Meta’s (formerly Facebook’s) Advantage+ shopping campaigns rely on automation to optimise ad delivery, making it easy for your ads to reach people who are the most likely to purchase your products.
Although it has been extremely successful for some marketers, you may typically encounter challenges. In this article, we’ll discuss the top 7 challenges with Advantage+ and how we overcome these challenges for a more streamlined advertising process.
1. Lack Of Control Over Targeting
Challenge:
Advantage+ heavily relies on Meta’s algorithms to find the best audience, which can sometimes be too broad or misaligned with your businesses specific audience goals.
An example of this would be advertising womens clothing, but men would be shown the ads. Although men could purchase womens clothing as a gift, the target audience for these products should be women. Otherwise it could lead to wasted ad spend and a lower return on investment.
Solution:
To overcome this issue, we would ensure that your goals have clearly been defined and that Advantage+ has audience signals to go off for better audience targeting and return on ad spend.
We will also review the campaign’s performance to ensure that the algorithm’s demographics align with your target market.
2. Difficulty In Understanding Performance Data
Challenge:
Due to the automation of Advantage+ campaigns, it can be difficult to understand why certain decisions were made by the algorithm.
Solution:
To overcome this, we will dig deeper into Meta’s reporting tools, using the breakdown options to analyse performance of the campaign based on variables like gender, age and ad placement to name a few. We can then use this data to compare our clients benchmarks, giving us a better understanding of the AI’s choices.
3. Over-Reliance On Automation
Challenge:
Although the automation of Advantage+ campaigns is a high-impact, low-maintenance way to get your products seen, it’s important to not solely rely on it. Whilst it doesn’t require much intervention, it can be easy to miss optimisation opportunities.
Solution:
As with everything related to AI, it’s important to manually review the campaigns. At Proof3, we regularly monitor our clients’ paid campaigns, making manual changes and optimisations where necessary to remain competitive.
4. Advantage+ Creative Issues
Challenge:
When creating an Advantage+ campaign, Advantage+ creative is turned on by default. Advantage+ creative allows Meta to show automatically ‘optimised’ and ‘personalised’ versions of ads to potential customers. This can include ad copy, overlays and image adjustments which can, on occasion, go against your company’s brand guidelines or have an unsuitable tone of voice.
Solution:
It’s essential that Advanced Preview process is undertaken before a campaign goes live and that ‘optimisations’ which are not brand-appropriate are turned off at the ad level. If you’d like to learn more about Advantage+ creative, take a look at Meta Business Help Centre’s article for more information.
5. Budget Allocation Issues
Challenge:
Advantage+ campaigns often allocate budgets dynamically based on performance. While this can return short-term results, it might overlook long-term strategic goals, such as market penetration in new regions.
Solution:
We would recommend running your Advantage+ campaigns alongside traditional, manually-controlled campaigns. This way, we can better ensure that your long-term and short-term goals are met.
We will also monitor how Advantage+ is spending your budget, making adjustments where necessary to ensure that your budget isn’t too heavily focussed on certain irrelevant segments.
6. Difficulty In Testing
Challenge:
Due to Advantage+ being an automated campaign, it can be difficult to run A/B testing to see which variations of the ad work well or not.
Solution:
We would use other Meta and Google Ads campaigns to test variations of ad copy, visuals and audiences to see which variation converts the best. You could also use Meta’s built-in experimentation tools to run tests within the framework of Advantage+ and compare results with non-automated campaigns.
7. Ad Fatigue & Creative Rotation
Challenge:
Ad fatigue is a common issue where audiences become tired of seeing the same ads repeatedly, leading to decreased performance. With Advantage+, the automated system may continue showing ads that have reached saturation.
Solution:
To prevent ad fatigue, ensure you have a diverse range of creatives in rotation. At Proof3, we will regularly refresh your ad sets with new visuals, copy and formats to ensure your ads stay fresh and relevant, even if the users have seen an older variation of the same ad before.
Meta’s Creative Hub can also be a valuable resource for trying out new creative ideas.
Ready to take your paid marketing to the next level?
Although Advantage+ is extremely beneficial to businesses due to its high level of automation, it does come with its challenges. With our help, we can help you overcome these challenges to get the most out of your paid marketing campaigns.
Remember, automation is the most effective with a strategic human oversight. If you’d like to learn more about how we can optimise Advantage+ campaigns, drop us a line.
