Meta Renames its Ad Automation Tools to Clarify the Purpose of Each Element

As it works to provide more options to help advertisers navigate the evolving data privacy landscape, Meta has announced that it’s re-naming its ad automation tools in order to more clearly delineate the purpose of each, and drive better results.

From today, Meta’s ad automation products will be consolidated under a new portfolio called ‘Meta Advantage’.

Under the ‘Advantage’ banner, Meta’s options will be split into two product lines – as explained by Meta:

“First, there are features marked “Advantage” that allow you to enhance a specific aspect of your manual campaign setup, such as the selected Detailed Targeting options within your target audience. Second, there are products marked “Advantage+” that allow you to automate an entire campaign flow from end-to-end or an entire core step of your manual campaign setup, such as placements or creative.”

Functionally, the title change doesn’t add anything new, as yet, though Meta has flagged some coming updates to its automation options.

Under Meta Advantage, you’ll have:

• Advantage Lookalikes and Advantage Detailed Targeting – These are currently your Lookalike Expansion and Detailed Targeting Expansion tools, enabling you to expand your reach based on similar audience traits
• Advantage Lookalikes – Similar to Lookalike Expansion, this enables Meta’s system to reach a broader set of people than those defined in your initial Lookalike Audience.
• Advantage Detailed Targeting – This process uses your selected targeting preferences as a guideline to find additional audiences. “If Advantage Detailed Targeting finds better performance opportunities outside your defined audience, the product makes dynamic updates to attempt to optimize those performance opportunities by expanding your audience”.

These, essentially, are your basic audience targeting automation tools, which are already available in different form. They’ll now be grouped under the new ‘Advantage’ banner, representing entry-level automation for targeting.

Meta Advantage+, meanwhile, is for more advanced AI options:

• Advantage+ App Campaigns – Currently known as Automated App Ads, this option aims to simplify app install campaign creation and drive performance by using real-time learnings to adjust ads across audience, placement and creative.
• Advantage+ Placements – Currently known as Automatic Placements, this option aims to find the most effective placement for a given ad, providing further opportunities for advertisers to maximize performance. “Showing your ads across 6 or more Placements – like on Facebook Marketplace, Instagram Stories, Reels – gives our system more flexibility to control costs and provide better results”.
• Advantage+ Creative – Currently known as Dynamic Experiences, this option provides automated creative optimizations to help improve ad performance.
• Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns – This one is coming soon, and is designed to optimize the performance of online sales campaigns by using variable including creative, targeting, placements and budget. Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are currently still in Beta testing, and are expected to be rolled out to all customers before the end of the year.

So as you can see, there’s nothing new, as such, about the tools, but the idea is that by separating each element, that will make it clearer what each option provides, and which applies to your approach to help you maximize your campaigns.

And definitely, Meta’s automation tools have improved in recent years. Once seen as a major risk, as you could end up losing money on poorly targeted approaches, Meta’s systems are now recommended by many ad experts as a key way to maximize the performance of your campaigns.

You just have to go through the learning phase, which can be nerve-wracking for some. But if you give Meta’s systems the time to measure and understand audience response, they can help to improve your efforts.

And now, they’ll be under a new header, which is worth noting in your process.