New Meta Ad Automations: Are They Worth Including In Your Next Campaign?

If you’re running meta ads, you’re probably aware that they push hard for you to use the new AI automations that can help guide you when creating new campaigns. 

Although these are appealing to use and opt-in on, will they be as effective as your manually created campaigns?

In this blog post, I’ll cover Meta’s new optimizations, and how they can affect your ad performance and creative strategy.

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What’s New in Meta?

Meta is changing by the day, and just as you grasp something, it shifts to better automate the user experience. 

Meta recently added onto their automations, and sometimes it’s hard to know how they work within your campaign to benefit your ads. 

Let’s go over their recent automations and how you can expect them to change your Meta ad experience.

Advantage+ Placements

When launching a new campaign, it’s crucial to keep a close eye on the placements and where your ads are showing up. There are lots of placement options to pick from when you do it manually, but Meta has implemented AI so that you no longer have to select the placements yourself.

The real question is, should you let AI pick your placements, or is it best to take the time to do it yourself? Let’s find out.

Pros

• Less Work: Letting Meta pick your placements saves you time and manual work. You can launch a campaign faster, and not overthink where you should place specific ads.
• Reach a Wider Audience: Opting into Advantage+ could help you reach a wider audience that you might not have been able to reach manually. It can place your ads on specific platforms, and use AI to best optimize where your ad is shown.
• Could Save You $: Meta’s system will adjust itself so your budget is used where it’s most needed. The algorithm can also focus on cheaper placements that you may not have picked manually.

Cons

• Minimal Control: Once you give Meta the go-ahead to take control over your ad placements, you may start to notice you’re not showing up where you want to. The algorithm can try its best to show up where it thinks it should, but that might not align with the goals and outcomes that you want out of your ad.
• Reduces Your Learnability: Some users may see Meta ads as a short-term, quick fix to a marketing and advertising problem. In that case, you can probably choose to opt-in on Advantage+ placements. But if you’re someone who genuinely wants to learn the ins and outs of the software, I would highly suggest opting out of Advantage+. An over-reliance on AI can prevent you from understanding key metrics in Meta, and what levers to pull to get the right results. Remember, you can outsmart AI and get better results yourself, it just may take a little more elbow grease.
• How it Spends Your $: Notice how this is also included in the pros section? It’s important to note that this is a double-edged sword. Conveniently, Meta can take control of your budget, but this means it can spend it where you don’t want it to. It’s important to weigh both outcomes and how involved you want to be with your budgets. Meta has no issues spending that cash wherever it wants!

Advantage+ Creative

Ahhh yes, now Meta would like to optimize your creative and add some of its own special touches. What could go wrong here?!

via GIPHY

Pros

• Special Customizations: If Meta thinks your creative could be optimized to better reach your desired audience, it will do so. It can brighten your creative, enhance its look, and even add music.
• More Appealing to Your Audience: Meta can be quite the know-it-all when it comes to doing what’s best for your audience. It can make your creative look better based on who it’s shown to.

Cons

• Adds Questionable Music: Have you ever scrolled past an image or video on social media and accidentally deafen yourself with random music? We have found that when Advantage+ Creative takes the aux cord and selects a song to put on your ad. It’s typically not a relevant song choice and has nothing to do with the type of ad you have, either.
• Potential Inconsistencies: You could get different variations that could accidentally result in an inconsistent brand image. It can confuse your audience and is probably not the right choice if you’re running a highly customized, or brand-sensitive campaign.

If you’d like to try it out on your ad, here’s what it looks like within Meta:

Advantage Campaign Budget

If math was consistently your least favorite subject in school, or if you ever had to take an accounting course and hated it, this optimization is for you.

The Advantage Campaign Budget in Meta decides how you spend your money for you. Here’s an image to give you a better idea of how it works:

Source

You can set your budget at the campaign level, and Meta can allocate your budget for you wherever it sees fit.

Here’s what it looks like within the Meta ads account:

Pros

• Automatic Distribution: Meta assesses what ads are top performers, and can give them more budget automatically to give it more room to reach the right audience.
• Easy to Manage: Setting your budget at the campaign level can save you time and help you manage your budget more easily.

Cons

• Unequal Budget Allocation: As you can see from the image above, Meta did not evenly distribute the campaign budget amongst the ad sets. If you want each of your ads to have an equal amount of spending opportunity, you may want to manually set the budgets yourself.
• Potential Missed Opportunities: By letting Meta allocate your budgets for you, you could miss opportunities by not manually giving some of your ads more spend.

Advantage+ Audience

Knowing your audience and how to reach them is simple marketing 101. However, this is not always the easiest thing to achieve.

Meta’s Advantage+ Audience can help find the right audience for your campaigns, and can automatically show ads to people most likely to respond.

Pros

• Optimizes your Performance: By using Advantage+ Audience, Meta can target the right audience based on your ad. This takes the guesswork out of who to target, and what interests you should select.
• Keeps on Learnin: Meta can not only find your audience, but it can continue learning in case there are any shifts in who sees your ad. The algorithm is constantly changing, and by opting into Advantage+ Audience, you don’t have to worry about missing anything.

Cons

• Less Control: I know I’m sounding redundant at this point, but if you take anything away from this blog post, I want it to be this. Sure, AI can automate your process and streamline your tasks, but it could be at the expense of your campaigns. Manually setting up your campaigns ensure you know exactly what’s going on, so you never miss a beat.
• Potential Wasted Spend: If for some reason Meta targets the wrong audience, you could be wasting your money on reaching the wrong people. This can be hard to catch too, so it’s important to be diligent when opting into this AI feature.

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If you were picking petals off of a flower while reading this, like a “should I, should I not” situation, you may still be feeling torn. But that’s okay! I hope you feel more educated about Meta’s new automations, and how they can affect your campaigns.

Or, if you’d rather pass the Meta Ads torch onto someone else, *cough cough or our digital marketing strategists* we’d be happy to help. Connect with our team to learn more!

Thanks for reading and we hope this helped you get more out of your paid ads!