Everything You Need to Know About Meta Advantage
Remember when, back in 2018, Google rebranded its flagship advertising products? What we know today as Google Ads is nothing more than the result of Google’s efforts to streamline its ad offerings.
Now here we are, four years later, when Facebook decided to follow Google’s path and merge all its automated ad products under one umbrella – Meta Advantage.
So, why should you care?
Suppose you’re a small business owner who wants to dip his toes into the shark-infested waters of Facebook advertising. In that case, Meta Advantage should now make it easier than ever to optimize and personalize your campaigns. Not having to hire someone to do this means you could invest that budget in Facebook ads and drive up your business revenue.
However, if you’ve never set up a Facebook campaign before, we don’t recommend starting now. Although it may seem easy-breezy at first glance, a few misplaced could are often all that stand between being profitable or losing money.
In-house marketers looking to speed up their ad creation and optimization process have every reason to get excited as well. Facebook claims Meta Advantage will save valuable time and effort on campaigns by freeing up your strategic big-picture work. With automation at your disposal, decision-making should go smoother than ever. You’ll have everything you need to know precisely about which automated tool to use and when it would be better to rely on manual tools instead.
Keep reading this article to find out more about:
- The machine-learning and automation benefits of Meta Advantage
- The approximate roll-out date for their most anticipated feature
& - Who stands to benefit most from this new advertising offering
How to Work Smarter With Meta Advantage’s Products
It’s worth noting that Meta claims the suite will consist of two types of Advantage products:
- Advantage – used to automate a specific part of a manual campaign.
- Advantage+ – used to automate a campaign from A to Z or part of a manual campaign.
It’s no secret that marketers have had it rough over the last couple of years. Major digital privacy changes brought forward by iOS 14.5 combined with the decline of cookies caused major upheaval all around.
Meta Advantage was, in one way, meant to tackle these issues and improve campaign performance for businesses of all sizes. However, remember this doesn’t mean that Meta Advantage will magically fix these new privacy hurdles. Instead, Meta Advantage’s new automation and machine learning tools will help you improve results and drastically reduce the time needed to create, optimize, or identify new audiences.
The suite includes six products. If you’ve ever worked with Ads Manager and Facebook advertising, you’ll see that there’s not much novelty around them. As we’ve already mentioned, this is nothing more than consolidation and rebranding of existing tools.
Now let’s see how these tools can help you make the most of every dollar you invest in your Facebook advertising strategy.
1. Advantage Lookalike – Previously known as Lookalike Expansion.
Use this tool to let Meta’s system reach a broader set of people than those defined in your lookalike audience. The beauty of this is that if Advantage Lookalike notices a better opportunity outside the defined lookalike size, it may expand the audience to take advantage of it.
You’ll see that this feature is automatically enabled for new, duplicated, and draft ad sets that use a lookalike audience when optimized for conversion, value, or app events.
According to Meta, using Advantage Lookalike can improve CPA considerably when compared to using Lookalike Targeting only.
Which brings us to…
2. Lookalike Targeting – You may have known it as Detailed Targeting Expansion. Even If you’ve never used it before, the tool name is rather self-explanatory: it expands ad targeting beyond the audience you’ve defined at the ad set level.
It does this by using your targeting preferences as a compass to find additional audiences. Once again, if the tool finds that your ads perform better outside your defined audience, it automatically makes some dynamic updates to optimize those opportunities.
Try out and see if this dynamic audience expansion can lower your costs while still helping you reach the right people.
3. Advantage+ App Campaigns – Formerly known as Automated App Ads. The purpose of this tool is to make it easier for app advertisers to set up app install campaigns. The feature relies on real-time learnings to adjust ads across audience, placement, and creative in order to drive up performance.
If we’re to go by what Meta’s internal tests showed, then using Automated App Ads should reduce your cost per install by an average of 6%. Your cost per action should also go down 9%. Fingers crossed for this one!
4. Advantage+ Placements – Now known as Automatic Placements, this is another tool that’s meant to maximize performance by finding the most effective placement for a given ad.
Your ads can appear across six or more Placements – like Facebook Marketplace, Instagram Stories, or Reels. As a result, Meta will be able to control costs better and give you better results.
According to a recent conversion lift study, campaigns that appeared across six or more placements were 73% more likely to outperform those running only across four or fewer placements.
However, Meta recommends that advertisers experiment with their campaigns as not everyone will see improved performance.
5. Advantage+ Creative – Or, as it’s now known, Dynamic Experiences. This is one of Meta’s newer features that allows advertisers to get multiple variations of the same ad using a single image or video.
The tool will perform changes both to media and ad-level.
For example, when it comes to the image or video used, the tool may adjust brightness or contrast, apply artistic filters, or vary its aspect ratio.
On ad-level, the tool may swap text combinations, display relevant comments below your ad, or add labels from your Facebook page.
6. [COMING SOON] Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns – Now known as Automated Shopping ads, this feature is still in its beta testing period.
According to Meta, this will help you get the highest performance from your online sales campaigns with minimal effort or management.
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns will optimize across multiple campaign levels in an attempt to give you the best conversion opportunities.
And hear this – Larissa Vichnevetski, Team Lead Social Ads at Popken Fashion says the tool already outperformed their high expectations. According to her, they increased their return on ad spend by over 80%!
The roll-out for this feature is expected before the end of the year.
Here’s What We Think About This
For marketing agencies and Facebook advertisers, the change will not have that much of an impact. Let’s not forget that these tools were already there. However, the fact that Meta decided to bring them all under the same umbrella will provide a better UX experience and a more efficient way to work.
That being said, we have high expectations for ad targeting and delivery. That’s where Meta’s AI will spring into action and show its worth. Let’s just hope it’s as good as they say it is.
However, the marketing world doesn’t begin and doesn’t end with agencies and advertisers. Meta Advantage is like an early Christmas gift for companies and businesses keeping their advertising efforts in-house.
For them, it will be easier than ever to understand what each feature does and when to use it.
Plus, the time-saving benefits will prove invaluable for those small-business owners forced to wear multiple hats at the same time. Having everything under the same roof means that creating ad campaigns should now go smoother than ever.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, it’s clear that Meta’s trying to make its advertising offerings more accessible to users of all types. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with it. However, don’t be tricked by their claims of how easy it can be to generate a profit from Facebook advertising.
If you’re a business owner, we still recommend getting the help of an expert rather than going out on a whim and setting the ad campaigns yourself.
No matter how well the AI may try to discover which audience responds best to your message there’s no way it can outperform a user-centric ad strategy based on research, data analysis, and interpretation.
Mixing analytics and customer-centricity to help your business win the battle for people’s attention is one of the things we do best at Growth Savvy. Schedule a free strategy session and let’s see how we can boost your advertising performance and help you achieve your targets.
