Privacy regulations, fewer data to track… It’s been a tough few years for Meta ads.  And forced to improve and experiment, the company might’ve finally come up with a solution.

Meta introduced Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, utilizing sophisticated automation tools and machine learning to squeeze out more despite having less to work with. 

So how can this brand-new campaign type improve your ad performance? Let’s break it down.

What are Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns?

Advantage+ Shopping (or Sales) Campaigns is a campaign type—designated for e-commerce brands and online store owners such as Shopify merchants and marketing agencies—to boost the performance of their ad efforts with fewer manual inputs.

With Advantage+ campaigns, you can maintain a full-funnel approach with sales objectives – while expecting automatic optimization according With Advantage+ campaigns, you can maintain a full-funnel approach with sales objectives—while expecting automatic optimization according to Meta’s best practices.

In simple terms, you input the initial data and let the algorithm do the work. According to Meta, you can use Advantage+ Shopping to:

• Mix and match prospecting and remarketing audiences under one campaign with customized products from your catalog.
• Leverage machine learning to identify and target high-value, high-intent customers within Meta’s network, with minimal effort.
• Automatically test up to 150 creative combinations (when using a single ad set) and place the highest-performing variations in front of the highest-value shoppers.

…and more. Nice, but let’s dive deeper.

The Difference Between Advantage+ Campaigns and Manual Bidding

With more traditional shopping campaigns, you had to input a bunch of data beforehand, then constantly track and manually optimize them, including testing various creative setups.

However, Advantage+ allows you to make fewer inputs during creation, simplifies audience options, and smooths out the creative process. In some newer versions—branded as “Advantage+ Sales Campaigns”—you can even split out multiple ad sets, though the system remains quite automated.

For instance, you can set up multiple Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns per country and have more opportunities to reach people who are likely to purchase your products. Combine that with testing numerous creative variations automatically, and it’s a powerful advantage.

It’s like having a little robot campaign assistant… Or is it?

What Changes With Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

First up, Advantage+ ads provide small business owners with easier yet more effective campaign management.

Agencies can also rely on automation to achieve better ad performance with greater scale and efficiency. Nonetheless, a few trade-offs remain:

However, with Advantage+ Ads, you lose a bunch of elements you might be used to, such as:

• Audience tracking: You can only use one UTM at the campaign level.
• Audience definition: You can mostly divide your audiences between prospecting (new customers) and existing customers.
• Less customizability: You typically can’t customize your placements, can only define location by country, and the bidding strategy defaults to the highest volume.

But it also keeps some known elements, including:

Spend-level control for new vs. existing customers (via “existing customer budget cap,” though newer Advantage+ Sales Campaigns may handle this via multiple ad sets)

Reporting breakdowns

Attribution settings

However, with Advantage Plus Ads, you lose a bunch of elements you might be used to such as:

• Audience tracking: You can only use one UTM at the campaign level.
• Audience definition: You can only divide into two audience groups – prospecting and existing customers.
• Less customizability: You can’t customize your placements, can only define location by country, and your bidding strategy will automatically be the highest volume.

But it also keeps some known elements, including:

• Reporting breakdowns
• Attribution settings
• Spend level for new vs existing customers: You can still control the percentage of your budget that goes into existing customers compared to prospecting audiences.

Downsides of Facebook Advantage+ Campaigns?

While Advantage+ does seem like an efficient, performance-driven era of advertising, it does come with some caveats.

Sensitivity to change: Budget adjustments and ad structure tweaks can reset the algorithm’s learning phase. That means if you’ve got a winning setup, it’s best not to fiddle with it too frequently.

Flexibility: They aren’t as flexible as manual campaigns. Smaller businesses can save a lot of time and generate effective ads without a hassle, but seasoned advertisers may find the lack of control limiting.

Not for every scenario: If you’re running more complex campaigns with third-party tracking or extremely detailed targeting needs, a standard or customized approach might still be necessary.

How to Set Up Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns on Facebook?

As said above, setting up Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are super simple.

1. Go to your Ads Manager and Click Create.
2. Choose Conversions as the campaign objective and click Continue.
3. Select Advantage+ and click Continue. 
4. Input campaign details.
5. Choose conversion location.
6. Set up audience targeting (more in the following section).
7. Set up daily budget (more later).
8. Click Import.
9. Publish.

Now we move onto the fun part…

How Audience Targeting Works With Advantage Plus

Meta recommends including your existing customers in the account settings so you can see the breakdown between new and existing customers. Make sure you have a Custom Audience source (website, app, catalog, customer list, or offline activity), so you can identify people who already bought from you.

This setup allows at least some budget allocation control. You can allocate more spend toward new customer acquisition while retaining a smaller retargeting slice for customers who’ve purchased before. Finally, it’s crucial to define Audience Type URL Parameters as needed, so you can still glean insights for best campaign performance. 

Explaining the Existing Customer Budget Cap

If you want more input on your ad spend—especially for calculating margins—the existing customer budget cap can help. When you’ve identified your existing customers, you can cap how much of your ad budget is spent on them.

This feature is especially useful if you’re focusing on scaling through new customer acquisition, preventing the campaign from spending a large portion on retargeting buyers you already have.

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns Case Study

As a Facebook ads e-commerce agency, we’ve had a chance to test out Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns on multiple clients.

The new feature arrived just in time for the Black Friday Cyber Monday period, so it was a convenient moment to experiment. 

Here are some of the findings…

Ad Improvements With Advantage Plus Campaign — Example 1

Client: An AI-powered image enhancement and upscaling tool.

In October, we conducted a split test comparing the performance of an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign and a non-A+SC campaign with exact targeting and ads. 

The findings indicate that the A+SC outperformed the non-A+SC with a 4.25 return on ad spend (ROAS) compared to the non-A+SC’s 3.78 ROAS.

That was an excellent outcome! 

So we chose to implement the campaign in the subsequent month, coinciding with the Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) period. 

We released several Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and performed an A/B test with non-A+SC for the promotional offer, and discovered that A+SC campaigns outperformed the non-A+SC campaigns even with the promo. 

Overall, the A+SC campaigns generated a 3.14 ROAS, whereas the non-A+SC campaigns produced a 2.70 ROAS.

With A+SC:

Without A+SC:

As the campaign proved to be effective, we decided to incorporate it into our long-term evergreen campaigns as well as monthly promotional campaigns. 

To date, the strategy has consistently produced favorable results. 

In our most recent promotional campaign, we achieved a 2.07 return on ad spend (ROAS).

Ad Improvements With Advantage Plus Campaign — Example 2

Client: A sustainable soy candle e-commerce brand

We’ve started the Advantage Plus Shopping campaign testing a bit later here, in February. 

The results showed that the ASC+ campaigns generated a 3.90 return on ad spend (ROAS), whereas the non-ASC campaigns only achieved a 2.39 ROAS.

Here’s the performance without Advantage+ ads:

Now here’s the performance when using Advantage Plus:

Excellent results. Of course, we continued running the ASC. In the most recent campaigns, ASC still continues to show good performance.

Early Agency Findings When It Comes to Advantage Plus Campagins

After testing out the campaigns on multiple clients, here’s what we found:

• The campaign typically succeeds when you’re leveraging high-performing ads.
• It simplifies the campaign setup process and enables the focus to remain on creative testing.
• It frequently yields better outcomes compared to standard campaigns that use targeting.
• Despite its success, it seems like it should not replace standard campaigns but rather contribute to diversifying campaigns and generating increased revenue overall.

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns Best Practices

Here’s what we recommend when launching an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign:

1. Add the existing customer budget cap: Don’t neglect this. Otherwise, the algorithm may overspend on your existing buyers—people who are already more likely to purchase.
2. Test, test, test: Advantage+ is automated, but you’ll want to try out different creatives (and potentially different budgets) early on to see what sticks. Once stable, don’t tinker too frequently.
3. Set up tracking: Ensure your Facebook Pixel and Conversions API are properly configured. The more data the system has, the better it can optimize.
4. Don’t change too much: If there’s any campaign motto for Advantage+, it’s “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Even minor edits can reset the learning phase. Make big decisions up front, then let it run.

By covering these bases, you’ll give Meta’s algorithm the best shot at delivering strong results.

Take Advantage Of Advantage+

By using Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (or their newly named counterpart, Advantage+ Sales Campaigns), you can make campaign setup and optimization smoother—and as many advertisers have seen, your ads may perform better on average.

On the flip side, treat Advantage+ with caution. They aren’t meant to replace all your existing efforts but rather to complement them with a multi-faceted approach.

Should you use them? Yes, definitely. If you need any assistance, make sure you hit us up! We’ll be happy to help.