Meta Advantage: How you can use AI and automation to drive results for your business

Over the past few months, you may have noticed that we’ve started to share more around AI and the ways in which it is helping drive stronger performance for advertisers through our automated products like Advantage+ shopping campaigns. What you may not know is that we have an entire suite of automated ad products that use AI to help advertisers get more out of their investment, known as Meta Advantage.

At its core, Meta Advantage is a suite of products that use AI and machine learning to help optimize campaign results, personalize your ads by matching them to the right people at the right time and unlock greater efficiencies to help you save time and money.

And in the interest of helping you understand how you can best use these products to achieve your business goals, I want to take a look at several different Meta Advantage products and highlight the key benefits and when you should use them.

First let’s start with our Advantage+, which are automated tools designed to help improve your results, while reducing the number of steps it takes to set up a campaign. These products can automate all or one of the five manual steps in your campaign creation such as audience, budget/bidding, destination, placements and creative. In other words, if you want to save time, these products can help make your campaign smarter, faster. Choosing the right Advantage+ product comes down to the type of advertiser you are and your goals. Here are a few to consider:

Advantage+ shopping campaigns

What is it? An end-to-end AI-powered ads product that automates and simplifies the process of creating advertising campaigns in as few as steps as possible, while also helping deliver more relevant ads to people. ASC unlocks performance with end-to-end automation across the campaign creation process – including targeting, bidding, placement and creative, which can be static or catalog-based.

Who is it for?For direct-to-consumer advertisers within the eCommerce and retail verticals. Businesses within other verticals, including CPG, Technology or Entertainment, have also found success when driving sales online.

When should you use it?When sales is your primary objective, and you are looking to simply grow your customer base with as few steps as possible. Advantage+ shopping campaigns help find your ideal customer and the one who is most likely to respond to your ad, at the right time.

Recent tests have found that advertisers who use Advantage+ shopping campaigns are seeing a 32% increase in return on ad spend.¹

Advantage+ app campaigns

What is it? A way to apply end-to-end automation to the promotion of your app by delivering your ad creative to the most relevant audience on the most effective placements across Facebook, Instagram and Meta Audience Network.

Who is it for?Advertisers in all verticals with an app looking to achieve the best performance for app install campaigns, event optimization, or value optimization, which is a way for our systems to ensure your ad is seen by someone who is likely to convert.

When should you use it? When scaling app installs is one of your primary objectives, or you’re looking to drive sales or in app purchases.

Bolt, a European transport and delivery app, was able to reduce its cost per app install by up to 23% and 20% lower average cost per purchase on average with Advantage+ app campaigns, compared to manual campaign strategy after automating its Facebook ads with Advantage+ app campaigns.

For advertisers interested in driving online sales or app objectives, end-to-end automation through Advantage+ shopping campaigns and Advantage+ app campaigns are the most effective tools we offer to drive AI-powered performance. But if end-to-end automation is not right for you, you can still leverage performance gains with Meta Advantage products that apply automation to individual pieces – such as creative and targeting.

Advantage+ creative - standard enhancements

What is it? Standard enhancements is a feature within Advantage+ creative – an option in Ads Manager for optimizing ad creatives – that uses AI to help advertisers automatically apply small enhancements like adjusting brightness, aspect ratios and text placement to improve the performance of the creative.

Who is it for? All advertisers.

When should you use it?When you have limited creative options and are unsure of what tweaks will resonate with the right person. Or, if you lack the bandwidth to modify your creative manually.

In a large-scale back-end study measuring incremental effects, ads using standard enhancements delivered 14% more incremental purchases per dollar spent, compared to ads that did not enable standard enhancements.²

Advantage+ catalog ads

What is it? Advantage+ catalog ads (formerly known as Dynamic Ads) show a broad range of ad creatives of your products and services (sometimes hundreds of them) to reach your ideal customer. Instead of manually setting up 1,000 different ad sets, Advantage+ catalog ads automates this process by giving our system the ability to deliver personalized catalog ads to the right people as soon as they express interest in your business.

Advantage+ catalog ads support a variety of objectives, and can be used as part of Advantage+ shopping campaigns to combine both static and dynamic ads to drive performance for your campaign.

Who is it for? Available for industry-specific use cases for advertisers within eCommerce and retail and CPG, as well as travel, automotive, and real estate verticals looking for personalization of their catalog ads at scale.

When should you use it?When you are selling a selection of products, services or media – and especially when running a seasonal sale or promotion.

Automating Audience Creation

Using Meta Advantage targeting products during the audience creation process helps an advertiser’s ads reach more valuable customers, further improving ads performance. Meta Advantage targeting products can be used even if an advertiser wants more manual control over manual inputs like creative, budget, or placement. Let’s take a look at our newest Meta Advantage targeting product: Advantage+ audience:

Advantage+ audience

What is it?Advantage+ audience is a new and simplified audience creation experience that helps increase campaign performance while still delivering ads to the people advertisers want to reach most. We combine the power of automation with business’ customer knowledge, enabling advertisers who want both performance and control to achieve better results.

How does it work?Instead of using an advertiser’s audience selections as constraints that limit ad delivery to just those types of people, such as Men, 18-35 years, who like baseball, Advantage+ audience uses these audience selections as suggestions to guide who sees an ad. By using Advantage+ audience, you allow us to look outside your set targeting parameters to find the people most interested in your products or services.

We know that in some cases audience selections such as minimum age, custom audience exclusions, location and language need to be strictly respected and we still allow advertisers to set these restrictions at the campaign level in a new section called “audience controls”.

Who is it for? Advantage+ audience is available for all eligible advertisers for most objectives, and we recommend all advertisers who are seeking improved performance in their campaigns to test it. On average, businesses that used Advantage+ audience saw a 28% decrease in average Cost per Click, Lead, or Landing Page View.³

When should you use it? Use Advantage+ audience when you want to leverage the performance gains of Targeting automation but need some manual controls on certain aspects of campaign creation such as placement or creative.

For those that wish to use our original Meta Advantage targeting products, we have three Advantage Targeting products that are designed to improve your ad results through smarter targeting.

For prospecting, we have Advantage Detailed Targeting, which uses interest, behavior, and demographic inputs selected by the advertiser as a guide to reach a broader group of people when our system determines that doing so could improve performance.

We also have Advantage custom audience and Advantage Lookalike - both use custom audience lists and machine learning to deliver your ads to more people. Advantage custom audience offers the ability to both retarget people in your custom audience lists while reaching new people likely to convert, whereas Advantage Lookalike is best for pure prospecting to reach people who may not know your brand just yet.

It’s worth noting that these three Advantage targeting products are included in Advantage+ audience as well. That’s because Advantage+ audience may look outside your set interests, behavior, demographics, or custom and lookalike audiences when you add them as “suggestions”, if it’s likely to increase campaign performance.

Look Ahead

Automated tools powered by AI technology are proving great value to businesses. We are encouraged by the rate at which advertisers have adopted Meta Advantage, including Advantage+ shopping campaigns – one of Meta’s fastest growing AI-powered ad products – to maximize performance of their ad campaigns.

We’ve learned how reliant advertisers are on automation to help drive their business, which is why we are focused on building out our Meta Advantage to unlock even greater efficiencies for creative optimization, reaching their audience and more. We look forward to sharing more details about how we are investing in these areas to help you improve performance.

In the meantime, for more details on the Meta Advantage suite, visit our help center or reach out to your Meta sales representative.