Explained: Meta's Big Changes to Advantage+ Campaigns

[00:00:01] What is Tuesday and time for our weekly deep dive episode. This week, our Meta Ads correspondent, Andrew Foxwell is here. Andrew is a veteran Meta Ads buyer and has visibility to $300 million in Meta Ads spend through his Slack community called Foxwell Founders, which I am also in. Hello, Andrew. Andrew Foxwell Hello. Andrew Foxwell So big changes Meta announced to its Advantage Plus ad campaigns. I want to talk about what they mean kind of on a day to day level for us. But can we walk through what those changes are?

[00:00:31] Andrew Foxwell Yeah, I mean, initially there was a lot of stuff reported, right? So I think Meta did a classic lead Meta job in terms of the comms rollout of this where it was a lot of confusion. And so there still may be confusion that people have heard on this. The initial thing that really freaked people out was that they're forcing you into Advantage Plus and you're not going to have a choice, which actually is true that they're forcing you into it, but that you do have a choice.

[00:01:00] Andrew Foxwell So that's a real difference than what we've seen or that we initially heard. Andrew Foxwell So the changes are essentially that there's only going to be one campaign type. It's going to be called Advantage Plus Shopping campaign, or it's going to be called something like an Advantage Sales campaign or something. They haven't settled on the official name of it yet.

[00:01:20] Andrew Foxwell So that they know that it's going to be called that they know that it's going to come out and be fully rolled out at the end of Q2. And what it essentially is, is you will have just that type of campaign, but you will be able to turn all these automatic optimizations off.

[00:01:36] Andrew Foxwell So they're putting it all into one place. You'll still be able to turn them off. Yes, it's called an Advantage Plus sales campaign. But essentially, that's the big one, that you'll be able to turn these things off. They're renaming it. There won't be another, you won't be able to do other campaign types, but you'll be able to turn pieces off. Andrew Foxwell So it is a little bit of a change in that regard. You're losing, you know, ABO, CBO, that kind of a thing.

[00:02:06] Andrew Fox Wait a minute, we're losing ABO and so ABO being ad set optimization for the budget and CBO meaning campaign budget optimization. What do you mean we're losing them? Andrew Fox Yeah, they're being rolled into this new Advantage Plus sales campaign. Andrew Fox So we won't be able to choose that.

[00:02:23] Andrew Fox We won't be able to choose as far as we know. So we're not entirely sure exactly how many controls they give us. So it could be that you'll have an advantage, like you'll be able to launch this Advantage Plus sales campaign, but it will live akin to a CBO, hypothetically.

[00:02:41] Andrew Fox But it'll be under this new umbrella. I don't know that that'll be the case. I think they're really trying to push towards obviously more AI driven automation for what they're saying, maximum efficiency and performance.

[00:02:54] Andrew Fox They're really giving every campaign a new score as well. So there's a it's called an opportunity score. It's zero to 100. Essentially, how many of the things that they want you to be opting into? Are you opting into? This would be any sort of automatic audience optimization, you know, creative optimization, bidding optimization, etc.

[00:03:22] Andrew Fox So this is just a score of how much you have done what the AI bot wants you to do? Andrew Fox Yes, how on how what they're saying how quote optimized each of them are towards that score. Andrew Fox I think Google has something very similar actually. I forget what it's called. Yeah. Andrew Fox It's modeled a lot like that, honestly, from a lot of people talking about this, it's modeled very similarly to what Google has. So, you know, it's, it's essentially, they're going to kind of redo the flow.

[00:03:52] Andrew Fox Of the way that you launch a campaign as well. So, you know, I think the people that that are in our community, right, they're some of the top ad buyers in the world. And I think most people that launch an ad on meta don't know how to manually control a lot of things. Andrew Fox The proper way. And so I think for most people, this is going to they'll just, you know, AI will take over and they're going to hit press play and like, you give it some creatives and it makes it into what it wants to and that's it.

[00:04:19] Andrew Fox Right. And, you know, I mean, a lot of the, a lot of the sort of the dark art of meta ad campaigns for the longest time has been people believing in very specific sort of ad set structures, you know, and in fact, a lot of not as much lately, but in your Foxville founders Slack community, a lot of questions in the past had been like, tell me your structure. Andrew Fox I still see these actually in the community, you know, tell me a structure. Is it 30 ads in an ad set? Is it two? Is it, you know, does this remove our ability to have that level of granularity?

[00:04:49] Andrew Fox As far as we know, not necessarily. So you'd be able to turn these things off and go like and not have them be optimized for it. You'll still be able to use audiences the way that we think that you're going to be able to. Andrew Fox I don't, you know, so first of all, existing campaign settings, if you have them are going to remain unchanged. So they're not, it's just new stuff that's going to be rolled into this.

[00:05:16] They're not, everyone's going to have this until the end of Q2. There's, it's a, it's essentially, they're calling it a beta test. It's starting today. Andrew Fox So one of that, like you may see some of your things be added into this beta test, but in terms of, you know, those types of structures and things, I don't, I think it'll look a little different.

[00:05:39] Andrew Fox If you were to try to launch, you know, a certain type of setup, but I think we've gone the way towards more simplification. So I don't necessarily, you know, you won't be able to do, I think the complex setups that we once had, but I don't know if you look at a current structure of a lot of campaigns, like most, you know, I would say it's most people are running primarily ASC.

[00:06:02] Andrew Fox And so I think even if like, and, and the thing is, is that we also learned that since I think it was September meta said, Oh yeah, look, whether you're running a business as usual campaign on CBO and ABO, or you're running an ASC, they're using the same engine and they have been since October.

[00:06:22] Andrew Fox So like, you'll, it's sort of one of those pieces of like in name only, like that's only that's, it's not necessarily going to be that big of a, of a massive change. I think it'll feel like less control.

[00:06:36] Andrew Fox And so that's my, my guess is I think there'll be some shift, but I don't know that the actual practicality of building it out will be any different. Like, I think you'll still see people starting an ASC testing campaign. You'll still see people starting a new ASC campaign, that kind of a thing.

[00:06:55] Andrew Fox Yeah. I want to talk about this opportunity score thing again. So this is a score that measures how well you're doing what they want you to do or what the AI wants you to do. Are there, is there any kind of penalty built into that? Like if you score low, does that mean you'll get lower reach or something like that? Andrew Fox Yeah. Andrew Fox Because that is the way it used to work. I mean, you know, we used to have this sort of these quality scores. Does this replace the quality score?

[00:07:19] Andrew Fox So I think that Meta would say, you know, by not opting into the things that we're suggesting, right, like your campaigns would likely perform worse. So it could be that you're reaching less people like it, will it hurt you in reality? It's really hard to say. Will there be threatening messages that say like, hey, there's a new there's there's also as part of this opportunity score system, there's a campaign opportunity section.

[00:07:47] Andrew Fox And Meta said, advertisers will now see an advantage plus indicator on ads manager signaling the optimal level of AI driven automation. If manual adjustments impact AI optimizations, Meta will provide real time guidance to turn advantage plus back on. So you'll see a lot of this of like, hey, you shouldn't be doing this is not going to work as well. It's probably going to be 30% more for your cost per lead. So you'll have that. Will it like in reality, if you ran a test,

[00:08:17] would it be you know, would there be any price difference there? It's really hard to say. Between juggling client meetings and keeping up with what's changed in the marketing world, who has time to stress about website security? But security is important. What with bots pummeling your brand site by the hundreds every hour looking for a way in.

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[00:09:25] This is probably an unfair question. I feel like I should ask you this every month because it changes so fast. But should we trust Meta's AI? My understanding is most media buyers consider it to be pretty good, maybe better than what we would do. But where do you stand on this? You know, this advice that it wants us to do in order to jack up this new opportunity score. Is the advice good?

[00:09:47] Yeah, I mean, here's the real challenge with this is like, we've had a situation where with ASC, you put in hard exclusions, and you put in the ability for it to say, look, like, hey, don't show it to any of the existing customers.

[00:10:04] Okay. And they're doing that. They're launching it to existing customers. Okay. So like, that's a real issue. And that's a mistrust, you know, between us and Meta.

[00:10:19] Should we trust the AI driven optimizations? I think that what this does is, I think it's great for them, right? It like, it will make them more money, it will drive them more profit, because it ultimately removes, yeah, more of the control that we have.

[00:10:36] Will, will ads, like, continue to work at the same level of profitability and scalability and things that they have been? I don't think so. I think that because losing the control on exclusions and losing the control on, you know, certain audiences probably will come with this, like, you're not going to be able to do as much as you did.

[00:10:57] And, you know, obviously the efficacy over time of lookalikes dying, like, all of these pieces, I think, do lead into the fact that Meta ads will, like, continue to perform worse. And, but again, there's no other place to go. Yeah.

[00:11:16] So, I think it's a real challenge. I think you're going to continue to see advertisers trying for anything that has scale. I mean, you look at the app love and boom, right, within e-commerce, that is purely based on people being so hungry for somewhere else to go. And there is no exclusions on it. And people are still pouring money into it, right?

[00:11:41] So, and I think their quarterly report, they had mentioned that despite the sort of the big negative backlash about Meta deciding, hey, we're just going to let anyone say whatever they want. We're not going to do any, you know, moderation, essentially a bit of an overstatement, but that was essentially it, that they did not see any impact on advertising, you know, with brands pulling out. Unlike what happened with Twitter, where a lot of brands pulled out after that happened.

[00:12:09] Yeah, I think that's, I mean, do we think that's true? Like, I think there's probably a lot of people that are ticked, but they're still going on Instagram. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's really, it's a real challenge. I think Twitter is much easier for people to pull away from. These are happening at the desktop level, in other words, through the web browser. There's another way to place ads on Meta NS through an API using a third party tool.

[00:12:35] Does this change, this sort of fairly large change to Advantage Plus, make its way through the API pipes as well? Or is this only when you're sort of using the desktop app? Yeah, this makes it through the API as well. So the thing that I think will, and this is kind of burying the lead, but I think this is really important to mention. I think that because everything's going into this one type of campaign type generally, and you might be able to opt out of it or whatever, but let's, you know, they're really forcing us in that direction.

[00:13:06] There's a big thing that API access has that's called bid multipliers. And this is if you wanted to say, look, I'm running this campaign, but bid more for women 30 to 40 in New York City. Okay. And you can do that and bid up to four times as you normally would. Like, that's who I want to get in front of. And so that's really where, so the AI folks, the API folks have generally adopted this already. Like, they're sort of in this model that we have, you know, where they're utilizing ASC.

[00:13:36] Because a lot of those people that are using an API are bigger, bigger spenders for the most part, right? So they're all in on ASC, so this is an easy thing for them. I would see, and I think it's probably possible that bid multipliers within this are going to become part of it, right? Because I think you're going to start to see people really, you can, wanting that control.

[00:14:02] Like, you need to give people some sense that, like, you know, it's just all they, it's all, we're going to put it where we want, trust us. Yeah. So that's a big difference. So it does affect the API world. I think that there will be more in terms of being able to, like, put everything in an AI style campaign and advantage plus sales campaign.

[00:14:22] And then I think you'll be able to do not just bid multipliers, but also be able to do things like maybe you'll be able to do audience sort of splicing or something too within it that they'll rename something, right? That would be, that would be another prediction. So, yeah. So it is a big change. I don't, in that regard, and I don't, there's not a way to go around it if you have an API access or anything like that.

[00:14:48] So, again, I think the biggest piece is that there's really nowhere else to go for a lot of folks. Well, and on that depressing note, I think we'll leave it, Andrew. Thank you. Thanks. Andrew Foxwell is our Meta Ads correspondent. He's here every month. You can learn more about Andrew's digital ads training at todayindigital.com slash Foxwell or his Slack community of senior meta ad buyers at todayindigital.com slash founders. Both of those are affiliate links, and you can find those at the bottom of our show notes. That is it for today. I'm Todd Maffin.

[00:15:17] Thanks for listening. See you Friday for our wrap up of the week's digital news. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.