Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns: What We Know Now
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns were officially released to most Meta ad accounts August 15, 2022.
What is Advantage+ Shopping?
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are designed to help e-commerce and retail businesses get smarter, faster on which campaigns are converting. It reduces the manual steps of ad creation, and automates up to 150 creative combinations at once. Up to eight Advantage+ campaigns per account at once. This could help you quickly learn which of your ads are performing best, while making the most of your advertising budget. In a study of 15 A/B tests, we discovered that Advantage+ shopping campaigns drove 12% lower cost per purchase conversion compared to advertisers’ Business as Usual (BAU) ads. With these savings, businesses can reinvest in their marketing strategies and help drive customer acquisition and sales more efficiently.
What we know about Advantage+ so far:
In an alpha test pre-release of ASC, results showed a steady lift in ROAS and increased conversions.
ASC focuses adding multiple creative types to one ad set (i.e. DPA, Link Post, Carousel, Slideshow, reel, etc) so that they can serve the right creative type that will most likely engage the user to convert/click through to your site
Their stats so far are a 12% reduction in CPA and an 55% increase in CTR (via Meta test results)
Upload your customer list(s) and then you input the percentage of existing customers/engagers you want it to target
After delivery, you can look in the reporting tab to understand performance via retargeting and prospecting customers. Also be sure to keep a closer eye on first time impression ratios for audiences to understand audience overlap
We do believe FB knows and understands who has seen what content, so by providing it multiple content formats, it is almost in a sense able to create a funnel within the campaign itself
If you are using multiple types of creative in the ad set, Facebook will serve different pieces of creative to mid & top funnel audiences based on what they have previously engaged with
Look month over month at the test we ran, in the month that the ASC was run, there was a 25% reduction in CPA versus the previous non-ASC month’s performance
Considering retargeting and prospecting are combined in Advantage+ Shopping campaigns, ad buyers will no longer be able to look at the funnel placements as siloed as we once did
For creative analysis and reporting, review the creative performance at the ad level the same as in business as usual campaigns
Current best practices for Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns:
Suggested a minimum of 10 creatives per ASC
It is important to get out of the learning phase
Creatives in the campaign should all be very different types or creatives
Saves ad buyers 1-4 hours of building time per week
It's meant to run alongside and as a compliment to other "regular" and BAU campaigns and currently should not be run as a standalone campaign(s)
This is a whole new machine learning algorithm compared to the current one being used in the ads platform.
You can adjust the attribution window from 7dc/1dv down to 1dc like with existing campaigns
And thanks to legend Phil Keil for some knowledge he dropped in the Founders Membership on what he’s seen lately.
In the majority of account it's improved CPA and ROAS in platform, where this has happened we've confirmed this is the case in TW / GA.
We have two accounts where A+ Shopping has worked amazingly for one location, but a duplicate campaign with a secondary location hasn't worked (US store scaling into UK for example), one recommendation from Tom on twitter here was to group these locations together in a single campaign.
We've seen an increase in AOV with A+ Shopping campaigns, both in GA and also in platform, either the campaigns are finding higher value customers OR attribution and the passing of data is better (this benefits in platform anyway)
We're only using 7DC only as I know some people have said A+ Shopping can over focus on view through
When launched with new creative (like a sale; Labor Day offer etc) we've seen great performance straight out the gate, for this reason I think A+ will be instrumental this BFCM. Last year it seemed new offer creative took time to spin up, and we saw evergreen ads with on site messaging doing most of the heavy lifting.
I know some have said A+ Shopping seams to die off after a week or two, where this has happened, we've seen other campaigns also drop in performance, which aligns that the drop isn't A+ specific but site / seasonality.