What is Meta Advantage Ad Suite
Meta Advantage suite has two ad products - Advantage and Advantage+
A weekend from a bygone era - I was having a drink with a media head and trying to listen. Backed by a network agency he proclaimed that along with his team they are building a media model that will make the job of digital media professionals redundant. They were automating the digital media buying process and making a tool for the network.
Not sure what happened to that tool but Meta is walking the same path of automation and simplifying the complexity of advertising on the medium.
It has its own benefits. It has to challenge the likes of Apple and Google, who are no more giving a free run to make ad dollars from their platforms.
Recently it announced that it will consolidate all of its automated ad products under a new portfolio, Meta Advantage.
“Automated ad products help to improve the performance of your ads by relying more on machine learning, such as automatically finding the most relevant audiences or ad placements. They also allow you to further simplify optimizing campaigns, so you can worry less about managing campaigns and get back to running your business.”
Meta Advantage Ad suite
The suite is divided into two kinds of Advantage products:
Advantage: this allows you to enhance a specific aspect of your manual campaign setup, such as the selected Detailed Targeting options within your target audience.
Advantage+: this allows you to automate an entire campaign flow from end to end or an entire core step of your manual campaign setups, such as placements or creatives.
Let’s take a look a the major products and see what’s in it for advertisers - especially for nonprofit clients who are looking to acquire new donors via campaigns like Conversions and Lead Generation.
Advantage Lookalike and Advantage Detailed Targeting
Both these products fall into the Advantage category and are currently known as Lookalike Expansion and Detailed Targeting Expansion. So both these products that will be rebranded under the Advantage set allow advertisers to optimize for conversions and improve performance by expanding their audiences.
Both the products have found more importance after Facebook removed the detailed targeting options.
Advantage Lookalike allows you to reach a broader set of people than those defined in the advertiser's Lookalike Audience. Once you click on the expansion checkbox, Facebook will reach out to the broader audience.
Advantage Detailed Targetting - While creating your targeting options for ad sets - one can also click on the checkbox, which will allow Facebook to reach out to the broader audience. In fact, Facebook provides an estimated audience size once you click on the box.
One of the reasons why marketers love Facebook ad managers is due to the ease of setting up a campaign and self-optimisation where required. For example the allocation of budgets and where to show the ads. While you can do it manually but I have seen that self-optimisation works brilliantly. So the trust is there and when you are working in a small region or a niche segment where you always have two concerns:
CPM might shoot up any time
And a smaller market with no detailed level targeting you are always worried about the audience size. So both these two features can come in handy. Also, all these expansions will only happen if Facebook finds it cheaper.
However, the expansion remains behind the curtain which could be a concern but Facebook wants to control it and you can’t do much.
Advantage+ App, Placements, Creative and Shopping Campaigns
All these products fall in the second category that focuses on complete automation - Advantage+.
Advantage+ App is currently known as Automated App Ads simplifies app install campaign creation and drives performance for app advertisers by using real-time learnings to adjust ads across the audience, placement and creative.
Advantage+ Placements currently known as Automatic Placements find the most effective placement for a given ad. Showing your ads across 6 or more Placements—like on Facebook Marketplace, Instagram Stories, Reels.
An advertiser can manually choose the placement but I have left this for Facebook to decide and it works neatly.
Advantage+ Creative currently known as Dynamic Experiences bundles a set of creative optimizations into a convenient single-entry point for ease of use, which can improve ad performance.
When the feature is turned on it automatically creates multiple variations of your ad and shows a personalised variation to each person based on what they're most likely to respond to.
You can create ads with dynamic experiences using the Traffic or Conversions objectives with website destinations to help drive performance and deliver more tailored ads to each person.
This feature only works on a single image or video. Good for organisations who don’t have the creative bandwidth.
Advantage+ Shopping(coming soon) work to achieve the highest performance from your online sales campaigns with minimal effort or management by optimizing across multiple campaign levers—including creative, targeting, placements and budget—to find the best opportunities to drive conversions.
Is there any advantage of Meta Advantage Suite
On the face from an advertiser's point of view, this is simplifying quite a few things via automation and I don’t see a problem. While some may have a problem since automation also means that you don’t know much of the stuff that is going behind.
From a Facebook point, it is structuring of the existing ad products under the Meta business. Also going forward Facebook will keep reducing user optimization and increase its power of automation. One of the reasons Facebook removed detailed targeting options was due to the backlash. In fact, detailed targeting was the secret sauce of Facebook advertising and everyone minted money from it.
Now with the option gone. Meta going forward wants to have more control over its ad platform be it targeting or optimisation. I don’t see this as a problem as long it delivers results. Also, these options when checked will deliver results when Facebook finds them cheaper.
If you are doing digital fundraising for Nonprofits on Meta then Advantage Lookalike and Detailed Targeting are worth testing. Complete automation products(Advantage+) isn’t exciting for me as of now but Advatnage+ Creative is something that I would love to try. However, it would be interesting to watch what kind of reporting it provides.
Okay, will test :)