Today in Digital Marketing - Explained: Meta's Big Changes to Advantage+ Campaigns

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

Our Meta ads correspondent Andrew Foxwell joins Tod to discuss the big changes to Meta's Advantage+ campaigns, including the trustworthiness of Meta's AI recommendations, and the impact on advertisers using API access..📰 Get our free daily newsletter🌍 Follow us on social media or contact us📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers.GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Premium tools: Update Credit Card • Cancel.MORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital🌟 Rate and Review Us🤝 Our Slack.UPGRADE YOUR SKILLSGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesInside Google Ads: Advanced with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and Courses.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Associate producer: Steph Gunn.Some links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

What is Tuesday in 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. Hello. 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? 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.

So that's a real difference than what we've seen or that we initially heard. 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. 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. 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, you know, other campaign types, but you'll be able to turn pieces off. So it is a little bit of a change in that regard. You're losing, you know, ABO, CBO, that kind of a thing. 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? Yeah, they're being rolled into this new advantage plus sales campaign. So we won't be able to choose that. 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 be able to launch this advantage plus sales campaign, but it will live akin to a CBO, hypothetically. 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. 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. So this is just a score of how much you have done what the AI bot wants you to do? Yes. On how what they're saying, how, quote, optimized each of them are towards that score. I think Google has something very similar, actually. I forget what it's called. Yeah. 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 essentially they're going to kind of redo the flow of the way that you launch a campaign as well. So, you know, I think the people 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 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. Right. And, you know, I mean, a lot of the, a lot of the sort of the dark arch of 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 Foxhole Founders Slack community, a lot of questions in the past had been like, tell me your structure. I still see these actually in the community. Tell me a structure. Is it 30 ads in an ad set? Is it two? Is it, you know, ad set? Is it two? Is it, you know, does this remove our ability to have that level of granularity? 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. I don't, you know so 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 um they're not everyone's going to have this until the end of q2 um there's it's a it's essentially they're calling it a beta test. It's starting today.

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 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 think 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've 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. 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. So like you'll, it's sort of one of those pieces of like in name only, like that's only, it's not necessarily going to be that big of a massive change. I think it'll feel like less control

and it will definitely be hard to turn everything off and become more difficult to turn everything off. But that's, so that's 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. 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? Yeah. So 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? 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, 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. 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. It's 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, would it be, you know, would there be any price difference there? It's really hard to say.

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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? This advice that it wants us to do in order to jack up this new opportunity score, is the advice good? 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. Okay. And they're doing that. They're launching it to existing customers. Okay customers okay so like that's a real issue and that's a mistrust or you know between us and meta 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. 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 um you know certain audiences probably will come with this like you're not going to be able to do as much as you did um 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. But again, there's no other place to go. 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 so um and i think they're out there uh 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 moderation, essentially. 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. 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. 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 MetaNAS through an API using a third-party tool. 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. 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, whatever, but let's, you know, they're really forcing us in that direction. 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. OK, and you can do that and bid up to four times as you normally would. Like, that's what I want to get in front of. And so that's really where so the AI folks, API folks have generally adopted this already. They're sort of in this model that we have where they're utilizing ASC. Because a lot of those people that are using an API are bigger, bigger spenders for the most part.

So they're all in and ASC 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 wanting that control. You need to give people some sense. We're going to put it where we want. Trust us. 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. And then I think you'll be able to do not just bid multipliers, but also you'll be able to do things like maybe you'll be able to do audience sort of splicing or something to 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. 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. 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. Thanks for listening. See you Friday for our wrap-up of the week's digital news.