These days in the digital marketing industry, it feels like everything is “AI this” and “AI that.” The technology is advancing rapidly, with new tools being released, integrated, and updated daily. Even our weekly staff meetings at flyte are punctuated by news of AI developments and our agency’s practices. All of which can, admittedly, become a bit mind-numbing.
But like me, you’ve probably come to the conclusion that AI cannot–and should not–be ignored. In some cases, you may have little choice in how AI infiltrates your marketing. But be not afraid. The best thing you can do is familiarize yourself with these tools so you can make informed decisions about when/how to use them and be prepared for their impact.
Let me give you a tour of how AI for Facebook ads has evolved over the last few years, plus my personal opinion and advice on using (or not using) Meta Advantage+ features.
What is Meta Advantage+?
Advantage+ is Meta’s proprietary term for its suite of native Instagram & Facebook ads AI tools. It includes:
- campaign types
- budgeting strategies
- ad delivery placements
- creatives
- targeting features
All of which can be used individually or in tandem. If you’ve been running Meta ads in the last year, you’ve probably been prompted, forcefully, to use these features.
Meta Advantage+ arrived partially in response to the new limitations of iOS 14 and competing ad platforms like Google, who also released AI features. Meta readily shares that these features leverage artificial intelligence, but there is little to no transparency around what the tools are doing and how they are shaping your ad strategy.
“In many cases, marketers may have limited visibility into how well specific campaigns performed, and why,” said a WSJ article on AI ad buying.
Meta Advantage+ assumes you will trust the algorithm to generate compelling ads, show them to the right people, and spend your money wisely. I’ll review each of the current features that make up Meta Advantage Plus, their pros, cons, and use cases.
Note: Meta’s AI features are changing and rolling out regularly so you may not see all of the following in your account. Some accounts, such as those in special ad categories, may always have limited features available. To stay up to date on changes, I recommend subscribing to Meta’s Business newsletter, although not everything is announced.
Advantage+ Budget
This feature is turned on at the campaign level and enables Meta to distribute your budget across ad sets in whatever way it thinks will best meet your goals. For example, in a campaign with two ad sets, Meta may choose to spend 75% of your budget on ad set 1 and 25% on ad set 2.
When Advantage+ Budget is in use, a “winning” ad set is often identified within the first 7 days and results in Meta spending the majority of your budget in that ad set moving forward. It could benefit your results by quickly consolidating spend around the best-performing ads or conversely, it can quickly “kill” your audience or creative distinctions through early data biases.
At flyte, we see ad sets as an opportunity to create and test multiple audiences within a campaign, so control over those budgets is crucial. Most often, I do not employ an Advantage+ Budget. Instead, I spread spend between ad sets based on audience size, priority, or large historical performance data sets. However, if your campaign has a small budget–let’s say anything less than $10/day–Advantage+ can help maximize your results.
-Izzy Siedman
Advantage+ Targeting
Meta uses their proprietary user data alongside publicly available information about your business and value proposition to identify users it thinks are most likely to complete your desired action–aka, your campaign objective. You can rely entirely on Advantage targeting or combine it with traditional audiences like detailed demographics or custom audiences based on first-party data. This gives Meta permission to use your chosen audience as “inspiration” and target users who they believe are similar. It’s unclear how often ads using combined targeting will be shown to users outside your selected audience.
Meta claims a 33% lower CPR and 5X the reach of traditional targeting–tempting figures! But it’s unclear what the size of the data set (or the budget) was in their experiments. Advertisers, on the other hand, report mixed results.
“I swear I’m getting whiplash on how many times I’ve read posts and comments on Reddit whether Adv+ is better or worse. I feel like Facebook doesn’t even know…” a user said on r/FacebookAds.
Unfortunately, whether or not they perform well, Advantage+ audiences also don’t output data on the users who are responding to your ads. You’ll never know common interests, job titles, industries, or other demographics that might help you better understand your best audience and use those insights in other marketing tactics.
Note: Advantage+ targeting is automatically turned ON when a new campaign or ad set is created. You must manually switch to “original audience” if you do not want to use this feature. Even when choosing detailed targeting options, you must be sure to uncheck the box allowing Meta to add Advantage targeting on top of your choices.
I’m always in favor of making data-driven decisions, and if Advantage+ targeting can improve results, it’s worth trying. Assuming you have at least $10/day you can dedicate to each ad set, I recommend running an A/B split test between your traditional audience(s) and Advantage+ for at least 30 days.
When evaluating performance, pay close attention not just to the quantity of results, but the quality too. For example, if your objective is to drive traffic to your website, evaluate not just the number of link clicks but also the engagement rate, session duration, and user events once they arrive. You may find that while your traffic increased, those users bounced quickly or didn’t move further down your funnel. Only data will tell!
Advantage+ Placements
This feature decides where, across Meta’s platforms and networks your ads will show to reach your best audience. Once again, you don’t get to know which placements Meta decides on or why.
99% of the time, I do not use this feature. When you don’t know where your ads will show, you can’t optimize creatives appropriately, and you may end up with ad placements that are awkwardly cropped or feature text that’s too small to read.
Additionally, there are placements that don’t get as much engagement, are less likely to produce your desired action, or don’t align with your objective. For example, why would I want to advertise on Facebook Messenger if I don’t want to get messages? Just because Meta owns all this space where ads can go doesn’t mean they should. I would much rather control where my audience is encountering my brand.
Advantage+ Catalog Ads
This special sales campaign type is only available for advertisers with a Meta Commerce account and a connected eCommerce catalog. Advantage+ shopping ads use the data in your product feed to dynamically show products to users they think will like them. They take full control of the ad format, using images and text already associated with each product to fit different placements. Like all sales campaigns that connect to a catalog, they have the benefit of allowing users to shop directly from their Facebook or Instagram app, reducing friction in your sales funnel.
If you’ve already gone through the process of setting up a Commerce account with Meta, you should absolutely experiment with Advantage+ shopping ads. They automate ad personalization with nearly zero effort on your part and can help maximize smaller budgets. Of course, you should always pay close attention to results and make data-driven decisions.
Advantage+ Creative
Get ready because this is a big one! When it comes to setting up your actual ads, there are a lot of different ways Meta encourages you to incorporate AI, from edits to creatives you provide all the way to fully AI generated Facebook ads.
Let’s start with what Meta calls “enhancements.” These are edits/adjustments that Meta makes to various parts of ad creatives including images, videos, headlines, text, and more. Any enhancements that are compatible with your ad format are automatically turned ON when building a new ad. Some enhancements can be adjusted manually to better fit your branding but most are made at Meta’s discretion. You can toggle individual enhancements off or turn all off at the Ad level only–so for every ad you create, make sure to check these settings!
Many of these features are still in beta and may only be applied sometimes during ad delivery. Like other Facebook Ads AI tools, you will often see claims on how these enhancements can improve results but its unclear what data those claims are based on and how well it will translate to your business.
I’ve broken down most of the creative enhancements I’ve encountered in the last year and my thoughts on them below.
| Enhancement Type | Description | Thoughts |
| Add Catalog Items | Adds a mini carousel of catalog items below the ad image. Only applies for advertisers with a connected catalog. | If your messaging and creatives match a purchase intent, this can be a useful addition. |
| Visual Touch Ups | Meta will crop or expand (zoom in) on your provided graphic in some placements. | This can be rough for any graphic with text on it. |
| Text Improvements | Meta can leverage any text you provide in different formats. For example, a headline you input may be used as the primary text instead. Or only a portion of your primary text may show. | Most often, this means your text is shortened. If you don’t mind the potential for your planned message to be cut short, this feature could speak well to shorter user attention spans. |
|
Relevant Comments |
Displays what Meta determines is the “most relevant” comment directly below the ad. | As most ads don’t receive comments, this usually makes no difference. In some cases, it can act as a beneficial way to bring in UGC. |
| Music | Meta selects a free-use song “based on your content” for reels and video placements. You can also manually select a song from a library of free-use options. | For Reels placements, audio can help grab user attention, but the free-use library is limited and not nearly as beneficial as original audio. |
| Video Filter | Color and visual sharpening. | This can help your content adapt to different devices, but it can also affect your brand colors so be careful if branding is a priority! |
| 3D Animation | Uses AI to give motion to a provided image. | I’ve found this is often “unavailable” for the graphics we upload. It could be cool but I can also see it looking off brand or at the least, very obviously AI. |
| Adjust Brightness | Adjusts the brightness of creatives. | Relatively harmless but can likewise change the appearance of brand colors. |
| Add Overlays | Meta may add your headline on top of your creative. Limited font and color options. | It can take significant time to manually edit these overlays and often they still don’t match your unique branding. |
| Profile End Card | Adds a card at the end of carousel ads that prompts the user to visit the business profile. | This is a great way to add a secondary CTA to carousel ads. |
| Highlight Carousel | Based on early campaign data, Meta will select the best-performing card and show it first in the carousel. | This can help optimize based on which images resonate best but it can also become a vicious cycle in which only one card receives the majority of impressions, making your ads less dynamic overall. |
| Dynamic Description | Meta may or may not show the descriptions you input for each card. | If your message is essential to your ad, turn this off. If not, it's a harmless way to appeal to placements that are image-driven. |
| Multi Image Format | Turns your carousel into a video slideshow. | Video is king nowadays so any way to adapt still content to motion is beneficial. |
| Enhance CTA | Pairs keyphrases with your CTA in image overlays. For example, a headline may be shown alongside the “Learn More” button in a Story placement. | This is relatively harmless but it takes time to review all possible variations. |
| Info Labels | Adds info that Meta pulls from your FB or IG page such as address, store hours, price range, etc. You can add or remove these but not edit them. | Particularly useful for local businesses or eCommerce brands. |
In many cases, these enhancements take away from the unique, curated brand you’ve worked hard to create. While they may offer quick and easy ways to adapt content, it’s important to be aware of the tradeoffs for your branding. To ensure maximum creative control, I typically turn these enhancements off, with a few exceptions.
Meta has also recently changed the way you input content–text, images, links, etc.–when building ads into what they call Creative Setup. This provides even more opportunities to integrate AI in your ad process.
For example, Meta will now offer you AI generated text based on the content you input for headlines, primary text, and descriptions. Sometimes, these AI variations are auto selected, so be careful to unselect them if you don’t want AI text. You can however edit the text variations that AI generates, offering more control.
Meta has also released a tool for AI generated Facebook ads images. You input an image or graphic and it generates similar images or changes the background of your image. Like other AI image generators, you can add some text prompts to help direct the machine. There are some choices for text overlays but limited ability to ensure branding accuracy.
As we know, image generation tools are rapidly improving but there are still some pretty obvious bugs. I find most of the AI generated Facebook ads to be very obvious and prefer to use more advanced tools outside of Meta to create my ad graphics (with or without the help of AI) where I can have full control over colors, text, etc. That said, I can envision a day not too far in the future when this tool has advanced enough to offer more personalized, better quality graphics.
So, Should You Use Meta Advantage Plus?
The answer is maybe. Meta Advantage+ promises a lot, but delivers on one thing without fail–quick, easy ad automation. If time is of the essence, these tools can save you a lot. Plus, you can always change your mind and edit ads or switch back to manual setup later. So, if your goal is to get ads up and running fast, Advantage+ certainly takes a lot off your hands.
However, as I’ve said, it’s quite the black box, removing much control, producing little insightful data, and sometimes resulting in questionably inflated vanity metrics. If you’re interested in using these tools, my best recommendation is to treat them as experiments and keep an eye on your results. Don’t lose sight of your user journey or sacrifice what makes your business unique to the “algorithm.”
And if you want the best of both worlds? Work with an experienced Meta advertising agency like flyte new media. We take the work of research, setup, reporting, and optimization off of your plate while still providing a completely personalized approach to your ad strategy.
Izzy joins flyte after moving to Portland in 2020, a city that is affably similar to her beloved Burlington, Vermont, with the added benefit of ocean air and fresh seafood. With a degree in English and a background in the nonprofit sector, she carries a curiosity for all things communications. From social media and email newsletters to website management and SEO, Izzy is involved. Reach out to Izzy today!