As a paid social agency with decades of experience, we’ve seen businesses make all types of mistakes when it comes to Advantage+ (Adv+). This is especially true when prospective clients request us to perform account audits. We perform in-depth analyses of account setups to see if there are any areas for improvement.
Before we begin, to those unfamiliar with Adv+ (also known as Advantage+ Shopping Campaign or ASC), it’s essentially a streamlined campaign type that leverages fairly broad targeting. It can support up to 150 different creative variations, allowing advertisers to test much larger creative batches at once. Nowhere is the oft-heard adage “creative is the new targeting” more true.
Outlined below, we dive into the top three Adv+ mistakes we encounter during account audits.
1. Not Properly Leveraging the Creative Function
One of the biggest differences between Adv+ and standard campaigns is that the former is capable of supporting vastly more ads. As such, Adv+ should be treated differently than standard campaigns when launching ads. Instead of the usual 6-8 ads per ad set, advertisers should (generally) be launching as many as possible.
Adv+ has a different machine learning model than standard campaigns, and the algorithm relies heavily on creative to determine to which users it should deliver ads. As such, you should be generating creative based on the different audience types and demographics you want to target.
In fact, you can even implement Adv+ into your creative testing methodology. By launching a new Adv+ campaign for each creative batch, you can test more creatives simultaneously than you could with standard campaigns. However, we usually recommend doing so only if you’re able to generate significantly more assets than you’d be able to efficiently test with standard campaigns.
2. Not Accurately Determining ‘Existing Customers’
Adv+ is a super simplified campaign type, so advertisers are very limited in their targeting capabilities. Instead of setting audience targeting at the ad set level (as is the case for standard campaigns), targeting for Adv+ is set at the account level. What we often see is that this feature isn’t properly utilized, with advertisers sometimes not defining their existing customers properly or even at all.
While this—like everything else in Meta—varies from account to account, we generally recommend that your existing customers reflect your core retargeting audiences. By “core”, we mean whomever you consider a retargeted user, and whomever is being targeted as such in your standard retargeting campaigns. This way, you’re able to leverage Adv+ as an effective prospecting tool, and you’re able to more accurately compare performance between standard and Adv+ campaigns.
3. Not Setting the Correct ‘Existing Customer Budget Caps’
Now that you’ve established who your existing customers are, you need to determine how much of your campaign budget you want going to them. The exact percentage will depend on your specific business needs.
If you want to leverage Adv+ primarily as a prospecting tool, you may want to set the budget cap at zero or something close to it. If it is set at zero, you can typically consider your Adv+ campaigns to be pure prospecting and can effectively compare their performance to your standard prospecting campaigns.
However, If you don’t care about prospecting and simply want to drive as high a ROAS as possible, you may not even set a budget cap. The downside with this is that there will likely be significant overlap with your retargeting audiences, and you won’t be able to control how much of your budget is going to retargeting vs. prospecting. We recommend testing different percentages between campaigns to see what best suits your needs.
