If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s frequent updates to the Meta Campaign Builder! One of the most recent installments is the Meta Advantage+ Campaign, created to improve and streamline the campaign-building process and overall user experience. Many of its individual features have been around prior to this update, but if you haven’t tried them out yet, here’s what you need to know.
What is Meta Advantage+?
Advantage+ is Meta’s all-in-one solution that helps you reach new customers while retaining existing ones. In a nutshell, it automates campaign creation—from audience and budget/bidding to destination, placements, and creative). You can quickly target multiple audiences without having to set up separate campaigns, which makes it the perfect solution for busy marketers who want to maximize their time.
Setting Your Budget at the Campaign Level
The first opportunity to use Advantage Plus features is at the campaign level for the budget. Previously, the options were to use Ad Set Level Budgets or Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO). The idea behind CBO was that the Meta algorithm would push more budget to the better-performing ad set, rather than the budget being dictated at the specific ad set.
Jump forward to today: CBO is no longer an option, but the Advantage+ campaign budget is available. There is still the option to not use the Advantage+ campaign budget and instead use ad set budgets, but Meta would lean toward Advantage+ being the better and more efficient setup.
Advantage+ Placements: What’s What
Moving on to targeting at the ad set level is Advantage+ Placements. It is denoted by the bolded + sign all the way down at the bottom of the page. There are no new features here; just a new name. Advantage+ Placements allow ads to run across all placements rather than specific, manual placements. Unless there are specific reasons to run on only certain placements, the Meta best practice would be to run on all placements available to the user.
Introducing: Meta Advantage+ Creative
While campaign and ad set features have been renamed, the creative-level option does offer something new! Once your creative is uploaded, you have the option to apply Advantage+ Creative (previously called “dynamic experiences”). Then you can enhance your creative with the following optimizations, which Meta has broken out into two categories and suggests will improve performance:
Media Enhancements
- Image brightness and contrast adjustments
- Artistic filters (which adjust image elements like sharpness, color temp, radial blur, etc.)
- Varying aspect ratio—leave it up to Facebook to choose to display the original or cropped image, depending on placement and performance
- Image templates designed to help your image fit various placements
Ad-Level Compositional Changes
- Labels you can add to spotlight helpful ad elements, such as Facebook Page or Likes
- (Only the most) Relevant comments displayed beneath the ad
- Various text combinations: test out your ad copy as primary text, headlines, or descriptions
The first notable new feature is standard media enhancements. This allows Meta to automatically adjust the aspect ratio and apply a template—or other changes to the look of the ad—that they believe will increase creative performance. It’s important to note that this feature should be used with caution, as some template changes can cut off ad copy on an image or shift an object out of view. This feature should improve over time, but it still needs some work.
The next new feature worth noting: Image brightness and contrast adjustment. It’s exactly what it sounds like, and is typically a good optimization to opt into. Then there’s music! If opted into, Meta can either automatically apply music or provide a list of musical options to choose from. This definitely cuts down on your internal creative costs if this feature pertains to your advertising needs.
Overall, Advantage+ has done a great job identifying the key decision points in the campaign setup and showing the user the optimal path to peak performance. While the campaign and ad set features may not be new, they have been conveniently packaged and named and demonstrate the preferred method of campaign building. On the other hand, the creative-level features need to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis to ensure that brand messaging is being displayed as intended.
