Advantage+ Audience on Meta Ads: Proceed with Caution

For a while now, Meta has been pushing Advantage+. In the most recent update, Meta Ads now defaults to Advantage+ when setting up campaigns.

When I think about a default setting on anything, I think about a middle-of-the-road, reliable setting that is plug-and-play. When setting up Advantage+ audiences, I can't say it is as plug-and-play as I would like it to always be for all campaigns.

Here’s the data. For an e-commerce client, I set up a website visit campaign targeting the female audience, aged 18 to 44 years. The campaign delivered over twice as many impressions to audiences outside my target age and nearly 30% more impressions to the male audience. Even when the campaign performed poorly among men, by the measure of the campaign objective – website visits – Meta still pushed more impressions to men.

Here’s a table of the impressions delivered and results in the first two weeks.

I, along with many other advertisers, find Advantage+ infuriating in most circumstances. It takes away all control and over-automates your campaign. The audience parameters you enter are considered “suggestions” (Meta’s own words), and then the algorithm completely ignores them. Precision goes out the window, and you are sidelined in the campaign you set up.  And to top it all, Meta makes it incredibly difficult to turn off the Advantage+ audience during campaign setup. I once duplicated an ad group with manual control audience, and the duplicated ad group had Advantage+ turned on. When I tried to turn it off, the system would not let me. I had to recreate the entire ad group manually.

Here’s what was happening. Meta’s Advantage+ audience is geared to driving conversions, not brand awareness. Meta claims to have proven results in driving conversions and sales. And without any conversion data to optimize towards, the algorithm is a headless chicken trying to find a worm.

So, where do Meta Advantage+ audiences work, and should you be using it?

1)      Advantage+ is better for conversion and lead generation campaigns. If your account has significant historical conversion data, an A+ audience may be right for you.

2)      A+ audience does better for common or standard products and services. For niche ones, the algorithm can struggle to find the right audience for it. If you are unsure whether your product is considered niche, the best way forward would be to test A+ alongside a manual control audience for a conversion campaign.

3)      If you are already looking to target all age groups and genders, then A+ audience might work for you.

If you are looking for campaign management that is not fully AI-controlled and has human oversight, contact us, and we will be happy to talk to you about how we can scale your paid advertising campaigns to drive results for you.