Meta Advantage+ Audiences And Your Business
For years, Meta has been pushing “Advantage+” optimizations for advertising campaigns. Advantage+ is its shorthand for everything that can fall into the bucket of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning to improve your advertising results.
Meta describes Advantage+ in the following terms:
“Meta Advantage+ is a suite of products that helps you maximize performance by using AI to optimize campaigns in real-time and match ads to the people most likely to take action.”
In this post, we’re specifically looking at Advantage+ Audiences, which are just a small part of the overall Advantage+ suite of products. At Big Rush Marketing, we’ve been working with these audiences since their inception, honing in on the best ways to use this technology for our clients in different industries, with different KPIs, and different conversion tracking environments.
We’ve spent a lot of time exploring where Advantage+ Audiences are helpful and where you might give them some help. Utilized the fullest extent, an Advantage+ audience is Meta telling you “Don’t worry about putting any definitions around your audience. You tell us what you’re looking for and we’ll find the people who will do that action.” Put more casually, Advantage+ audiences are Meta saying: “Don’t worry about it, we’ll handle it.”
What will Meta handle, if you let it:
- Age
- Geography
- Gender
- Interests, Customer Lists, Remarketing Audience, Lookalike Audiences & all the other stuff you used to be told by the platform was important.
When things are going well, this feels great. But when you or your client start to question your ad results, this degree of trust in the platform can feel a bit frightening.
Here are some questions we ask before deciding which aspects of Advantage+ Audiences we should deploy for a campaign.
Can Meta See Your Conversions?
Just like any machine learning or artificial intelligence, Advantage+ Audiences can only optimize for what it can see. If Meta can’t see your desired conversion action (Either through a Meta Pixel, Meta Conversions API, or ideally both) then it can’t optimize for it. Advantage+ can be more fully utilized in areas where Meta has full visibility into the conversion funnel.
An example of a full visibility business would be a 100% e-commerce business built on Shopify with a fully integrated Meta Dataset set to Maximum tracking. This Dataset combines Meta’s third party pixel tracking with Shopify’s first-party data (via Conversions API) to provide the most complete picture about who’s making a purchase and the journey they go through to make that purchase after clicking on an ad.
On the flip side, a zero visibility business would be an all cash restaurant with no online ordering. There is no collection of any customer information that could be passed on to Meta to improve the quality of your ad audience. This type of business would be a terrible place to use Advantage+ audiences.
Most businesses fall somewhere in between these two extremes, and so that means other questions must be taken into consideration.
Who is the Addressable Audience of Your Business?
If Meta can’t see all conversions, it might have trouble figuring out who is a potential customer for your business, or equally importantly who IS NOT a potential customer. Advantage+ Audiences do allow pretty granular Controls over the geography where your ad is served, but it will only allow demographic guidance beyond that as a Suggestions – You can say “My customers are women between 25-44” but Meta will show your ad to people outside of that suggestion if it thinks it can improve results. When you’re looking at top-of-funnel campaigns like Awareness or Web Traffic, this can result in a significant amount of ad spend happening outside of your target demographic.
In general, unless your addressable audience is everyone everywhere of every age (think McDonalds, Walmart, etc.) awareness & web traffic campaigns are likely going to require some more hand holding than full Advantage+ audiences can offer.
What Additional Guidance Can You Give Meta?
Once you’ve determined that Meta can’t see all of your conversions and that your audience isn’t everyone, you’re likely going to be flipping that Advantage+ audience off and going back to “Original Audiences.” Depending on your ad interface, sometimes this option is now called “Further limit the reach of your ads.” From here, you’ll have to make more granular choices to guide the platform to the people you think are your potential customers.
Your first stop on this journey of additional guidance is likely going to be setting up custom audiences, and the base for many of your audiences are going to be retargeting/remarketing. Even if you’re not an e-commerce business, people who visit your website are more likely to be your customers than people who aren’t. If a Meta Pixel/Conversions API is set up on your website, consider using website visitors as part of a remarketing audience. You might also consider using that as a source of a lookalike audience to find more people similar to those who are visiting your website. The same idea could be done with an email list for people who have agreed to receive marketing emails from you.
If you’ve got a Facebook or Instagram page, you can use people interacting there as another source to tell Meta “these people have shown interest in my business” and with a lookalike audience say “find me more like this!”
Guiding principles for building & improving your ads through audiences:
- Your ads can only optimize for data they can see. Build your ads with the best data you have right now, and keep working with clients to improve that data quality.
- If Meta can see all your data, a less targeted audience can perform better than a more targeted one.
- Sometimes you DO know better than the platform regarding the goals of your ads. These are circumstances when you might have to flip off Advantage+ and provide that extra guidance.
If you have any questions about Advantage+ audiences, don’t hesitate to reach out by filling out the form below. We handle advertising for hundreds of businesses, helping them make the most out of their digital adverting spend on Meta and other ad platforms. We’d love to help you on this journey as well!
Put Our Digital Advertising Expertise to Work for Your Business!
Fill out this form for a free consultation on your advertising results, or just a quick email exchange if you’d prefer. We’d love to hear more about your business and figure out if we’d be a good fit to work together. We’re also happy to answer any questions you have about our business. Get the process started below or give us a call at (314) 400-7783. However you choose to get in touch, you’ll be put directly in touch with one of our digital advertising strategy experts who will be excited to talk in real concrete terms about how Big Rush Marketing might be a great partner to help your business achieve their goals.
Put Our Expertise to Work for Your Business!
Fill out this form for a free consultation on your advertising results, or just a quick email exchange if you’d prefer. Start the process below or give us a call at (314) 400-7783. However you choose to get in touch, you’ll be put directly in touch with one of our digital advertising strategy experts.
