Automation suggests improved speed and convenience in performing tasks that take a lot of time and effort manually. Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the technological ability to process information and act on it intelligently, as a human does. Together, AI and automation streamline paid advertising on social media, making it easier for business owners and advertisers to manage campaigns and get excellent results.
Meta (formerly Facebook) is now making AI and automation for social media advertising more accessible to everyone through Meta Advantage. It is a consolidated suite of Meta’s automated ad products, which include Facebook ads automation tools like Detailed Targeting Expansion.
With these AI-powered social media advertising tools, advertisers and businesses can automate parts or the entirety of their campaigns. Meta’s bigger goal with Advantage is to improve outcomes for social media campaigns by leveraging machine learning tools to improve audience targeting, keyword selection, copy creation and more.
If you’re interested in learning what is Meta Advantage, this blog is for you. We’ll talk about the Meta Advantage tools, the new features of the most recent Meta Advantage update and the benefits of using Meta Advantage for automated Facebook ads and paid advertising on Instagram.
Let’s start.
What Is Meta Advantage?
Facebook automated ads long before it rebranded into Meta. Businesses of all sizes and industries were already using automated Facebook ads to cut down the manual work of creating copy, scheduling, launching and tracking paid ads. They also used Detailed Targeting Expansion to optimize their ads and reach more people beyond the demographics they indicated.
Five of these old tools are still available, but they’ve been re-classified and rebranded as Meta Advantage in March 2022. They were given new names that aptly describe each of their uses. Moreover, Meta made Facebook ads automation more customizable: advertisers can now automate single campaigns, whereas it only used to be possible for full ad campaigns. This is a huge boon to small business advertising as it finally allows small-budget campaigns to benefit from the platform’s AI and automation capabilities.
Meta Advantage’s primary goals are:
• Optimize campaigns to achieve the desired outcomes.
• Sustain those improved results over a longer period of time.
• Achieve all of these at the lowest possible cost and effort from advertisers.
What’s great about Meta Advantage is that small advertisers and business owners can also enjoy these benefits because the platform’s AI tech and machine learning tools are available to everyone. So whether you were already enjoying good results from Facebook ads automation, getting middling results, or haven’t tried it all, things can only get better when you maximize this new iteration of Meta’s social media advertising tools.
The Meta Advantage Update: What You Need To Know
People who are used to Facebook’s advertising automation tool can rest easy because apart from the rebranding and re-classification, the changes to the existing tools are so far minor.
Opening the suite gives you two types of products: Advantage and Advantage+.
1. Advantage
The Meta Advantage tools allow advertisers to enhance specific parts of a manual campaign setup. It focuses on expanding audience reach for optimal conversions. Two products fall under this category:
• Advantage Lookalike
Formerly Lookalike Expansion. With this tool, the Meta system can extend an ad’s audience reach beyond the parameters of the advertiser’s Lookalike Audience. If it determines that overall performance can improve by showing the ad beyond the Lookalike parameters, it will do so.
Early tests of the tool also show that it can help reduce cost per action (CPA).
• Advantage Detailed Targeting
Formerly Detailed Targeting Expansion. This tool works similarly to Advantage Lookalike in that it expands the audience reach by going beyond an advertiser’s targeting preferences. It uses the existing targeting parameters (i.e., interests, hometown, music preferences, age) as a basis for finding additional audiences who may be interested in and would respond to Facebook automated ads.
According to Meta’s early tests, activating the Advantage Detailed Targeting can reduce the median cost per incremental conversion by 37%.
2. Advantage+
These tools enable advertisers to automate full campaigns from start to finish. They can also be used to automate parts of a manual campaign. Four tools are under this category:
• Advantage+ App Campaigns
Formerly Automated App Ads. This tool takes Facebook automated ads to the next level by using real-time data to adjust ad settings for target audiences, placements and creative elements (i.e., attached media like images and videos). Meta reports that this improved Facebook ads automation feature can produce a 6% decrease in cost per install and bring the CPA down by 9% compared to a manual app install campaign.
• Advantage+ Placements
Formerly Automatic Placements. As the name suggests, this tool analyzes the best possible placement or location for your ad and automatically deploys your ads there. It can place ads across all of Meta’s platforms:
– Facebook and Instagram feeds
– Facebook right column
– Facebook Marketplace
– Facebook Business Explore and Instagram Explore
– Messenger inbox
– Facebook and Instagram reels
– Facebook, Instagram and Messenger stories
– In-stream videos
– Search results
– In Instant Articles
– On the Oculus mobile app
The automatic placement aims to deliver better ad results by posting your ads on six or more placements, for example, to boost impressions and generate more clicks. At the same time, Advantage+ Placements keeps costs in check, ensuring that your ads perform much better than usual without going beyond the budget.
• Advantage+ Creative
Formerly Dynamic Experiences. Among all the Advantage+ social media advertising tools, this one is the most helpful in creating ads with the least time and effort. It is a tool for ads that uses a single video or image. After uploading the photo or video, advertisers can input multiple texts or ad copy variations. Advantage+ Creative will then generate multiple variations of the ad using the image, video and text variations.
The tool takes into consideration your preferred setup and placement selections, too, so it only produces variations that fit those parameters.
In sum, Advantage+ Creative is a single-entry point for making multiple ads, and it leverages AI and machine learning to find creative and technical combinations that will improve ad performance for automated Facebook ads. Pre-launch tests show that Advantage+ Creative can reduce CPA by 3%.
• Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns
Formerly Automated Shopping Ads. This is the new tool launched several months after Meta Advantage was announced. It is still in the beta testing period and is pretty ambitious. It automates the optimization of various tools at once, including creative, placements, audience targeting and budget management.
By optimizing across all areas, Advantage+ Shopping can massively improve social media campaigns on Meta platforms with minimal effort and hands-on supervision from advertisers. This benefits all users, but more so small business owners with limited time, manpower and resources for small business advertising.
Meta’s early tests of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns were very satisfying: they found that the tool successfully improved overall ad performance with a more than 80% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) compared to the Business As Usual campaigns. Moreover, A/B testing results showed that Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns lowered cost per purchase conversion by 12%.
This is just an overview of the Meta Advantage and how each advertising automation tool benefits ad campaigns. There’s more to how each tool works, and it takes a lot of study and mastery of the whole Meta advertising ecosystem to maximize the features of the Advantage and Advantage+ tools.
If you want to improve your ongoing paid advertising on social media, our Facebook marketing and ads specialists here at Thrive will be happy to help.
Harnessing the Power of AI Marketing
Recall that AI is one of the key selling points of the Meta Advantage update. At its core, the suite uses AI and machine learning technology to personalize ads according to your ad campaign goals and find combinations of deployment configurations to produce the best outcomes.
But what is AI in marketing? AI collects and analyzes data – in this case, relevant insights for an ad, like impressions, clicks, traffic, conversions, CPA, ROAS, etc. It also collects information about the target audience and the factors that may affect their response to ads.
AI is crucial to automation because it informs how the system would roll out an operation, just like how Advance+ Creative generates multiple ad variations and determines which one works best for a particular placement.
Meta effectively harnesses AI to make paid advertising on social media more advanced and beneficial for advertisers and the businesses they represent. And with automation, the Meta Advantage tools simplify the process of launching ad campaigns, from putting together an ad copy to deciding where to publish the ads.
Reap the Benefits of AI Marketing Through Meta Advantage
Meta commands 36.64% of the global social media market. It has 2.20 billion active monthly users worldwide, and an estimated 239 million Americans have a Facebook account. Hence, it is one of the best platforms to advertise on. However, we witnessed a sharp increase in the number of social media users and advertisers in the last couple of years. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Facebook and Instagram, for example, are now highly concentrated with ads and promotional content.
As more people advertise their businesses on social media, it becomes increasingly challenging for them to be seen and heard. It gets harder for small businesses with limited means and resources to make their ads surface over the multitude of competing ads.
Fortunately, the Meta Advantage suite gives the smaller players the benefit of technologies that used to be available only to businesses that could afford their premium price or invest in patented AI and automation technologies. But more importantly, the suite’s AI marketing and automation capabilities enhance campaign performances and outcomes. So whether you’re doing Facebook ads or paid advertising on Instagram, consider maximizing the Advantage and Advantage+ tools.
Improve Social Media Campaigns with Thrive
Internet advertising is now part and parcel of running a business in modern society. Any business owner who wants to reach as many people as possible – as quickly as possible – knows that the best way to do it is to promote online. And for businesses that cater to local customers, social media advertising is the way to go.
If you want to improve your advertising efforts and results or have yet to explore the benefits of promoting your business with Meta Advantage and Advantage+ tools, get in touch with Thrive Internet Marketing Agency. We have an experienced, highly-trained, results-driven social media advertising team that can assist you in every stage of marketing your business, from developing a campaign to implementing, monitoring and optimizing social media ads.
Maximize every advertising automation tool available to amp up your Facebook and Instagram advertising. Call Thrive today.
