If you’ve run any Meta Ads campaigns, you’ll probably be familiar with Advantage+, Meta’s offering in using automation to simplify campaign setup, improve performance, and reduce manual workload. And while it undeniably has some great uses, we’ve also seen it causing persistent problems for charities, when not managed properly.
Left unchecked, ad campaigns equipped with Advantage+ can lead to unexpected ad spend, poor targeting, and ultimately, inefficient campaigns. It’s also alarming that so often, Advantage+ features are enabled by default, so many advertisers might not even be aware.
Let’s break down what Advantage+ can do, how to use it effectively, and where you need to tread carefully.
What is Meta Advantage+?
Meta Advantage+ is a campaign tool designed to streamline your advertising by handing more control over to Meta’s algorithm. It uses automation to manage campaign delivery and determine creative combinations, placements, and importantly, audiences.
For advertisers, this can sound like a win: less hands-on setup, more ‘intelligent’ targeting. But as with many automated systems, what’s easy isn’t always effective, especially when your campaign has specific goals or audience nuances.
To give more specifics of what Advantage+ can do:
Allows you to set one central campaign budget (daily or lifetime) that continuously distributes in real time to ad sets with the best opportunities, throughout the course of your campaign. As opposed to setting budgets per ad set/audience.
Automatically optimises ad placements across all available platforms: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Meta’s Audience Network. As opposed to manually selecting specific placements e.g. News Feed.
Advantage+ Detailed Targeting:
Allows Meta to reach a broader group of people than defined in your detailed targeting selections. This option will show your ad to additional people who Meta believe are likely to get you more or cheaper results, or both, informed by your optimisation goals.
Uses generative AI to apply ‘creative enhancements‘ to your original ad creative, including: adjusting brightness, image cropping, image animation, image background variations, text overlays, and adding music.
While we do often make use of and encourage the budget and placement features of Advantage+, we have more concerns over the targeting and creative options…
The lack of control over audience targeting can cause problems.
Advantage+’s detailed targeting promises improved performance, largely by handing over the reigns to Meta. The Meta interface does indicate that you can still “set limits to control who can and can’t see your ads,” which is done by providing suggestions about what the ideal audience is (e.g. demographics, interests, and website actions).
Functionally, the setup is similar to normal campaigns, where you would carefully define age ranges, genders, interests, and custom audiences. However, we have found Advantage+ often ignores these input parameters entirely.
This can become especially problematic for charities running campaigns designed to speak to specific motivations and/or life stages, such as legacy giving or challenge events. When testing Advantage+ in these situations, we’ve often seen the net cast much wider than intended, placing most of the budget on the wrong demographic.
One example of this for a Skydiving fundraising campaign, where the target demographic clearly wasn’t 65+…
Another campaign we ran, targeting expectant mothers, saw the exact same trend. In theory, Meta’s AI should be analysing the content of the ad creative, ad copy and landing pages, and use them to help steer the ad delivery. But this obviously doesn’t seem to be the case.
The fact it repeatedly puts so much weight into older demographics, is most likely because that is a key audience for most charity campaigns. This missed nuance leads to misaligned messaging and audience, and ultimately wasted spend.
While Advantage+ audience targeting may perform well for some campaigns, our advice for now is to always opt for manual targeting whenever you need to be more certain of reaching a specific audience. While new campaigns will default to using Advantage+, you can revert settings at the bottom of the ad set targeting menu by clicking ‘further limit the reach of your ads’.
How to view the data using segmentation.
As in the above examples, you can segment performance data in Ads Manager, to see exactly how far Meta is deviating from the intended audience.
If you customise the columns by clicking the ‘Breakdown’ button, you can then split your data by demographics like age, gender, and placement. This allows you to review cost and reach allocations for each demographic segment, as well as their comparative performance.
Even if you don’t use Advantage+ audience targeting, we would encourage advertisers to be using this function anyway. These insights are essential for understanding campaign performance and making informed optimisation decisions. You can break down results by platform, device, time of day, and even creative variations like headlines or images, helping you identify what’s working, where, and with whom.
Time to face(book) the music.
Another frequently problematic feature of Advantage+ is its creative automation.
While we encourage using some of the basic creative enhancements, such as auto-adjusting brightness and highlighting the ‘most relevant’ ad comments, we have concerns about those that compromise how the brand is represented. This includes generating entirely new copy, altering image backgrounds in ways that don’t align with brand colours, and adding music that wasn’t part of the original creative direction.
Adding some background music might not seem like a major issue, but it can raise legitimate brand safety concerns, particularly for charities with sensitive messaging. The AI should match the content of the ads to a relevant piece of generic music, but in practice can completely misalign.
A particularly frustrating aspect of the music is that this option regularly turns itself back on. Make any edit to a campaign (unrelated to creative asset customisation) and upload your changes, and boom, music is re-enabled. It doesn’t even log this in the account/campaign change history, so it can feel like Meta is gaslighting you.
Our advice is to proceed with caution when using the Advantage+ asset customisation options without having a good understanding of what changes they can make. Always check your campaign settings before publishing any changes. And check again after publishing. And maybe one more time for luck.
Fluctuating ad spend.
Another automated feature, which isn’t necessarily new or specific to Advantage+ budgets but is worth flagging, is Meta’s ability to spend up to 75% over your daily budget. This will even out across the week though, so you won’t exceed 7x your daily budget over a 7-day period.
The point of this is to maximise potential opportunities to improve results by allowing for flexibility. Google has a similar level of flexibility with their budgeting, too.
Generally, we find this feature to be a helpful use of automation, but it can be alarming to see if you’re operating under strict budgets and not expecting your daily budget to be exceeded.
Issues can also arise if this causes the limit on your card to be reached at the same time of being invoiced, which can lead to ads being temporarily paused.
What’s the future of Advantage+?
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to avoid using Advantage+ features. As Meta continues to push automation, along with a continually changing interface, with disguised options pre-set, opting out is getting harder.
Also, as with Google, we expect control to eventually become completely relinquished, being impossible not to use automated campaign set-ups in the future.
This is part of a much longer trajectory Paid Media platforms have been on, with options becoming more and more limited. Note, for example, Meta’s removal of interest targeting options around ‘sensitive causes’, which impacted charities in early 2022.
That said, we expect Advantage+ to improve over time. As machine learning advances, there’s potential for smarter targeting, better creative combinations, and more efficient spend. Even since writing this blog, Meta has announced further features being rolled out around generative AI tools for branding creatives and automated video creation.
But we’re not quite there yet.
Our recommendation, therefore, is to use Advantage+ with caution. Don’t assume Meta’s automation will make decisions in your best interest. Monitor campaigns closely, especially when running time-sensitive or audience-specific messaging. Segment your data, double-check settings, and be wary of default opt-ins.
If you’re unsure whether Advantage+ is working for you, or need help navigating Meta’s increasingly automated platform, get in touch. We’re always happy to chat.
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