What is Facebook Advantage+: Pros and cons

Facebook Advantage+ is a newly released feature designed to help advertisers optimize the performance of their campaigns. Essentially, it's an automated system that enhances various ad elements such as placements, target audience, and creatives. The available options include Facebook Advantage+ Audience, Advantage+ Catalog Ads, Facebook Advantage+ Creative, Advantage+ Placements, and Advantage+ Shopping.

According to Meta’s internal research, campaigns that utilize the Advantage+ features tend to have lower costs and higher conversion rates. In this article, we’ll explore what Facebook Ad Advantage+ is, how it works, and the pros and cons of using Advantage+ Facebook Ads.

What is Facebook Advantage+?

Definition

Facebook Advantage+ is Meta's suite of AI-powered advertising tools designed to automate and optimize various aspects of Facebook ad campaigns. These tools leverage machine learning to simplify audience targeting, creative testing, budget allocation, and campaign management all while driving better performance with minimal manual input.

It includes products like Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, Advantage+ Placements, Advantage+ Audience, and Advantage+ Creative, each focusing on different automation layers within the campaign setup process.

How Does It Work?

Facebook Advantage+ works by analyzing large datasets from Meta’s advertising ecosystem including user behaviors, ad performance history, and real-time interactions to make automatic decisions that typically require manual optimization.

Here’s a general breakdown of how it operates:

• Automated Campaign Creation: For example, with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, advertisers can launch campaigns without having to split audiences manually. The system automatically finds the highest-performing audiences and placements.

• AI-Powered Targeting: Instead of narrowing down to detailed interests or behaviors, Advantage+ uses broad or minimal inputs and allows the algorithm to identify the most likely converters based on performance signals.

• Dynamic Creative Optimization: Advantage+ Creative automatically enhances ad creatives by adjusting image formats, text placements, and templates based on what performs best for each user.

• Budget Optimization: Budgets are allocated in real-time across top-performing ad sets or audiences, improving return on ad spend (ROAS).

Advantage+ is ideal for advertisers who want to simplify campaign setup and let Facebook’s machine learning take the lead especially in ecommerce, lead generation, or app install campaigns.

Meta Advantage+ campaign types

Meta offers a variety of advanced Advantage+ features, each designed to optimize specific components of your Facebook ads whether that’s targeting the right audience, choosing the most effective placements, enhancing creative content, or improving performance for catalog and shopping campaigns.

Facebook Advantage+ Shopping

Facebook Advantage+ Shopping is a solution specifically designed for sellers on the platform. It combines machine learning and AI to optimize ad delivery and has shown proven performance improvements:

• 17% lower cost per acquisition (CPA)

• 32% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS)

The goal of this feature is to simplify campaign setup by removing many manual steps, fewer inputs, and better results. It allows advertisers to reach more potential buyers and drive higher sales.

Another key benefit is the ability to combine prospecting (new customer acquisition) and retargeting (re-engaging past customers) into a single campaign, saving both time and budget. Advertisers can still manually allocate separate budgets for each group if preferred.

Thanks to AI, Facebook Advantage+ Shopping also supports ad personalization, tailoring delivery to user behavior to improve conversion rates.

Advantage+ App Campaigns

This solution is designed to maximize app installs through campaigns focused on driving downloads. It optimizes three key elements bidding, audience, and placement to increase conversion rates while staying within budget.

Key benefits include:

• Improved delivery models to better optimize for in-app events

• Supports lowest-cost bidding models, with the option to apply bid caps

• No creative limits upload up to 50 images or videos, and 5 different ad texts (copies)

• Hybrid of automation and control advertisers can still make manual edits when needed

• Streamlined campaign creation up to 50 unique ads at once, reducing repetitive input

• Fully customizable reporting, allowing users to choose how results are displayed

Note: Some features are not available when using Advantage+ App Campaigns, such as manual targeting options and sort by app campaign filters.

Facebook Advantage+ Audience

Advantage+ Audience uses AI and machine learning to automatically find the best audience for your campaign. It leverages data such as:

• Meta Pixel insights

• Past ad engagement

• Historical conversions

Performance results based on internal Meta studies:

• Awareness campaigns saw up to 14.8% lower cost per result

• Traffic, Engagement, and Lead generation campaigns saw up to 9.7% lower cost per result

• Sales and App promotion campaigns saw up to 7.2% lower cost per result

This solution is compatible with nearly all campaign objectives across Meta platforms except for remarketing campaigns. Meta recommends using A/B testing to compare the effectiveness of Advantage+ Audience versus manual audience targeting, helping advertisers find the best fit for their strategy.

Facebook Advantage+ Placement

Facebook Advantage+ Placement automatically delivers your ads across Meta platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Meta Audience Network. Instead of manually selecting ad placements, this feature uses machine learning to optimize where your ads appear ensuring they reach the right audience at the right time.

By allowing ads to show in more placements, you maximize visibility, increase reach, and improve your chances of driving conversions. It's an ideal option for advertisers looking to simplify campaign setup while getting the most out of Meta’s ad ecosystem.

Facebook Advantage+ Creative

Facebook advantage+ creative is a solution designed to optimize ad creatives. Based on data from previous ads, the system will automatically optimize and deliver the version of the content that users are most likely to engage with.

Depending on the ad format and placement (manually selected), Meta will provide creative optimization suggestions that match your choices.Elements that will be customized include the images and videos you upload, and the ad copy you provide.

Enhancements for single image or video format

• Adjust brightness and contrast

• Show products

• Add details to ad layout

• Add overlays (branding will be applied if it’s turned on)

• Add dynamic overlays

• Enhance CTA

• Expand image

• Image animation

• Music

• Relevant comments

• Store locations

• Text improvements

• Video effects

• Video expansion

• Visual touch-ups

• 3D animation

Note:

• Music optimization and image animation are only available for image ads.

• Show products is only available if you have a catalog containing products.

• Store locations is only available if you have store Pages.

Enhancements for carousel format

• Adapt multi-image format

• Add details to ad layout

• Dynamic description

• Highlight carousel card

• Add standard labels

• Music

• Profile end card

• Relevant comments

• Text improvements

• Visual touch-ups

Note: Some of these enhancements are only available when you select Manual upload in ad setup. If you select Catalog to dynamically create a carousel using your products, they may not be available. 

Facebook Advantage+ Catalog Ads

When you use Advantage+ Catalog Ads, Facebook will automatically deliver your promoted products to target audiences based on their characteristics, including interests, behaviors, and intent. Although you're using this solution, your catalog ads will still look like regular ads but the products shown are selected based on the user data that the platform has.
Advertisers can fully utilize this solution for sales, app installs, engagement, lead generation, and traffic objectives.

Benefits of using this solution

• Retargeting old audiences: reach people who have previously interacted with your ads

• Find new customers: identify users with similar interests, behaviors, and intent as your existing customer base

• Cross-sell and up-sell to existing customers, extend the customer lifecycle by leveraging brand trust

Requirements:

• You must have a catalog before running the ads, products must be added to the catalog, and the catalog must be owned by a Business Account

• Install Meta Pixel to measure events

• Install SDK if you're promoting a mobile app

• Connect the Pixel or SDK to the catalog

Pros And Cons Of Facebook Advantage +

Facebook Advantage+ Pros

Time saving

Simplified ad setup is one of the key advantages that Facebook Advantage offers advertisers. It’s an almost fully automated solution that minimizes the amount of input advertisers need to provide. As a result, advertisers can save time by creating dozens of ads in a single setup.

In addition, ads using Facebook Advantage+ settings are automatically optimized without human intervention. This means advertisers spend less time analyzing data and manually optimizing ads.

Ease of use

With just a few setup steps, your campaign can be published. Extremely simple and streamlined. All optimization steps are handled by AI. Advertisers only need to configure the ad with a few inputs to launch their campaigns.

Moreover, Facebook Advantage is divided into smaller categories so advertisers can choose to optimize specific parts of the campaign such as audience targeting, ad placement, or creative optimization.

Better results

Trial campaigns run by Meta and its partners using Facebook Advantage+ have shown better performance and cost-efficiency. With the help of machine learning and AI, ads are delivered in a more personalized way to users, increasing the chances of conversion for each campaign.

Facebook Advantage+ Cons

Besides the benefits that Facebook Advantage+ offers, advertisers also face several challenges when using this automated solution.

Lack of control

The first challenge is the limited control advertisers have over their campaigns. While control is not entirely lost, advertisers are mostly handing over decisions to Facebook such as who to target, where to display the ad, what creative to show, and when it appears. These choices are no longer in the hands of the advertiser but controlled by Facebook Advantage+.

Limited insights

Another concern for advertisers is the lack of insights into campaigns whether successful or not when using Facebook Advantage+. You won’t know exactly which audiences were targeted, which placements performed best, or what creative content worked. Instead, you only get general performance reports in Meta’s dashboard.

This lack of detailed data from past campaigns can make it harder for businesses to plan and optimize future campaigns. These are insights that manual ad setup can often provide.

Conclusion 

Optimizing ads is no longer a difficult task with the launch of Facebook Ad Advantage+.

Streamlining the ad setup process and maximizing ad performance are just a few of the key benefits this solution brings. However, advertisers will still need to navigate certain challenges that come with Facebook Ad Advantage+.

That said, Facebook Ad Advantage remains a comprehensive solution with various types such as Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, Advantage+ Placements, Advantage+ Audience, and Advantage+ Creative. These options give advertisers more control in choosing which parts of their campaigns to optimize.

Need help with Facebook Ads? Don’t hesitate to reach out to Luca Marketing Agency today.