The Ultimate Advantage+ Shopping Campaign Guide
The Impact of iOS 14
It won’t be news to you that the landscape of Paid Social looks significantly different than it did last year this time. The main cause being iOS 14.5 changes which were rolled out last June, causing tracking and measurement to drop off a cliff as well as reducing the size of key datasets.
Whilst we’ve spent copious amounts of time in trial and error, searching for solutions to the new challenges posed in a post iOS14 world, Meta has been working on, and released a solution in the form of Meta Advantage, specifically the Advantage+ Shopping Campaign.
This is a campaign type to help increase sales and drive growth. As we should’ve expected, the Modus Operandi is loud and clear – rely on the power of automation and AI.
We’ve had Advantage+ features in place in our campaign set-up for a while now; namely automatic placements, expanded targeting and campaign budget optimization. Advantage+ shopping consolidates all of these features at different levels under one seamless, automated campaign set up process. In essence it hands the control and responsibility over to Meta to deliver on their promise – increase sales and drive growth!
This new campaign set up, to quote Meta, is according to best practice, streamlined and tailored. It removes the manual component of campaign set up, and is being rolled out to advertisers globally.
What Are Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns?
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns leverage a combination of budget allocation, detailed targeting expansion, placement automation and ad creatives. This powers Meta algorithmic learning to automatically show the relevant ad creative, in the right place to the right audience, ultimately for the most favourable outcome in terms of ROAS and CAC.
What is Different About Advantage+ Shopping Campaign Type?
The short answer is data. There is an interesting article published by Felix Krause which highlights Meta’s work around in an effort to counteract the tracking issues caused by the iOS 14.5 updates. Quite simply put, Meta is injecting its own Javascript code into websites from its own in-app browsers to enhance behavioural targeting within its’ data privacy sandbox.
Essentially this enables Meta to relatively accurately target users based on recent behavioural purchase intent signals. This can then be matched with relevant product data from your Product Catalog and served to users who have visited similar product pages via the Facebook or Instagram apps.
At its core, Advantage+ Shopping uses data about existing demand and makes it available to advertisers willing to take the leap to hand over the reigns.
How To Set-up Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns in Ads Manager
Now that you’re convinced that this is a viable solution, here’s a quick “How-To” set up an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign, and test for yourself:
- From Ads Manager, click Create
- Select “Conversions”
- Select “Advantage+ Shopping Campaign”
- Review the set-up (location targeting, budget and dates can be define)
- Click next
- Add your catalog, your copy, your links and your CTA
- And Publish!
It’s that simple.
The Power of Automation
When it comes to automation, nothing like this has ever been done in the Meta advertising space, this product can automate up to 150 creative combinations at once. Shopping campaigns are built to suit the small business owner and can be created from a Facebook Business account.
This sort of approach to automation; ensuring that marketers have a varied and quality set of images and ad copy as well as a set of audience signals (pixel or customer upload) combined with the data available within the data privacy sandbox is increasingly becoming the norm. A prime example being Google adopting a similar approach with Performance Max replacing and deprecating Smart Shopping in July 2022.
Optimising Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns
Naturally, with the onus solely on Meta to serve and deliver ads efficiently and effectively, comes the inability for advertisers to test, control and optimize as they have before. This can be a drawback.
Advantage+ Shopping Campaign is the newest Meta Advantage product and can currently only be set up from a conversion campaign objective.
Pleasingly, there are still ways to leverage Advantage+ in the traditional campaign set up, and still keep some control and optimisation ability.
Advantage Campaign Budget Optimisation, selected at Campaign Level:
Advantage+ Lookalike / Detailed Targeting, selected at Ad Set level, within targeting:
Advantage+ Placements, selected at Ad Set Level, under placements:
Advantage+ Creatives, selected at Ad Level when setting up the creative.
Quite simply, wherever you see the name Advantage with the star icon across the campaign set up, you can select these options, leveraging the advanced automation, tracking and machine learning that Meta have in place.
To maximise the opportunity of Advantage campaigns, ensure you leverage the product catalogue as best as possible, using it in your ad creative, as well as making sure all the Advantage+ options are selected in the campaign set up.
Advantage+ Shopping Initial Results
Initial testing across a range of clients is demonstrating additional reach when moving outside of core audience targeting and notably lower CPM and CPCs which is delivering significantly better ROAS for all clients.
Below is an example of a Dynamic Prospecting campaign AFTER advantage+ options were introduced. You will note that this is driven by significantly lower Cost Per Click values.
Before:
After:
Conclusion
While Meta nudges us in the direction of fully-fledged automation, this type of campaign is still very efficient and should form a part of comprehensive Paid Social strategy so that the pros and cons of all campaigns are balanced, monitored and optimised.
It will not create new demand, nor will it offer product and brand validation in the same way that UGC ads offer. Nor will it deliver the same impact as video or engagement of Stories. It will however offer great value and is a solid starting point for smaller budgets to find some success.
Understanding more about the way the Meta tracking and automation work hand in hand, it makes perfect sense why we have seen success switching to Advantage+ campaigns.
If you need any assistance with setting up your Advantage+ Campaigns, including how to optimise product catalogues and integrate as part of your paid social set-up get in touch with our team at CRKLR.
Featured Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash