In this solo episode, I am breaking down Meta’s Advantage Plus suite. This suite aims to streamline the process of running ads through automation and improved AI algorithms. It comprises five main components: Advantage Plus shopping, Advantage campaign budget, Advantage Plus audiences, Advantage Plus placements, and Advantage Plus creative. I’ll talk you through the pros and cons of each and the importance of understanding ad placements and maintaining visually appealing ads.
In today’s episode, you’ll learn:
- The different elements of the Advantage Plus suite:
- The Advantage Plus Shopping
- Advantage Campaign Budget
- Advantage Plus Audiences
- Advantage Plus Placements
- Advantage Plus Creative
- The pros and Cons of each of these
- The future of Advantage Plus Suite
Links from the show:
Transcript
And the last one, which I also despise, is Advantage Plus Creative.
Now, the reason I don’t like Advantage Plus Creative is because it’s hideous.
If you have ever been scrolling Facebook or Instagram, seen that really hideous banner across the top?
They didn’t do that. Facebook did that. They thought it looked pretty.
Introduction to Bright Minds of Ecommerce
[0:22] Hi, and welcome to the Bright Minds of Ecommerce podcast. I’m Dana, founder of Bright Red Marketing, and I created this podcast because I wanted to bring you the best advice from Australian experts in e-commerce and e-commerce store owners.
If you’re wanting relatable stories and actionable advice and the latest Facebook advertising strategies, you’re in the right place. So let’s get into today’s episode.
Exploring the Advantage Plus Suite
[0:44] Hi, and welcome to the Bright Minds of e-commerce podcast. Today, we’re here with, well, me.
We had some really lovely feedback on the individual episodes we did last year, and I decided to bring them back.
So what we’re going to talk about today is the Advantage Plus suite.
Now this is one that’s getting a lot of traction. There’s lots of gurus talking about it and essentially the Advantage Plus suite is Facebook trying to roll out more automation, making it easier for people to run ads because if you’re trying to run them yourself, they can be a little bit complicated.
So essentially the Advantage Plus suite is Facebook’s AI.
It’s Facebook’s AI trying to run these ads and make life easier.
So there’s five main types.
There’s Advantage Plus shopping, which you might be the most familiar with.
It tends to be the one that’s most spoken about and it tends to be the one that you see the most because every time you go to make a new ad, you get Advantage Plus as an option.
Now, I love Advantage Plus shopping, but they have a time and a place.
And that time and place is as an addition for most brands.
A lot of people are using them as the sole part of their top of funnel because they work so well.
But the problem with the Advantage Plus shopping campaign is you have absolutely no control over who is going to see that.
[2:00] So you go into that and you go, okay, I would like my ad and my Advantage Plus to be my top of funnel.
And that’s nice, but you don’t actually know if the people seeing that Advantage Plus are your top of funnel.
There is every chance they could be be your middle funnel. It could be acting as a retargeting campaign.
So it’s one of those things where it’s like, well…
[2:20] It’s nice. It’s like a little cherry on top. We add it to most of our full package clients because it’s a very nice cherry, but I get a little bit concerned with people that have that as their entire campaign.
You just don’t know where that’s coming from and you don’t know who’s seeing those ads.
So my preference for a true Tupper Funnel is going to be a manual setup.
So when you go to create your ad and there’s those two options and it always defaults to Advantage Plus, Plus, I do recommend most people still stick with manual.
And there’s a lot of gurus that will argue with me, but I find especially for smaller businesses where filling up that top of funnel is so important.
You may be struggling to get organic reach, those sorts of things.
You still need that little bit of control. But I do like it as a cherry. It is a very nice cherry.
But again, if you don’t have a lot of data for Facebook to run with,
Understanding Advantage Campaign Budget
[3:09] sometimes that cherry doesn’t work for you. So something to keep in mind.
Now, the next option is Advantage campaign budget. Now, advantageous campaign budget, to me, is very much like the campaign budget optimization.
[3:21] Again, this is really good for you if you don’t have a lot of time to manage your ads.
But as someone who spends a lot of time managing ads for other people, I like to keep the control. The control for me is important.
So especially if you’re trying to test with different audiences, it can be really hard to actually get any good clear data if you don’t have any control over how that data is spending. spending.
So if you just want to give that control to Facebook and you’re like, look, I don’t care where my money gets spent.
Just give me the best results. This is where I’m at. This is where I’m happy.
A campaign budget could work really nicely for you. If you’re in the space where you’re like, I really want to know who my audience is. I want to make sure I can do this testing properly.
[4:01] Let’s just stick with ad set budgets because that will give you the best way of working out what audiences are working so that you can actually start to scale.
Also make scaling a lot easier because you don’t have to reset everything.
If you want to increase budgets, You can just add new audiences and increase
Navigating Advantage Plus Audiences
[4:15] budgets audience by audience.
Then we’ve got Advantage Plus audiences.
[4:21] Advantage plus audiences to me are very similar to your broad audience so again you don’t really know who’s in them and that might be fine for you you might be like look i don’t care i just i want to make this as easy for me as humanly possible and that’s fine the advantage plus audience is like a broad audience so you can do both you could just use advantage plus audience you could use a broad your broad audience being one that i always recommend people test and again Again, if you’re going to use the Advantage Plus audience, probably test it, see if it works, see if it’s good for you because it might and it might not be.
And then we’ve got Advantage Plus placements, which I despise.
[5:00] And I despise them because Facebook’s running out of space.
There is not enough space for all of your ads as every other brand on the planet’s ads.
So they’ve made all these fun placements. and there’s the really tiny little right side column that no one ever looks at and ignores, there’s marketplace ads which are actually good for some people but if you sell a product that no one would ever in a million years search for in the marketplace it’s a waste of money they’ve got all sorts of explore and this and that and video and stories it’s important that you know where your ad is being shown because where your ad is being shown is important for for what ad you have made.
So if you’re going to use Advantage Plus placements and leave them on, be aware of where that ad is being shown and be aware that your content needs to match because there’s nothing worse than going on to Instagram stories and seeing an ad that was not made for Instagram stories because they look terrible.
So keep that in mind if you are going to keep it on. There are a lot of experts, some who I respect quite greatly, that recommend starting with advantage plus placements and then narrowing it down using the breakdown tool later so the breakdown tool essentially allows you to split test without split testing so you can run your advantage plus placements run all of those for a week or two see what data you get and then come back to it and go you know what.
[6:28] That actually didn’t work for me. And you can actually see the actual placements
Analyzing Advantage Plus Placements
[6:31] that were working or weren’t. So you can do it that way.
I tend to just stick with feeds and stories for your chopper funnel and middle of funnel.
And then you can actually use all placements for retargeting because at that point you want to do the follow them and stop them around the internet thing.
But for a chopper funnel, it’s not as effective in my experience.
And the last one, which I also despise, is advantage plus creative.
Now, the reason I don’t like advantage plus creative creative is because it’s hideous.
[6:59] If you have ever been scrolling Facebook or Instagram, it’s in that really hideous banner across the top.
Critiquing Advantage Plus Creative
[7:06] They didn’t do that. Facebook did that. They thought it looked pretty.
They also like to add really bad music to your ads.
Yeah. There are a couple of ones that they’re putting out that are half decent, but it’s definitely not something that you want to just leave on and hope for the best.
So yeah, advantage plus creative, I turn turn off so we have five we have advantage plus shopping which i recommend you dabble with but not have as your entire strategy advantage campaign budget which if you’re a tester and you want good data i’d stay away from if you’re just like i don’t care let facebook do it that’s fine to leave on just be aware that it’s going to spend where it wants to not necessarily where you want it to spend your advantage plus audience which is basically like your broad so again a good one to test your advantage plus placements which we know i don’t like and be careful with them but again you can use the breakdown tool to review them see how that works and your advantage plus creative which I despise because it makes things ugly and you didn’t spend all that time making pretty ads for Facebook to make them ugly.
Summary and Future of Advantage Plus Suite
[8:08] So, that’s my summary of Advantage Plus, the whole suite of ads that Facebook have running.
Just as a reminder that Facebook are changing things every other day.
They’ve even just added a new one to the Advantage Plus Creative, which caused quite a bit of chaos for us last week, where it decided to combine multiple clients’ creatives into one ad, which was super fun for our clients.
We turned everything off. Everything’s fine. Everyone’s all good.
But Facebook is constantly changing things. So it’s something to be careful of and there will probably be another advantage plus piece added to the suite.
Who knows when? So the thing with all of these is always to just make sure you’re keeping an eye on them.
You’re not just swiping through as you go really quickly because there are always changes in the Facebook backend and you don’t want to just click on something and it does something weird that you didn’t actually expect it to.
Facebook and meta ads is not something that you can just, oh, it was the same last week. I’ll just keep going because that’s not how they like to play this game.
So if you have any questions, feel free to message me. We’ve always got our free strategy sessions where we can run through these things for you, see what’s working, see what’s not.
So that’s brightredmarketing.com.au forward slash free dash strategy dash session.
But let me know your thoughts on Advantage Plus. I’d love to hear how they’re working for you.
Thank you for listening to the Bright Minds of Ecommerce podcast.
Podcast. As always, you’ll find the show notes at brightredmarketing.com.au forward slash podcast. Thanks for listening.
