes to prospecting, you have to find the sweet spot balancing your investment into ASC vs. non-ASC campaigns.

There is no magic, one-size-fits-all correct budget allocation. You need to test to understand how the campaign will perform, the effect on your overall Meta account, and the impact on your holistic business objectives. 

That requires closely monitoring your third-party measurement, incrementality testing, and Meta Advanced Analytics before, during, and after the campaign launch. Don’t just trust in-platform reporting to validate and evaluate the impact of ASC on new customer acquisition. Use that information to drive budget allocation decisions.

Since ASC targeting is by definition broad, the audience segmentation tools you’re used to in Meta campaigns just don’t exist. That takes some getting used to! But there are new ways to tailor the campaigns for your business needs. One big feature is that the existing customer budget bid cap lets you toggle up or toggle down different audience segments depending on your business goals and who you want to target with ASC campaigns.

You can also look to your approach to creative inputs for more control. One cool thing about ASC campaigns is that you can maximize the signal of a single campaign by including both feed (DPA) and traditional creative. 

But that might not be the best solution for everyone. DPA tends to win over traditional creative assets when mixed in the same campaign. If your brand puts a strong emphasis on creative, you may want to break out two separate ASC campaigns, one for DPA and one for traditional creative, so you can effectively drive and scale brand recognition.

“What’s unique about dynamic ad campaigns in ASC is that they collapse the funnel. They go after prospecting, retargeting, and past purchasers with that existing customer budget cap so you can really use ASC to reach all of those different audiences in one campaign type.”

ASC campaigns are truly changing the game on social by collapsing the funnel and leveraging new capabilities to achieve your goals. That means you need to adjust your strategy too. But the end result will be big rewards for your brand and business. 

As you’re getting used to the new tech, keep pushing your boundaries and trying new things to get the most out of its capabilities and see what works best for your brand. That curious mindset shouldn’t stop there, either–you need to make a long-term commitment to continue testing so you can stay at the forefront of all the AI developments coming our way. 

Learn more about how to deploy the right mix of ASC tactics by checking out our full on-demand masterclass, Win With AI By Leveraging Meta Advantage+.