Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns: What We Know in October 2022

WHAT META SAYS:
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns: Meta’s newest product offering that is an automated Meta ads setup that exclusively uses machine learning to optimize the ad. It has less manual options for targeting, bidding, etc., and is designed to deliver your highest performing ad variation to the highest value shoppers.

ACTUALLY:
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns: Meta’s newest product offering reps and internal teams are pushing to advertisers that is supposed to optimize performance, but as of October 2022, is not perfect yet. It has shown some success in small amounts and in small timeframes, but is still being ironed out.

The TL;DR?:
It’s worth testing once it is released into your account as a compliment to your BAU and regular manual setup campaigns, and may improve in the future as it progresses in development, but is not the answer to our e-commerce and ROAS prayers.

Keep reading to learn more on how to optimize ASC+, how to utilize and strategize it in your ad account, and how to implement it this Q4.

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Best practices for ASC+ Setup

• Existing Customer Budget Cap allows you to specify what percentage of the campaign budget you would like to allocate toward a specific audience(s)

• Able to group site visitors into your "Existing Customer audience" for exclusions to ensure the campaign is more incremental/prospecting (“existing customers” can be any combination of core audiences you have in the account (IE: Purchasers, a customer list, engagers, etc). Also note that these custom audiences will be used to optimize all ASC+s

• Can create up to 8 Advantage+ shopping campaigns per country

• Use existing top creatives to be launched in these campaigns — NOT for creative testing at the moment

• Meta suggests 10 creatives per ASC+ but as of now, we are seeing ~5 creatives more successful/profitable

  • Similar to Sales/non-ASC+s, ad sets with 10+ creatives will skew more spend to 1-2 creatives and leave the others without any spend, negating

Optimizing ASC+ right now

• If one ad is hogging spend, but also delivering great results: duplicated the campaign with that ad off to let others get spend and both campaigns are doing well

• If ads that are not getting spend are working well elsewhere, pause them in A+. If they're poor across the account, then it's likely a creative issue, not the campaign type that's the issue

• Meta reps are suggesting 10+ creatives per ad set, but we are seeing best performance with ~5 ads per ad set

• One member says they are adding in new creatives to the duped A+ campaign as we find new promising creatives in testing

• To get more scale or if an account has excess creatives, could duplicate again with the creatives that aren't getting spend

Advantage+ so far has driven higher ROAS

• 90% better than TOF and 37% better than BOF

• Lower CPA

  • 57% better than TOF and 25% better than BOF

• Higher CTR

  • 110% better than TOF and 72% better than BOF

• AOV has not been as strong

  • 18% lower AOV than TOF and 22% lower than BOF

What to expect for ASC+ during BFCM

• While as of October 2022 we are currently seeing early success with ASC+, expect performance to fatigue quickly, especially at scaled budgets

• Use best-performing ads from the sale to launch in ASC for short spurts

• In parallel with traditional sale ABOs

• Last year, saw more success with proven creative that had been running prior to BFCM as opposed to creative specifically produced for BFCM

• Begin testing and iterating on best creatives NOW

  • Include static images, GIFs, UGC videos, etc.

• Perfect your offer: GWP, Bundle Discount, Percentage Discount, etc.

• Build your list before BFCM (via quizzes, popups, other methods for giving info on your website)

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