Are Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns a Good Fit for You?

Enhance your business’s potential in Facebook advertising with Advantage+ Shopping campaigns—a dynamic tool designed to power up online campaigns. This comprehensive guide contains everything you need to know about it.

What are Advantage+ shopping campaigns?

Advantage plus shopping campaigns by Facebook are an automated product offering that is designed to help advertisers reach valuable audiences more efficiently with reduced setup time. Your ads will dynamically be served to audiences most likely to convert, and all your targeting, placements, and budgeting will be handled by AI 🦾🤖

Some notable features:

• Machine learning: Utilizing advanced machine learning capabilities, these campaigns pinpoint and target your most valuable audiences on Facebook and require minimal manual input from your end.
• Efficiency: Advantage+ Shopping campaign (ASC) Facebook ads are designed to drive online sales more efficiently for performance-focused advertisers.
• Automated testing: These campaigns automatically test up to 150 creative combinations to deliver the highest-performing ads for you.
• Performance goals: These campaigns have enhancements for better performance. They’re perfect for businesses looking to scale or launch a new campaign type, such as introducing a new product or collection. 

In fact, a study conducted by Facebook found an average improvement of 17% in CPA and an impressive 32% increase in ROAS. 

Before you begin with Advantage+ shopping campaigns… 🤚

You need to ensure your Meta Pixel is installed. If you’re having problems with yours, this Pixel troubleshooting guide will assist you. Additionally, staying informed about the latest Facebook updates is essential, as these may also impact your Advantage plus shopping campaigns and Facebook ads.

Note: Advantage+ Shopping campaigns are part of Meta's Advantage+ suite of AI tools, which you can read about in our detailed guide.

How to set up an Advantage+ shopping campaign 

1. Go to ‘Create New Campaign’ in Meta Ads Manager.

2. Choose ‘Sales’ as your goal.

3. Select ‘Advantage+ Shopping campaign.’

4. Target the country where you wish to market your products or services. You can select one or more countries. 

Just an FYI ⚠️: You can only target audiences by country here. Age, gender, and interest-based targeting is prohibited.

5. To add customer audiences, go to ‘Account Settings’ and ‘Create’ under the new section to create custom audiences. Any audiences added here will be labeled ‘Existing customers.’ Adding these customer audiences helps you identify and exclude those who have already engaged with your brand, allowing you to allocate your resources toward attracting new customers.

A good thing to note is that once you’ve been running an Advantage+ Shopping campaign, Meta Ads Manager lets you segment your reporting for existing and new customers. 

Go to the ‘Breakdown’ tab, then select ‘By delivery.’ 

You can then select ‘Audience type’ or ‘Audience type and country’ which creates separate rows for new and existing customers by country.

This is what it looks like:

6. Set your campaign daily budget.

7. Confirm audience parameters. This is to customize your ad targeting based on specific website traffic behavior. By using UTM parameters, you can differentiate between new visitors and existing customers who have made purchases.

8. Select a campaign attribution setting. An attribution window of "7-day click or 1-day view" is generally recommended. 

9. Add your creatives by selecting the ads you want to import and click ‘Import All Ads.’ 

You can also upload the creatives manually like the below ⬇️

⚠️ You can test up to 150 creative combinations in one campaign.

10. You’re ready to hit ‘Publish!’

Have you heard? 📣 Meta's recent updates bring a major change to Advantage+ Shopping campaigns. They’re phasing out the 'Existing customer budget cap' feature. Instead of setting a budget cap percentage, you now use multiple ad sets to control spending on different audience segments.

If you want to spend no budget on existing customers, this is no longer possible in Advantage+ Shopping campaigns. You need to set your campaign up manually and exclude these custom audiences at the ad set level. Alternatively, create a new campaign with two ad sets to split your budget between new and existing customers. Set a maximum amount for existing customers in the first ad set, duplicate it and exclude existing customers in the second ad set.

For more detailed instructions on creating manual acquisition campaigns, check out this comprehensive guide.

What are the pros and cons of Advantage+ Shopping campaigns?

As with anything, there are upsides and downsides. Here’s a snapshot of what you can expect:

Pros

• Efficiency: Advanced AI and machine learning algorithms can analyze large amounts of data quickly and accurately, enabling real-time optimization.
• Automated testing: AI tests up to 150 ad combinations, ensuring it matches the right ad to the right audience.
• Simplified campaign creation: Campaigns require less manual input, fewer adjustments, and minimal management.
• Improved ROI: Businesses get the most value from their ad spend through automated bidding strategies and optimized ad placements.

Cons

• Limited targeting options: The targeting options are limited to the country level, excluding the ability to specify demographics such as age, gender, and interests. Fortunately, tools like Madgicx’s Audience Launcher provide a solution to this. With over 100 pre-packaged audiences at your disposal, Audience Launcher simplifies the process of finding relevant audiences. All it takes is a few clicks to launch your desired audience and BOOM!

• Exclusion concern: Campaigns don’t exclude warm audiences, a practice generally recommended for acquisition campaigns aiming for prolonged growth. Plus, as already mentioned, launching acquisition campaigns requires manual setup to ensure they only target cold audiences. Fortunately, with Audience Launcher, you have built-in exclusions that allow you to launch pure acquisition campaigns. Once you launch an acquisition audience, it automatically excludes your warm audiences. No tedious setups. With just a few clicks, et voilà, your campaign is up and running. You can even test it out with the 7-day FREE TRIAL!
• Control limitations: If you prefer full control over campaigns, this automated tool may not be for you. Some settings are preset.
• E-commerce businesses only: Currently, this automation technology is only available to e-commerce businesses.

Advantage+ Shopping campaigns best practices

Implementing Meta Advantage best practices is key to driving high-quality traffic, improving conversion rates, and enhancing customer engagement. 

Here’s a list to compare your campaigns against:

1. More is more: The key is to load as many creatives as possible onto the system. AI will automatically perform media enhancements that automatically tailor each creative to match individual user preferences. We recommend launching with a minimum of 10 creatives. ‍
2. A/B testing: Regularly test different versions of your ads to see what works best. This could involve changing the ad copy, images, video, or calls to action.‍
3. Install a pixel: Use the Meta pixel to track conversions and retarget users who have already interacted with your brand. By using a pixel, you can effectively retarget users who have previously engaged with your brand, thereby optimizing your campaign performance.

Are Advantage+ Shopping campaigns better than a manual campaign setup?

When it comes to online advertising, the choice between Advantage+ Shopping campaigns and manual campaign setups often depends on your specific needs and circumstances. Both have their strengths and potential drawbacks. 

ASCs are particularly beneficial for the following groups:

1. Small businesses: These campaigns are beneficial for small businesses that want to maximize their advertising impact with limited resources.
2. Time-constrained marketers: If you’re looking for a time-saving solution that automates campaign setup and management, Advantage+ Shopping campaigns would be a good fit.
3. E-commerce businesses: These campaigns are particularly beneficial for e-commerce businesses as they can showcase their products directly to the potential customer, making it easier for them to find and purchase their products.
4. Businesses with large inventory: Businesses can use these campaigns to manage a large inventory of products, effectively showcasing each item to the right audience, thereby maximizing visibility and potential sales. 

On the other hand, manual campaign setups are more suitable for those who prefer having full control over their campaign parameters and are willing to invest time in manual optimization.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while Advantage+ shopping campaigns offer a remarkable range of benefits, they also have their limitations. Luckily, there are tools in the market that can close this gap. 

By incorporating Madgicx’s targeting tools into your Facebook ads e-commerce strategy, you can overcome these limitations and ensure that your campaigns are as effective and efficient as possible. 

So, now that you know what the Advantage+ shopping campaign pros and cons are, are Advantage+ shopping campaigns a good fit for you?