Shopping Advantage + Meta: Automation in Service of Marketing

Michaël Niavet, Senior Consultant at Converteo with expertise in Social Media, shares his perspective on Meta’s new tool: Shopping Advantage+, which promises to transform media buying and management on the platform.

Key Takeaways:

• Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) on Meta are automated campaigns that leverage artificial intelligence to deliver your ads to the audiences most likely to convert, while efficiently managing your advertising budget.
• This feature addresses the need to maximize conversion KPIs (CPA, CVR) and also aims to optimize top-of-funnel indicators (reach, visits). Therefore, implementing Advantage+ Shopping should be part of a communication strategy that covers the entire media funnel.
• The usage conditions of this tool (budget, placements, audiences, creatives) require establishing a well-defined testing protocol beforehand to identify the best combination for each of your campaigns.

Delivering the right message to the right person at the right time remains the ultimate goal for marketers. Personalization is often seen as the ultimate solution to these challenges, but its implementation is still complex and time-consuming within media buying tools.

The response from advertising platforms has been to facilitate the adoption of personalization by offering “automated campaigns” that shorten the time needed for campaign creation and optimization through new AI-driven features.

With the advent of AI, Meta has taken on the challenge of addressing a major industry issue: the automation of campaigns and their components to maximize performance.

Machine learning at the heart of media strategies

Meta’s media buying platform has introduced a new tool that combines the pursuit of business results with time efficiency in campaign implementation: Shopping Advantage+.

How does it work?

Meta’s promise is to save time through the industrialization of campaign parameters, such as the automatic refinement of audiences during campaign delivery via algorithms or the optimization of creatives with AI-driven adjustment suggestions. Additionally, it aims to more effectively meet businesses’ expectations for online conversions.

Indeed, for campaigns executed with Shopping Advantage+, Meta leverages AI to identify the audience that best aligns with your business objectives. The only required settings for audience setup are related to the countries of delivery and the users’ age. The platform emphasizes using a broad and aggregated audience that the algorithm will scan to detect profiles most likely to meet the campaign’s goals, adjusting the targeting throughout the campaign.

Additionally, Meta capitalizes on a fundamental component of Social Media: creative content. The Shopping Advantage+ option offers the capability to automatically generate up to 150 different creative combinations for a campaign. This feature aligns with the platform’s guidelines, which recommend a significant volume of ad content within each campaign.

With this new functionality, machine learning significantly reduces the time account managers need to spend on campaign management, allowing them to focus on other aspects of their role. Meta relies on data processing to achieve objectives through real-time adjustments of campaign parameters. However, it remains crucial to maintain control over activations to avoid any potential pitfalls.

A Test & Learn Approach to Maximize Performance

While global trends and best practices emerge, it is important to remember that each industry has its own specificities. Consequently, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to using Shopping Advantage+. At Converteo, we advocate for a “test & learn” approach to better understand and leverage this tool.

During the implementation of Shopping Advantage+ for some of our clients, various hypotheses were tested to observe the benefits of this feature, particularly in terms of budget allocation.

Surprisingly, we found that some campaigns configured with the Shopping Advantage+ option did not deliver the expected results. On the contrary, the performance was below that observed in traditional campaigns for lower-funnel KPIs.

However, for the upper funnel, the tool proved effective in optimizing results, whether boosting visibility or increasing the number of qualified visits. Therefore, the hypothesis of relying solely on the ASC model in your activations should be discarded, given the observations from previous tests. In fact, the 100% Advantage+ strategy yielded the lowest performance outcomes.

Following these tests, it appears that a good way to integrate Shopping Advantage+ into the media plan is to combine it with “classic campaigns” during promotional periods, for example, where there is a need to react quickly to competition. This combination of Shopping Advantage+ campaigns and classic campaigns allows for performance control while standing out from competitors with an optimized audience and creative strategy.

However, this combination should also be part of a long-term strategy. In fact, when retesting the same clients, we observed a slight improvement in conversion performance on certain campaigns. Therefore, by systematically integrating it over time, the ASC and classic campaign duo will be able to adjust to the business needs of companies.

For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) starting on Meta, Shopping Advantage+ can be a quick and effective way to become familiar with the media buying platform. This solution simplifies campaign creation by consolidating many parameters (targeting, creatives, placements), which are now managed by machine learning during the campaign. However, it should be integrated into a broader activation strategy to ensure the success of media campaigns.

It is worth noting that the adoption of this campaign type is slow but currently equips a large majority of advertisers. Similar to Google’s Performance Max campaigns, they have proven beneficial and are now integrated into advertisers’ acquisition strategies.

Given their developments, it is likely that these types of campaigns will revolutionize the way Social Media is operated in the coming years.