Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns: Farewell Customer Budget Cap

‍Meta's recent updates include a significant update to their Advantage+ Shopping campaigns, which is crucial for digital marketers and business owners who rely on Facebook ads. This change involves removing the 'Existing customer budget cap' feature and introducing a new method to control audience-related budgets using ad sets. 

This blog contains a breakdown of what this means and how you can adapt.

What’s changing?

Previously, the 'budget cap' feature allowed advertisers to set a maximum budget percentage to spend on existing customers, defined by custom audiences in the ad account settings. This feature is slowly being phased out. 

This feature was crucial because it enabled you to exclude warm audiences from your acquisition campaigns. Without it, Meta’s algorithm will prioritize conversions and revenue from your existing customers (warm audiences), which prevents expanding your audience base. Over time, this could lead to exhausting your existing customer base without gaining new ones.

With the removal of this feature, launching acquisition campaigns requires manual setup to ensure they only target cold audiences. You can no longer rely on Advantage+ Shopping campaigns for this purpose.

But before you panic, Meta has provided two ways to manage your budgets effectively, and this blog will guide you in doing just that.

Why the change?

Meta’s decision to update this feature aligns with its ongoing efforts to improve ad management tools and provide more granular control over budget allocation. This change might initially require some adjustment, but it ultimately offers a more robust way to target and manage audiences.

What this means for advertisers

Removing the 'Existing customer budget cap' feature may seem like a step back, but the new method provides a flexible and detailed way to manage your ad spend. Advertisers can maintain precise control over their ad costs and campaigns by using multiple ad sets to separate budgets for new and existing customers.

How to control your budget with multiple ad sets

Instead of setting a budget cap percentage, you can now use multiple ad sets to control spending on different audience segments. Here’s how:

Option #1: Spend no budget on existing customers

1. Open Meta Ads Manager and click on ‘Create campaign.’

2. Select ‘Sales’ as your campaign objective.

3. If you want to spend no budget on existing customers, you must set up a non-ASC campaign to get that feature. Click ‘Manual sales campaign’ here and then ‘Continue.’

4. Now, add your campaign name. Select the ad category from the list if your ads are related to credit, employment, housing, social issues, elections, or politics. If your campaign doesn’t fall under this ad category, click ‘Next’ and skip to the next section.

5. At the campaign level: Toggle on 'Advantage campaign budget' as your budget strategy and then set a daily or lifetime budget.

6. At the ad set level: Under Audience controls, click on the ‘More’ dropdown. Tap ‘Exclude these custom audiences’ to exclude any people you consider your existing customers.

7. Choose the creative for your ad at the ad level. Select the ads you want to import and click ‘Import All Ads.’

You can also upload your creatives manually like this ⬇️

8. Once you're ready, hit ‘Publish.’ 

Option #2: Split the budget between new and existing Customers

For Option 2, begin by following the same steps as in Option 1. Once you have toggled on ‘Advantage campaign budget,’ proceed with the following steps:

1. In the first ad set: Navigate to ‘Budget & scheduling.’ Then, check off ‘Ad set spending limits’ and set a maximum amount for existing customers. 

2. Tap 'Switch to original audience options,’ then 'Use original audience,’ and include your custom audiences.

3. Now, you must duplicate your ad set and select ‘Original campaign.’ You can keep the same creative for both ad sets. 

4. In your second ad set: Under ‘Audience controls,’ click on the ‘More’ dropdown menu. Here, you can exclude people you consider to be your existing customers. You have two options: select saved custom audiences you've previously created in Ads Manager or Audiences, or generate new custom audiences directly in Ads Manager. Any settings from your ad account settings will be automatically applied.

5. Tap ‘Publish’ once you’re done.

After submitting your ad for review, Meta will send you notifications at different stages: during the review process, upon approval or disapproval, and finally, when the campaign concludes. 

If your Facebook ad remains in the review stage longer than expected, this guide offers strategies to expedite the process and minimize future waiting times.

Not feeling this manual way of doing things?

With our AI-driven ad strategies, Madgicx can help you navigate these changes and optimize your Meta campaigns more efficiently. Madgicx’s Audience Launcher contains built-in exclusions that allow you to launch pure acquisition campaigns. 

Once you launch an acquisition audience, it automatically excludes existing customers, which are called ‘Madgicx non-acquisition.’ These are individuals who visited your website within the past 30 days and those who completed a purchase within the last 180 days, as tracked by the Meta pixel.

Launching a campaign with Madgicx is really that simple. With just a few clicks, it is up and running. Experience it for yourself – give the 7-day free trial a shot!