Facebook’s Advantage+ shopping campaigns: Are they worth the ecommerce hype?

Are you running ecommerce ads on Facebook? Then you’ve probably heard of Advantage+ shopping campaigns. 

This innovative advertising technology integrates proven best practices with machine learning to optimize ad delivery. 

It allows businesses to reach more people likely to purchase their products, driving more sales with less set-up time and greater efficiency. 

But is Advantage+ worth the hype? 

Let’s dive in and find out.

Advantage+ shopping campaigns use automation to streamline and optimize ad delivery. This makes it easier for ecommerce businesses to reach more people who are likely to purchase their products. 

The new machine learning models can quickly learn which creative will resonate best with customers based on where they are in the shopping journey.

The system generates countless variations of adverts, assessing how well they resonate with audiences, and then floods the market with the variants that perform best. 

This has led to impressive results for some brands, with the option to alter text and images automatically.

Concerns for ecommerce business owners

While Advantage+ shopping campaigns are innovative and exciting, there are some concerns that ecommerce business owners should be aware of. 

First, this technology is only available to ecommerce businesses at the moment. While over 90% of ecommerce users reportedly have this rolled out, it’s unclear when Facebook will make this available to everyone outside of ecommerce.

Moreover, the system requires KPI history on creatives and targeting, so you can’t run it on a brand-new ad account. Someone needs to do testing before deploying Advantage+ to ensure that it’s optimized for success.

One downside of Advantage+ is that you can’t define targeting. 

For example, if you have products for women, Advantage+ would still show ads to men. This could potentially lead to wasted ad spend and decreased ROI.

The other concern is that with Advantage+, you are giving control to the platform. While AI and machine learning have revolutionized advertising, it’s essential to approach these new tools with a healthy dose of skepticism. 

As humans, we operate based on a lot of previous patterns and our limited field of awareness and knowledge. With Advantage+, the AI has more awareness into targeting and ideal customer modeling. 

But at the end of the day, AI cannot process your unique marketing objective or overall plan, nor does it have emotions on what direction to move to next.

Despite the concerns, our ad agency has had great success with Advantage+. 

Over 80% of our ecommerce clients are on Advantage+, and the return on ad spend (ROAS) has been pretty good. 

All we have to do is adjust the budget based on performance.

With Advantage+ shopping campaigns, Facebook does all the heavy lifting of targeting and mainly getting qualified people to your content. 

However, it’s important to remember that this technology is controversial because it gives control to the platform. Put in the work to ensure your content and ads are relevant and converting.

Advantage+ shopping campaigns are an efficient tool that allows ecommerce businesses to work on better creatives. At the same time, Facebook does all the heavy lifting of targeting and getting mostly qualified people to your content. 

If your ecommerce business has a proven online sales process and quality content and ads, Advantage+ shopping campaigns are worth giving a test.

But remember, it’s just one tool in the larger digital advertising toolbox. Approach this technology with a healthy dose of skepticism and ensure it’s optimized for success before deploying it.