Digital ADV and automation: Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping campaign

People at the center of planning even when we talk about digital advertising.

Even in the advertising field, people are at the center of our projects, but it’s not just us who think so. The largest companies in the world have the same focus: Google and Meta have created new technological solutions to automatically optimize advertising campaigns based on the people who see them and interact with them.

How Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping campaigns work

After Google’s Max Performance (if you want to know more, read our article on the subject) and the enthusiasm for Chat GPT, Meta is also focusing on the complete automation of its campaigns with Advantage+ Shopping, “an automated portfolio solution for performance marketers”.

With this campaign, currently optimized for the “purchase” conversion only, Meta automates all the targeting, optimization and creative settings, with the aim of showing the right ad to the right person.

Setting up the campaign (there is no ad group) is elementary: just create a campaign with the “sales” objective and choose “Advantage+ shopping campaign”.

In the next step you need to indicate:

• if the ads are about a special category (credit, employment, housing, social issues/elections/politics);
• place of conversion: website or website + app;
• pixel that will track the “purchase” conversion;
• location of the target audience (macro only: countries or geographical areas);
• an ideal percentage of the budget to be dedicated to existing customers (Advantage + Audience);
• budget, daily or total;
• end date if needed;
• attribution setting: suggested “7 days from click + 1 day from view”;
• lots and lots of creativity, with image/video, carousel and/or collection format.

The pre-set and mandatory bid strategy is “lower cost”.

What to expect from Meta Advantage+ Shopping

There will be three fundamental pillars of the advertising activity:

• Better performance: decrease in CPA/COS and/or increase in ROI;
• Greater efficiency: minimum manual intervention and automatic optimization of creatives;
• Wider reach: users with high purchase intentions for the brand market are intercepted.

The future of adv specialists: what can we do?

We can, or rather we must, first of all offer this new type to more online customers (e-commerce with at least 30-50 conversions per month) and test, test, test. How to do it best?

• Load as many ad variables as possible, without driving the creative department crazy.Up to 150 creatives can be uploaded, where a mix of product and lifestyle images is recommended. You can combine catalogs to create ads with creatives and attributes placed in your feed.

• Analyze the first data immediately and fix weekly moments of analysis to understand how to improve performance.If you don’t want to risk too much, proceed with Meta A/B tests between your existing campaigns and the Advantage+ Shopping campaign.

• Suggest a target of highly qualitative “existing customers”: conversions and CRM are excellent, visitors to be avoided. On this target, set a “budget limit for existing customers” with a maximum percentage of 30%. If you want to activate remarketing campaigns, the percentage will become 100%.

• Assumed, but never too much, correctly trace the purchase action. The perfect combo for Meta is obviously Advantage+ Shopping and API conversion.

Our thought as an adv specialist in TSW

As always, we are driven by results.

In the latest Meta webinar, 31 brands tried the Alpha version of these campaigns and found -17% CPA and +32% return on ad spend (source analysis by Meta August-September 2022).

From our tests at the beginning of 2023 we recorded good results, which led us to suspend the “old campaigns” and dedicate ourselves to optimizing the new Advantage+ Shopping. Here are some data.

In the sports sector with campaigns in Italy:

• -35% CPA
• +16% ROI

In the accessories sector, EMEA+USA campaigns generated the following results:

• -3% CPA
• +5% ROI

On the latter, excluding the Italian market, where we have tests still in progress, the increase in ROI was 27% and the decrease in CPA was 7%.

Optimization is therefore welcome but we must not forget to dedicate the right time to the strategy and care of the information we give as input to the “machines”. In order not to feel overwhelmed by all this automation, I’ll end with a sentence I read on LinkedIn:

“Dear GPT Chat,
Thank you for demonstrating that good copy is the answer to a good brief.”

People therefore do not lose importance: they remain the focus, both in our strategic activities and in the optimization of adv campaigns, which will increasingly have the goal of reaching the right people for that message, interested in that type of product. Because satisfying their needs remains our goal.