As it works to mitigate the impacts of Apple’s ATT privacy prompts, which have reduced its capacity for personalization and data-based ad targeting, Meta’s looking to enhance its automated ad tools, and make them more available to more businesses, via a new expansion of its ‘Meta Advantage’ automation program.

Originally launched back in March, Meta Advantage groups together its various ad automation and AI-based tools, in order to make it easier for advertisers to understand which elements do what, while also highlighting the various automation tools it has on offer.

And now, Meta’s expanding its Advantage options – first off, Meta’s adding ‘Advantage+ Shopping’ campaigns, which will provide assistance in ad creation, and will be able to automate up to 150 creative combinations at once. 

As per Meta:

“Rolling out to ecommerce and retail advertisers on August 15, the Advantage+ shopping campaigns tool gives advertisers new ways to optimize campaigns. Advantage+ shopping campaigns uses AI to automate the campaign creation process and is powered by new machine learning models.”

Those models, according to Meta, have been generating good results:

“In a study of 15 A/B tests, we discovered that Advantage+ shopping campaigns drove 12% lower cost per purchase conversion compared to advertisers’ Business as Usual (BAU) ads.”

The update will provide more options for eCommerce brands, while Meta’s also looking to enable businesses with a FB or IG Shop to use it as a destination for Advantage+ shopping campaigns.

“We’ll then use the power of AI to direct people to the Shop or the seller’s website based on what has the highest likelihood to result in a transaction.”

So the process (which is still in testing) will be able to guide users to where they’re more likely to convert, based on their past behavior. Elements like this have been particularly impacted by Apple’s update, because Meta can’t track where people are tapping through to – though recent research has shown that Meta is still able to track link click activity when you use the in-app browser in its apps.

That could make this a more effective option, which could be worth considering in your campaigns.

Meta’s also looking to give SMBs more access to the same tools, with smaller brands now able to access Advantage+ creative and Advantage audience to create ads via their Facebook Page.

“Advantage+ creative automatically adjusts ad creative for each person who views your ad. This helps show them the version they’re most likely to respond to, delivering better ad performance, while Advantage audience creates a personalized audience based on your Page details and automatically adjusts over time to help you reach more relevant people with your ad.”

Both of these new options are now available when you create ads from your Facebook Page.

Meta’s also updated its creative optimization options via Ads Manager, in order to better enable advertisers to create multiple versions of an ad, that are optimized for what viewers are more likely to respond to, while it’s also testing a new process that will automatically add music from Meta’s sound catalog to image-based ads, ‘creating a more immersive experience for placements in Reels ads’.

These are some interesting updates, and it may well be worth exploring Meta’s evolving Advantage product suite, in order to gauge how they might help to enhance your campaigns in its apps.

Using automation has become an increasingly viable option for brands, as online ad systems continue to evolve and ‘learn’ from user behaviors. And again, with less data to go on, due to the new iOS prompts, automation could well be the best way to maximize campaign performance.

You can learn more about Meta Advantage here.