How We’re Taking Advantage of Meta’s New Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns in 2023
Since June of this year Meta has been testing a new campaign structure called Advantage Plus Shopping (APSC or ASC for short), this campaign set-up is its most automated ever and is designed to provide advertisers the most streamlined ad building experience to date while also leveraging an brand new algorithm. We’re not quite sure what data points are being poured into it at the moment but we can securely say that the the stability and performance over the last couple of months has felt like a bit of a renaissance of the pre-iOS 14 days.
With that said, we do want to start off with a few of the downsides, that way we can really pour into a few strategies we intend to continue with in our client accounts into 2023 and believe you can as well.
The Cons:
The options to control targeting is very limited. We get it, Meta has rolled out AI that is designed to learn from the custom audiences that you feed it and within time it will know who exactly to serve on the platform. That said, the marketer in us still wants to be able to have some demographic control by selecting “men” or “women” when products are specific to one or the other.
There is no way to set mid-funnel targeting. Again, we understand that Meta is essentially creating a mini-funnel within the campaign itself and the algorithm knows who within it has been reached, but it feels off not being able to know/see that they are being reached, let alone being able to see this breakdown in reporting. The best that we have it new vs. existing.
While you are able to have up to 8 ASCs active in an account, there is only one list of existing customers that all ASCs will optimize from. For most brands this is probably okay, but for those with multiple product lines that have similar yet different customers for each line, we’ve found the ASCs can take a bit longer to get going and it feels as if they are doing double time to find the right “customers” to build off of within those lists.
No control over ad placement. This is 100% controlled by Meta as they want ads to be delivered where-ever they can put them, when-ever they can fit them in. Ok Meta, but you’re still not winning us over on that audience network placement, nice try.
Meta wants a lot of different creative types within a single ASC. Currently Meta suggests at least 10 different creative types within a single ASC, that means dynamic product ads (DPA), reels, IG Story, link post ads, carousels, you get the idea. However, these creatives and ad types do not all play well together. For example in most cases we tend to see DPAs over power most other ad types or we will see reel style videos over power link post ads, etc. We also find really good success with 5-6 creatives and not the suggested 10.
The Strategies We’re Using Into 2023:
We could have totally done a list of pros before this but we figure it’s probably best just to share with you how we are working around/within the cons to create some powerful campaign set-ups to keep our accounts stable and growing instead. A few Notes: in all of these ASCs we are optimizing for Website and Shops and launch between $100 - $500 a day depending on overall budgets. Because we can have up to 8 ASC campaigns in an account and we are told by Meta that they do not overlap, we are running a combination of these in accounts. We are also rotating in new creative to stable existing ASCs as we see frequencies rise or performance dip within the ASC.
ASC for brands with multiple product lines/collections.
For our accounts with multiple collections we are segmenting customer lists by each product collection and uploading it as an existing customer file for the ASCs. We’ve found, unlike in the image above with the lumped all customer lists, performance can improve with these broken out. Note: you could also do this by product sku if you have a hot seller/unicorn product that really drive traffic over others.
Next create an ASC targeting a 75/25 split of existing customers with existing social proofed creative and 1 -2 new pieces of creative. We will test a carousel DPA and a single DPA in these and will turn them off if they appear to be taking all of the budget.
If the client has say 3 product lines we are then creating 3 ASCs each with creative and messaging that focuses on the specific product line.
ASC for more prospecting.
One of the big things we’ve really been pushing for scale is capping the existing customer targeting to only 10% thus pushing this ASC to focus on 90% new traffic.
For these we are running a variety of social proofed/top performing ads along with more evergreen video creative.
Sale specific ASC.
Similar to the multiple product line ASC, we are also running ASCs that only have specific messaging and creatives for longer sales/promotions.
With these we have been setting the existing customer cap much higher to 90-100% and setting a smaller budget depending on the known size of this audience.
Creative Specific ASC.
This one goes against what Meta suggests as they want a variety of creatives that allows them to serve the right creative to the person most likely to convert from that creative type. However, in testing we often find that CTR tends to be what Meta latches onto so creative with high click engagements can get over served. Thus our aim to test the same creative type with varying messages here.
The All In ASC.
We know we’ve talked about how it can appear that some creatives are getting under served in ASCs and by traditional standards look to be under performing. However, in putting our trust in the system, we are also testing Meta’s suggestions and running up to 15 different creative types in one Advantage+ Shopping Campaign. (Hat tip to Foxwell Founder Member, Caro Stangeland.
This ACS has
2 different PR Hit style ads
6-7 different UGC Product In Use ads
4-5 info based ads - not sales focused, instead focus on sharing techniques and tips
2-3 TOF focused Question & answer ads - so founder or other brand members answering common question and recommending products to get started
All pushing 95% TOFU/new audiences