Will Smith
As a digital marketing agency, it’s always important to keep on top of developments within your industry to ensure you deliver the best work for your clients. One area constantly developing within Paid Media is automation and data-driven strategies, including Meta’s Advantage+ Sales Campaign (ASC) – an AI-powered solution tailored for eCommerce brands looking to scale with precision and efficiency.
Advantage+ Sales Campaigns (formerly Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns) is Meta’s automated campaign designed for businesses selling consumer products. It uses the power of machine learning to serve ads to audiences with the highest possibility of driving conversions, and rather than relying on manual audience segmentation, Advantage+ automatically allocates your budget to audiences with the highest potential for driving conversions.
The change from Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns has not changed the principles of the campaign type too drastically, but it now covers a broader, more flexible format designed to support a wider range of sales objectives than just eCommerce, including sales, app, and lead campaigns.
Advertisers can now optimise both online and offline conversions. It’s a clear signal from Meta: automation is here to stay, but flexibility and strategic control remain essential.
At the start of 2024, Meta removed and consolidated certain detailed targeting options because they were either not widely used, redundant, too granular, perceived as sensitive, or due to legal or regulatory requirements.
As the advertising industry moves towards a cookieless future, advertisers are becoming more sceptical about the quality of third-party audiences, meaning the trust in machine learning and AI-driven targeting is gaining traction.
We’ve seen great results from using Advantage+ in our Paid Media campaigns for our clients, including the likes of Joe Browns, through advanced automation, dynamic testing, optimised budget allocation, and greater operational efficiency.
Following this approach for Joe Browns delivered lower costs, improved performance metrics, and a streamlined campaign structure, enabling more effective and scalable outcomes. We achieved a 39.7% lower cost per purchase compared to standard campaigns, highlighting their effectiveness in driving results.
Platforms like Bloomreach and Klaviyo can be strategically used alongside Advantage+ and present a significant opportunity to expand paid social efforts, creating more effective prospecting and retargeting campaigns while maintaining data privacy compliance.
The graph below shows GA4 – session/source data, supporting that Advantage+ campaigns outperformed standard campaigns on both an engagement and revenue basis (GA4 – session/source data).
While Advantage+ campaigns are showing strong performance, don’t just set it and forget it. Every brand, audience, and product behaves differently, and as the scope of paid advertising continues to expand, what works today might not work tomorrow, so frequent experimentation is key.
Even though these systems are automated, it’s important to keep on top of running campaigns and make adjustments if necessary. For all your advertising campaigns, it’s important to continue to:
By layering in strategic testing alongside automation, you give yourself the best shot at uncovering insights and driving consistent performance.
Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns represent a clear shift towards a more automated, data-driven future in paid media, one that embraces machine learning, prioritises first-party data, and simplifies campaign management without sacrificing performance.
The key is finding balance: leveraging automation to scale efficiently, while still applying strategic oversight through testing and optimisation. As the tools evolve, so should your approach, always guided by performance, data, and a deep understanding of your goals.
