Should You Run Meta Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns?

Using Advantage+ for Meta ads, you can harness the power of automation and machine learning to optimize targeting and get real results.

Follow along as Associate Director of Paid Media, Jenna Long, walks you through the best strategies for deploying effective campaigns.

What You’ll Learn

What Are Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns?
Advantage+ Ads vs. Manual Bidding
How to Set Up Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns
Advantage+ Audience Targeting Options
Best Practices for Advantage+
FAQs About Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

My Expert Insight on Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

If you’re a business that’s able to combine prospecting and remarketing, target from the national level, target the U.S. with a Purchase Event, and someone who is looking to utilize AI capabilities, then Advantage+ Shopping might be best for you.

Action Item: If you meet the right criteria for Advantage+ Shopping, you should absolutely implement these campaigns for your business. They can help hyper-target your ads and ensure you get in front of the right people at the right time, which is becoming increasingly difficult as big companies look to tighten data privacy.

What Are Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns?

Meta Advantage+ ads allow advertisers to use automation and machine learning to ensure Facebook ads reach target audiences more easily and efficiently.

With the help of Advantage Shopping, you can overcome certain challenges that businesses face today, including tightening data privacy policies and a growing sea of competition. The key is knowing when you qualify for these campaigns and how to implement them properly.

Who Can Use Advantage+ Shopping Ads?

Wondering whether you should be running Advantage+ Shopping campaigns?

Many businesses can benefit from Advantage+, but these campaigns aren’t for everyone. They may be right for you if your business meets the following main criteria:

You can target at the national level, meaning you can target the entire United States
Your business can use the Purchase Event as an ecommerce business
You can blend your prospecting and remarketing funnels, pushing one product using ads that connect with audiences at different stages of the funnel

If you can check off all these items, you’ll likely benefit from using these ads. However, they may not be worth your time if your business:

Doesn’t use the ecommerce Purchase Event and simply wants to attract leads for in-store purchases, app downloads, or other events
Is brand new, as you likely won’t have sufficient historical data or creative assets to get the most from your campaigns
Is a brick-and-mortar store relying on in-store purchases
Has highly specific demographics and locations to target

The Benefits of Meta Advantage+

Advantage+ campaigns offer numerous advantages for businesses that can use them. These potential benefits include:

The ability to get great results with highly efficient campaigns
Reduced number of campaigns to conserve your budget
The chance to free up more time to spend on other important elements
Improved personalization throughout the sales funnel

Advantage+ Ads vs. Manual Bidding

Advantage+ Shopping has several key differences that set it apart from Manual Shopping campaigns.

Manual Shopping ads require advertisers to manually enter the necessary data when setting up ad campaigns. Additionally, advertisers have the responsibility of manually tracking and monitoring these campaigns, optimizing them on their own to improve their performance.

Conversely, Advantage+ makes it easy to automate campaigns and saves you some time and effort. Unlike Manual Shopping ads, Advantage+ Shopping requires less manual input and streamlines ad and creative development.

Ultimately, you’ll benefit from increased automation, with the ability to gain real insights into your campaigns through in-depth report breakdowns and attribution.

Keep in mind that you’ll lose some benefits of Manual Bidding, including the ability to define more than two audience groups, use multiple UTM for your campaigns, and customize ad placements by location.

How to Set Up Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

With a better idea of what Advantage+ is and whether you’ll want to use it, here are some steps to help you set up these campaigns:

1. Open Meta Ads Manager

The first step will require you to log into or sign up for a Meta Ads Manager account. You can then click Create.

2. Choose the “Sales” Campaign Objective

When you see the pop-up menu appear, select the Sales campaign objective from the list.

3. Choose the Advantage+ Shopping Campaign Option

In the next pop-up screen, you’ll see “Advantage shopping campaign” at the top. Select this and then click Continue.

4. Set Up Your Ad Campaign

After selecting Advantage+, you’ll go to the next screen, where you can begin setting up your ads.

There are several categories to customize, including:

The name of your campaign
Special ad categories, e.g. “Credit,” “Employment,” “Housing,” and “Social issues, elections or politics”
Conversion location, performance goals, and cost per result goals
Audience location by country
Reporting breakdowns
Budget and schedule

In addition, you’ll see a column on the right that displays “Audience definition” and “Estimated daily results,” both of which will change based on your inputs.

You can then click Next at the bottom of the screen to move on to the next step.

5. Finalize Your Ads

Before publishing, you can optimize other options, including the Ad name, choosing whether the ad will be a Partnership ad, and setting up creative elements.

You can also view a preview of your ad to see how it will look before publishing.

Once you’ve selected all the options you want for your ads, click “Publish” at the bottom of the screen.

After publishing, you can automatically keep track of your ads and make any necessary adjustments to them over time.

Advantage+ Audience Targeting Options

Audience targeting in Advantage+ looks a bit different from Manual Shopping.

To start with audience targeting, try to include data from existing customers within your account settings, which you can then divide into new and existing customers to gain some insight.

You should then ensure you have a custom audience source for your campaigns, which you can set up via “Ad account settings.”

With these options, you can better keep track of and modify your ad spend, particularly when it comes to retargeting ads.

Best Practices for Advantage+

Want to excel with your Meta Advantage+ campaigns? Here are some best practices to follow when setting up and tracking your ads.

Conduct A/B Tests

Like other types of ad campaigns, use A/B testing to determine what ads work and which need some improvement.

These tests entail launching two different versions of the same ad with one element changed, such as copy or images.

Based on these ads’ performance, you can figure out which creative works best.

Go Crazy with Creative Assets

Don’t be shy about using as many creative elements as you can for your campaigns.

Import multiple images and other creative assets to incorporate into your ad campaigns and let AI optimize them for better performance.

Set Up Your Meta Pixel

To get the insights you need to effectively measure your advertising efforts, be sure to install a Meta Pixel for your ad campaigns.

This code will go on your website and help you determine how your ads are performing based on the traffic they bring to your website.

Be sure to use Meta Pixel and Conversions API, to improve the connectivity between your ads and business and provide even deeper insights.

Avoid Making Changes Later

Another tip is to avoid the need to make changes to your campaigns after publishing. Try to get everything just right from the beginning and test your campaigns before committing.

The reason for this is that even slight changes made to your ads can negatively impact your placements as the algorithm adjusts to them, potentially causing the machine-learning process to start all over again.

Set the Budget Cap for Existing Customers

Set a budget cap for your existing customers to save you some more money and ensure your ads connect more with new customers.

New customers will require more convincing and reminders to shop with you, so you’ll want to make these audiences the primary target of your ads.

FAQs About Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

1. How many weeks for consideration campaigns on Meta and Google?

After the awareness stage in your ad campaigns and connecting with new audiences toward the top of the funnel, you’ll eventually reach the consideration stage.

When launching consideration-stage ads, you’ll need to wait for approval from Meta and Google before they publish, which can take weeks.

On Meta, you can expect the review process to take around 2-4 weeks, while Google Ads can take around 3-5 weeks to receive approval.

2. Is an Advantage+ Shopping campaign worth it?

The answer to this depends on your business and specific needs. Your business will benefit from these ads if it:

Can target the US at the national level
Uses the Purchase Event as an e-commerce company
Has some historical data with existing customers to inform your ads
You can blend your prospecting and remarketing funnels

3. How do I set up an Advnatage+ Shopping campaign on Facebook?

To set up your campaign, simply open the Meta Ads Manager, click on Create, and choose “Advantage+ shopping campaigns” for your ads.

The following screens will then guide you through setting up your ads, enabling you to choose all options from audience targeting to creative imports.