If you’ve been using Meta Ads at all this past year, you’ve probably noticed how more and more of the older options and features have disappeared.
We’re talking countless interests and other minutiae that we used to stress over when creating audiences to populate all our lovely Ad Sets.
Replacing these prior manual options, of course, has been a stronger emphasis on Meta’s AI powered capabilities as rolled out through their Advantage+ offerings.
Like most AI components of advertising platforms, the rollout of Advantage+ is pretty much happening whether we like it or not, and maybe that might actually work out in our favour.
A couple months back, Meta marketing guru Jon Loomer wrote a thoughtful piece asking whether Facebook targeting still matters.
His piece was inconclusive, but definitely suggested there was the possibility that Advantage+ could work well if you’re only optimizing for conversion quantity rather than other factors or areas of more minute segmentation.
Even though Meta Advertising is not as big a part of our portfolio as other areas of marketing, we decided to toss our hat into the ring as well and run some tests of our own.
We built a campaign for one of our accounts, this time giving Meta full control of the targeting save for language and location.
The results?
For the first couple of days, it spent and spent, hitting it’s target daily budget perfectly, but without producing any results.
Pretty disappointing start – so much in fact, I was tempted to pull the plug and roll my eyes at the suggestion that the AI could get good results with minimal effort from our part.
But then something surprisingly happened. The campaign started performing. And quite well.
The campaign currently has the best Cost per Acquisition (CPA) in the account, with CPA at half of what the next best performing campaign is delivering.
On the surface, it would seem that, given enough time, the Advantage+ audience can find its niche better than the ones we manually set.
A caveat, however.
While looking positive, there’s only a month of data so far.
Plenty of things can happen with another month’s worth of data. It also remains to be seen whether it will continue to behave in the same manner as we get into the holiday season and everyone’s online behaviour changes.
But we’ll keep you posted on the results as things get updated.
