Ecommerce businesses must always be willing to adapt and change when it comes to digital marketing. Most ecomm brands have tens, if not hundreds, of competitors with very similar products. It is vital to stay up to date with marketing trends to ensure that potential customers are seeing your products and not those of your competitors. Advantage+ is a newer campaign type from Meta which can help give you the edge.
What is Advantage+?
Advantage+ is a type of shopping campaign from Meta, designed to reach your audiences with less set up time and a greater level of efficiency. It is perfect if you would like your advertising efforts to be performance-focused and drive sales. While Advantage+ ads look like traditional single image or carousel ads on Meta platforms, machine learning uses your assets to create personalized ads for shoppers. In this way, it is very similar to a PMax campaign. Advantage+ shopping campaigns allow you to:
- Combine both existing customer and prospecting audiences in one campaign with personalized products from your catalog.
- Use machine learning to find and target your highest value customers across all of Meta’s apps and services, with a lesser amount of input.
- Ensure your highest value shoppers are served your highest performing ad variations.
- Automatically test up to 150 creative combinations to find the highest performing ads.
As you can see, Advantage+ shopping campaigns offer a wide array of benefits when advertising for an ecommerce business. Now, let’s dive into exactly what you need to do to ensure your campaign is set up for success.
How Do I Set Up an Advantage+ Campaign?
Setting up an Advantage+ shopping campaign is relatively simple, but careful attention should be paid. A mistake here could have disastrous effects on the efficacy of your campaign in the long run. Here’s a quick guide to the most important parts of the setup process.
Choosing Audience
As any ecomm business owner knows, your target audience is a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to whether or not an ad campaign is successful. When setting up your Advantage+ shopping campaign, you will have the option of choosing your own audience. You can select variables such as age range, gender, and other detailed targeting categories. Meta AI will target your chosen demographics before broadening out if needed. However, you also have the option of selecting Advantage+ audience. When this is chosen, Meta AI will use the broadest possible audience so that it can test and find the perfect audience for your products.
Just as important as who to target, is who not to target. Luckily, Advantage+ has audience controls for this exact reason. With these controls, you’re able to exclude certain audiences based on age range, gender, location, and more.
Setting Your Budget
Setting the right budget is crucial in giving your Advantage+ shopping campaign the best chance at success. Too low of a budget and Meta AI will not be able to gain enough data through testing to discover what works best for your brand. We recommend starting with an absolute minimum of $30 per day for your budget. You can go higher than this if you would like. A higher budget can result in more impressions and more data for Meta AI, speeding up the success of your campaign. However, under no circumstances should you go lower than the recommended $30 per day.
Importing Assets
Choosing the right creative assets is arguably the most important part of setting up any campaign. Poor assets will get poor results. Make sure you use only high quality and engaging images to ensure you grab and hold the attention of shoppers. Additionally, your images should not all be similar. You want to use a variety of imagery, including product and lifestyle images. By doing this, you’re giving the AI more to work with. It will find out which images work best for your products, so it’s best to give it a lot of options to test. We recommend starting with at least 20 images to ensure your content is fresh and engaging.
As an added bonus, if you already use Meta ads, you can easily import your existing creative into your new Advantage+ shopping campaign. To accomplish this, during set up, simply select import under suggested ads. If you go this route, we advise importing all existing creative assets. You’ll just be giving the AI more to work with to learn what works best.
Common Mistakes
An Advantage+ shopping campaign can do wonders for your marketing efforts, but only if it is done right. A mistake can turn a campaign that should’ve been successful into a waste of money. Here are some of the most common errors we see, so you can be sure to avoid them
Not Enough Creative Assets
It can be tempting to only give Advantage+ what you think are your best assets, the 3 or 4 that have performed well in the past and that you feel are better than the rest. Do not do this. Use all of the creative assets at your disposal, do not leave any out. You may think that a certain image will not work, but you lose nothing by including it. Worst case scenario, Advantage+ finds it doesn’t work and stops using it, but best case scenario, it does work and maybe even with an audience that would not have responded otherwise.
Too Low of a Budget
As we’ve said, Advantage+ utilizes machine learning to ensure that your campaign is as effective as possible, and in order to do this it needs to test your ads. If you set too low of a budget, your ads will not be shown enough for Meta AI to collect enough data to learn from, making the whole thing a waste of time. We believe the ideal budget could begin at $50 or $70 dollars per day, and $30 per day as the absolute minimum. Any lower than this and Meta AI will not get the data it needs.
Making Frequent or Unnecessary Changes
Sometimes, people expect to see results immediately when they start an Advantage+ shopping campaign. When they don’t, they are tempted to start tweaking settings to try and make results happen. This has the opposite effect. It can take some time to see results because the AI is in the learning phase, figuring out what works. Anytime you make changes, the AI must begin the learning phase from the beginning again. Instead of getting results faster, making changes will actually make it take much longer to see results. On average, we find it takes about 7 days for your campaign to start being effective.
Best Practices for Scaling with Advantage+
The metric you should use for scaling is return on ad spend (ROAS). This measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. Set your target ROAS, for this example let’s say your target is 2.5, which is generally considered a decent ROAS. Once your campaign reaches 2.5 and seems to be staying there, we recommend increasing your budget by 20%. Initially after the increase, your ROAS will go down, but it will quickly build back up until you’re reaching your target again. Continue this strategy of increasing your budget by 20% when your ROAS target is reached until it seems that increasing the budget is no longer having an effect. Additionally, always follow our general guide to scaling Meta campaigns.
Scaling an Advantage+ shopping campaign can be a little tricky. If you need help with any aspect of Advantage+ or any other form of ecommerce marketing, remember to contact Rise Marketing Group. We love working with new clients and helping them reach their goals.
