Your Advantage Shopping Campaigns are COMPLETELY wrong!

Advantage Plus is getting a lot of talk nowadays - but is it really something that you should mess around with? In this video, I detail the pros and cons, and under which circumstances you should consider using it.

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Chapters
00:00 How to use Advantage Plus campaigns to scale your business
00:15 Maximizing Facebook Ads with Advantage Plus: How to Make It Work for You
05:35 The ultimate guide to Facebook Advantage Plus campaigns

Advantage Shopping is an increasingly popular tool promoted by Facebook and marketing experts. The tool can make Facebook ad account results appear more attractive, but it may not necessarily improve the bottom line for a business. Advantage Shopping campaigns differ from normal campaigns in that they prioritize showing ads to people based on where they are in their customer journey, not necessarily what they want to see. This can create ad fatigue and harm the end-user experience, leading to a deterioration of the relationship with Facebook as a business partner.

Additionally, using Advantage Plus or Shopping campaigns exclusively can also limit your ability to test and optimize your ad campaigns. Since these campaigns are more aggressive at showing ads to people who are already in the funnel, you may miss out on potential new audiences that could be interested in your product or service. By only targeting people who have already shown some level of interest, you may not be able to identify nearly as many new audiences that could be just as valuable to your business. This focus on extracting as much value as possible from existing funnel customers can impede growth by not filling the funnel and increasing competition within your own maketing ecosystem, for the same individuals.

One of the benefits of using Advantage Plus campaigns is that they can be used to strategically create ad fatigue against an advertiser's control ads. Sometimes these ads are so good that they prevent other ads from getting spend. While they are extremely desirable in isolation, they create a liability of over-reliance and the inability to test any new ads to aid in the scaling of efficiency. By putting these ads into an Advantage Plus campaign, the advertiser can force them onto people who are more likely to make a purchase, which can help to generate more revenue in the short term. However, this also means that the control ads are being shown to people who may not be as interested in the product or service, which can cause them to become fatigued and less effective over time. This process creates opportunity in our control environments for new ads to breakthrough, which is the best case leveraged risk to create growth.

Another drawback of using Advantage Plus campaigns is that they can result in less net new money for the advertiser. While the report may show an increase in sales on Facebook, this may not necessarily translate to a linear increase in revenue for the business. The reason for this is that the ads are being shown to people who are already in the market to buy, rather than reaching new potential customers who may not have considered the product or service before. Creating overlap between multiple channels and damaging the incrementality that is Facebooks single greatest value in the markting mix. This can limit the advertiser's ability to grow their business, and may not be a scalable solution in the long term.

Using Advantage Plus campaigns can also ultimately raise the advertiser's cost of advertising and decrease the quality of impressions that they are buying. This is because the ads are being shown to people who may not be as interested in the product or service, which can result in lower engagement and lower the Estimated Action Rate. Additionally, this means that many more of the ads may not be shown in premium placements, such as above the fold, which can further decrease their effectiveness.

Advantage Plus campaigns can be beneficial in certain situations, they should be used sparingly and in conjunction with other advertising strategies. By using them to create ad fatigue against control ads and generate some depreciation in proven assets, advertisers can create more opportunities for testing and optimization, which can ultimately lead to greater scalability and efficiency. However, using Advantage Plus campaigns as a sole strategy can be a liability, as it may limit the advertiser's ability to reach new potential customers, raise omni-channel costs and ultimately result in less net new money over time.