Over the years, Meta has become one of the essential marketing tools for businesses all over the world, especially for D2C businesses. It has a solid advertisement platform that allows organizations to increase their brand awareness, improve app install rates, and sell their products.

To deal with the problems related to iOS 14 updates, Meta has announced Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, where Meta will use AI and ML algorithms to automate many steps of the campaign creation and optimization process.

In this article, you will learn everything you need to know to get started with Meta Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. You will learn the following:

  • How Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns would change the way you set up Meta ads.
  • The benefits of this new Meta campaign format.
  • And how to set up this campaign in your Meta Ad Manager.

So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

What are Meta Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns?

Meta introduced Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns or A+SC in August 2022 to the world. This campaign is created for the D2C e-commerce sellers, so they can run multiple ad campaigns for various audiences with a single consolidated campaign structure.

With A+SC, you can create a unified view to control your ad campaigns distributed across multiple Meta channels. The consolidated campaign structure can simplify the campaign creation and management process.

According to Meta, these campaigns use machine learning algorithms along with Meta’s best practices to deliver better performance. The actual goal of Meta Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns is to deliver better ROIs and increased conversion rates at a grander scale.

A+SC can bring together full-funnel marketing stages into one single campaign so you can get rid of multiple manual campaign creation steps. It takes your creative input and combines them to create up to 150 different variations of ads. After that, it chooses the most optimum variation that has higher possibilities of bringing in more returns.

What are the Changes Brought by Meta A+SC?

As Meta A+SC brought a lot of changes in the way you set up and run campaigns, marketers like you have also lost a lot of control over their ads.

In the new Meta A+SC campaign, you will lose control over the following aspects:

  • Audience Definition: With the new Meta ad campaign system, you can only divide or define the audience into two categories: prospective and existing customers.
  • Audience Tracing: Even if you’re planning to use a third-party tracking tool, you can only place one UTM code at the campaign level to track your audience.
  • Bid Strategy: Your bidding strategy would be set at the highest volume, which you can’t change manually.
  • Placements: There is no way to personalize your ad placements in Meta A+SC.
  • Location: You can only target your audience at the country level.

Thankfully, there are still a few aspects you can modify according to your will in the new Meta Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. Some of these aspects are:

  • Attribute settings
  • Reporting breakdowns
  • Setting up investment levels for new and existing customers

Benefits of Meta A+SC

As a marketer or advertiser, you probably maintain multiple ad accounts. Each of those ad accounts can have tens of ad campaigns running, and each campaign might be divided into tens of ad sets. And each ad set might have more than one ad. Setting up and managing all these campaigns can be an incredibly draining task.

You can simplify and automate these tasks with A+SC so you can run your tests with no more than one campaign. All you need to do is set up and run this one campaign, and Meta will utilize its AI algorithms to determine the optimal combinations of your creative assets for producing the most revenue-generating advertisements.

Even so, the advantages do not stop there. Let us look at the top benefits of Meta Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns:

  • With a single campaign, you may run up to 150 creative tests.
  •  You can set up A+SC campaigns in less than 5 minutes, which is a lot faster than previous Meta campaign deployments.
  • Meta will lead the campaign based on AI algorithm recommendations and automated budget optimization to attain the most significant outcomes.
  • A+SC doesn’t really require much human user input since machine learning algorithms will take care of producing appropriate ad combinations, campaign optimizations, and audience targeting.
  • A+SC now has new “Budget Limit” options that allow you to choose how much of your ad budget you wish to spend on retargeting advertisements.
  • As you continue to run your ads, the Ai algorithms will keep learning from the historical data and optimize the campaign to increase their performance.

How to Setup Meta A+SC?

Here comes the most important part – setting up your very first Meta Advantage+ Shopping Campaign. To set it up, you need to follow the instructions mentioned below:

  1. You can initiate a new meta campaign by going to your “Meta Ad Manager” and then selecting the “New” button.
  2. The Meta A+SC will only show up if the “Sales” target is selected for the campaign. The “Select a campaign setup” option will become available after that.
  3. Choosing the “Advantage+ shopping campaign” and then pressing the “Continue” button is the next step. Using the Meta A+SC will make campaign setup significantly quicker than the standard campaign preparation processes. The machine learning algorithms connected to Meta’s campaign will handle a lot of the grunt work, freeing you to concentrate on what really matters.
  4. Clicking “Show all preset options” now displays the campaign configurations.
  5. Most marketing veterans agree that delivering visitors immediately to a website’s landing page while setting the conversion event to “Buy” is the optimal strategy for maximising the effectiveness of conversion tracking. In the A+SC, Meta will typically default to “Buy” as the conversion event. It certainly doesn’t hurt to double-check, though.
  6. The “Audience Location” field is your primary focus. Choose the country (or countries) in which you want to sell your goods here. While it is possible to specify an unlimited number of countries or locations, doing so will need a larger advertising budget.
  7. Now, in contrast to other meta campaigns, A+SC will not allow you to customise your target audience by criteria such as age, gender, and interests. The A+SC algorithms at Meta will handle that for you.
  8. The next step is to plan out the timeline and financial parameters of the campaign.
  9. After that, you will be forwarded to the attribute settings. Here, you should select the “7-day click or 1-day view” option to get the best results and proper campaign reports.
  10.  Meta will show you a list of suggested ads. It will show the ads that got the best results so far in your Ads Manager account. It is recommended you import all your available ad data to help Meta’s AI algorithms get as much data as possible. The more data it has, the faster it can optimize your campaigns to provide better results.
  11.  Finally, review all the choices you made and make the campaign live.

Conclusion

Unlike Google’s Performance Max campaigns, Meta doesn’t force you to select Advantage+ Shopping Campaign as your only choice. You can still access the manual campaign setup and have solid control over Meta ads.

However, Meta is heavily leaning toward the utilization of machine learning to automate the campaign setups and bring in the best performance with its A+SC. That’s why now is the perfect time to test the waters with A+SC and see how it can help your brand flourish.

Sure, you would need to relinquish a lot of control to Meta, and it might take a reasonable amount of time before you start seeing the results. But once the Meta algorithms collect enough customer data, they can optimize the campaigns so your ads can bring more ROIs and sales than ever before.

Do you still have questions related to the Meta Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns? Let us know in the comment section.