As you’ve probably noticed, digital marketing is emphasizing automation over manual inputs more than ever. Similar to how Google is leveraging Performance Max, Meta now has a similar offering, Advantage+ designed to further automate marketing efforts.

But what is Advantage+? Is it really the same thing as Google’s Pmax? The answer: yes, kinda! It started as an option specifically for shopping campaigns but now is available across the architecture of a campaign, from ad sets to ads themselves.

Per Meta, this ostensibly should improve your campaigns. Yet there are now fewer customizations you can make within them, instead having to heed ground to the “black box” of Meta’s AI.

Let’s dive into what Advantage+ really is and how you can best utilize it:

What is Advantage+?

Image source: easyinsights.com

At its core, the Advantage+ Suite is the new way to set up campaigns in Meta ads manager with simplified features to make the advertising set up easier for marketers and brands.

Features include:

• ‘Advantage+ shopping’ to help optimize the products featured in ads. In the screenshot that follows you can see Meta is recommending the ‘Advantage+ shopping campaign’ over the ‘Manual sales campaign’. By selecting Advantage+ the marketer gets less control in the options that follow, however Meta states that these campaigns will ‘maximize performance and reach valuable audiences with a simplified setup. Preset settings include placements, age and more.’

Image source: facebook.com

• ‘Advantage+ targeting’ to broaden and identify top performing audiences and placements (such as feed vs reels, etc.). If you select ‘manual campaign set up’ you still have the opportunity to utilize Advantage+ for audience and/or placements. In the screenshots that follow you can see how Meta shares that the audience and placements will be managed to perform best.

Image source: facebook.com

• Lastly, ‘Advantage+ creative’ that optimizes the ad creative, copy and other elements. In the first screenshot below you can see for shopping campaigns you can allow Advantage+ to dynamically create catalog ads. Alternatively, for any objective selection or ad type you have several features that you can allow Advantage+ to optimize, such as adding music, image touch-ups or even text improvements.

Image source: facebook.com

So, how does Meta describe the objectives of Advantage+? That would be, to “streamline [insert your name here]’s performance goals to achieve the highest performance from our marketing solutions.” That’s a lot of words that essentially mean “market more efficiently.”

Just like Google’s Performance Max, with the Advantage+ Suite, you’re ceding a lot of control over targeting and bidding, and even the creative assets of your ads.

The advantage you’re ostensibly given through this is that in theory, it’s taking human error and judgment out of the equation to follow the conclusions that more complex data is telling should be “optimized” for your goals. In reality, the potential positive effects aren’t necessarily all that — essentially, you’re losing control while all advertisers get more of their choices automatically made by the same platform. Essentially, flattening out and homogenizing all advertisers and businesses, like yours.

Still, just because we’re a bit iffy on the self-proclaimed benefits of Advantage+, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to understand it better.

Here are its main characteristics:

1) It allows you to combine prospective and existing customer audiences into the same campaign using personalized products in your existing catalog. This allows you to manage fewer campaigns instead of many, meaning you have to dedicate proportionally fewer resources.

2) Its machine learning identifies your highest-value customers and prioritizes them from there. This goes across all of Meta’s platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and more — and requires less time, energy, and resources for input from you.

3) It simplifies your campaign setup and further management, through extension making it more efficient.

4) It tests creative asset combos — up to 150! — and from there can automatically deliver ads that are performing the highest.

The bottom line here is, per Facebook/Meta themselves, that Advantage+ sets out to “deliver your highest performing ad variation to the highest value shoppers.”

Setting your expectations of Advantage+

Unfortunately, while there is the advantage of improving your efficiency in some ways, there are some pretty noteworthy disadvantages to, ahem, Advantage+.

Notably, this includes that it returns pretty much no insights to you.

In the same vein, you simply lose a bunch of the controls you could previously set for both ads and whole campaigns. It makes sense that increasing automation would mean you’re losing much of your agency to control your output, so that’s not shocking, but the practical implications for “unable to access insightful data” and “also unable to make many adjustments because a black box is deciding for you” can snowball — and not in an encouraging way.

Of course, all this would be merely an inconvenience but — ultimately — moot if Advantage+ really marked a huge improvement over manual decision-making for your campaigns. The issue is that it not only doesn’t do that but, in some cases, does worse. Despite Meta claiming greater efficiency (fair enough, technically true) will lead to more sales, we’re not really seeing that backed up by testing.

In our experience, when it comes to classic sales ads Advantage+ operates roughly on par with your classic manual approach — albeit without returning really any useful insights — but is less successful than standard Meta advertising for lead generation ads and campaigns.

Still, there are some steps you can take to make it work for you while the classic campaign styles are still available.

Making Advantage+ work for you

Image source: facebook.com

First off, we should say that our gut feeling is that the classic, more manual advertising capabilities offered by Meta will go away at some point. This isn’t based on anything Meta has said or any concrete evidence, but that’s the way things have been moving and is in line with past trends from tech platforms where they unveil a new tool, later move to make it standard and then, down the line, the exclusive option. Further, there are some newer ad accounts that you already aren’t able to revert to the traditional, more manual style.

So, with that in mind, we recommend you take the time now to familiarize yourself with it and test it against the traditional campaign styles.

This will help you contextualize Advantage+’s results and help you calibrate for the future when it might be your only option. Furthermore, if Meta does make it your only option in the future, you want to — pardon the cliche — hit the ground running instead of starting from zero and having to learn everything from scratch when you don’t have the classic advertising style to be your training wheels.

Overall, Advantage+ is in line with trends on these giant platforms similar to Google’s Performance Max. In general, they’re pushing you to rely more on their standard AI to ostensibly improve your advertising, but in doing so taking away your own control over your ads.

This flattens all advertisers’ efforts and gives you fewer options to stand out using your own creativity and targeting — meaning you might have to supplement your Facebook and Instagram marketing with other platforms digital or otherwise that can help give you a leg up. In the words of The Incredibles: If everybody’s super, nobody is.

Still, despite it being something a lot of us aren’t the biggest fan of, doesn’t mean it’s not worth your effort to make sure you have a basic understanding of how to work with it as best you can.