An Ultimate Guide to Meta Advantage+ Sales Campaigns 

Are you looking for a smart solution that helps you increase your sales online by advertising across Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta platforms? One that doesn’t require you to spend too much time setting up your campaigns and ads? Advantage+ Sales Campaigns could be just what you need.

A part of the Meta Advantage+ Suite, these campaigns are designed by Meta to simplify the entire ad-creation process while also helping you get better results (compared to the traditional sales campaigns) from your advertising efforts!

In this blog, we will discuss Meta Advantage+ Sales campaigns in detail. We will understand how these campaigns work, how to set them up, their benefits, and the recent changes that Meta has introduced to the setup flow for all Meta campaigns with sales objectives.

Are you ready? Let’s get started.

What are Meta Advantage+ Sales Campaigns? 

Meta Advantage+ Sales campaigns (earlier known as Meta Advantage+ Shopping campaigns) are AI-powered campaigns with sales objectives. With these campaigns, you can improve how you reach and convert potential customers. They aim to maximize sales or conversions on your online store, app, or Facebook or Instagram shops.

What makes Advantage+ sales campaigns different from traditional Meta campaigns with sales objectives is the automation they offer across different campaign settings.  

In a traditional Meta sales campaign, you turn off the AI optimizations and manually set up which audiences, placements, and other campaign settings. However, an Advantage+ sales campaign is an end-to-end solution that automatically applies AI across important campaign settings such as placement, audience, and budget.

Moreover, with Advantage+ sales campaigns, you can skip the hassle of creating multiple types of ads and manually testing different combinations to find what will work well. Rather, Meta’s AI will find which ads perform the best and display them to those users who are more likely to convert.

Note: While AI optimizations are enabled in an Advantage+ sales campaign, you can still add your inputs to guide Meta’s AI. For example, even with Advantage+ Placements enabled, you can select which platforms to display your ads on (eg, Facebook, Messenger, etc.), which types of devices and operating systems to target, and much more.

How Do Meta Advantage+ Sales Campaigns Work? 

We discussed in the previous section that AI plays a major role in enhancing the functionality of Advantage+ Sales campaigns. In fact, when you start creating a sales campaign, all Advantage+ solutions, such as Advantage+ Placements, Creative, Campaign Budget, etc., are already enabled by default.

That means as soon as you publish a campaign, Meta’s AI and Advantage+ solutions start working behind the scenes and optimizing your campaigns to improve your ad’s performance. 

Now, let’s take a closer look at how AI powers each part of the campaign and improves performance:

1. Budget Management Is Optimized Automatically: By using Advantage+ Campaign Budget, you just need to set one central budget for your sales campaign. Beyond that, Meta’s system will complete the tedious task of distributing the set budget in real time to those ad sets that have the maximum potential. 

This ensures that stronger-performing ad sets get a healthy share of your ad spend, helping you get the best possible results. 

2. Audience Targeting Becomes Dynamic and Adaptive: For Advantage+ Sales campaigns, you no longer have to choose between manual or automated targeting. With the Advantage+ Audience feature, Meta’s AI and machine learning will find the most relevant audiences for your ads. 

Moreover, you can also give suggestions to Meta’s AI with custom audiences, lookalike audiences, age, gender, etc. These suggestions will act as guiding signals for the AI to deliver your ad better. 

3. Ads and their Creative Assets are also Optimized With AI: Meta Advantage+ Creative ensures that your ads and their creative assets are optimized to those versions that your audience is most likely to engage with. 

Thus, even the creative assets you upload to Ads Manager are adjusted to ensure your ad’s performance improves. 

Note: While Meta’s AI enhances your creative assets, it also ensures that your brand’s core message remains as is.

4. Product Recommendations are Personalized for Each Campaign: If you are creating Meta Advantage+ Catalogue ads within your sales campaign, then ad delivery will be much more personalized. This means that using machine learning, Meta will dynamically display the most relevant product to users based on the event data from your Meta pixel or app SDK, etc. 

5. Ad Delivery and Performance are Improved in Real Time: When Meta delivers the ad you create in a sales campaign, it is also learning and improving its understanding of how to optimize your ads’ performance further. Thus, the more your ads are shown, the better their delivery becomes. 

Its delivery system’s end goal is to optimize your ad’s performance to minimize the cost per optimization event. 

How to Set Up Meta Advantage+ Campaigns 

We will now be discussing the step-by-step process to create Meta Advantage+ sales campaigns. But before that, we will also be covering the prerequisites. 

Prerequisites for Advantage+ Sales Campaigns 

1. Meta Business Suite Account
2. Facebook Business Page 
3. Set up your Ads Manager Account 
4. Set up your Commerce Manager Account 
5. Add your catalog (helpful if you want to run Advantage+ catalog ads) 

Pro tip: If you are a Shopify merchant, you can add your product catalog to Meta via the partner integration.  In case you choose the partner integration method to upload your product catalog to Meta Commerce Manager, then you can consider using a feed management software like AdNabu. A ‘Built-for-Shopify’ certified app, AdNabu provides you with accurate data feed URLs of your Shopify products that you can use as a data source on Meta Commerce Manager.

6. Set up Meta Pixel (optional, but highly recommended) 

Step-by-Step Process 

1. Go to your Ads Manager account, and click on Campaigns. 

2. Click on + Create Campaign. 

3. Select the Buying type from Auction and Reservation. 

4. Select Sales as your campaign objective, as we want to create a Meta Advantage+ Sales campaign. 

Note: Meta has updated the campaign creation flow. Earlier, after selecting the campaign objective in the previous step, advertisers could choose between manual and Advantage+ campaign setups.  However, now, all sales campaigns are Advantage+ by default, and thus, you cannot select the manual setup method.

5. Add your campaign’s name. 
6. Turn on Advantage+ Catalogue Ads (if you want to run Instagram or Facebook ads for your ecommerce store).
7. Select your budget strategy from the two options: Advantage+ Campaign Budget (recommended) or ad set budget.  

8. Turn on A/B testing. Click Next to go to the ad set creation level. 
9. At the ad set level, add a name for your ad set. 
10. Select or edit conversion locations. 
11. Then, select a performance goal and a cost-per-result goal. 

12. Next up, you will see the budget & schedule section. As earlier, we chose Advantage+ Campaign budget, we can now only configure ad set spending limits (if there are any). 

You can also set the schedule of your ads by selecting a start and end date. 

13. Next, configure audiences for your sales campaign. While Meta will use Advantage+ Audiences, you can set your own controls or even suggest custom audiences. 

14. Next, configure placements. Remember, Advantage+ Placements is on by default here, too. But you can offer more suggestions related to devices, platforms, etc.

Then, click Next to go to the ad level. 

15. Add a name for your ad, and if you are running this ad with other creators, brands, etc., then enable the Partnership ad option. 
16. Select a Facebook or Instagram page in the Identity section that will help represent your business. 
17. Then, select your ad’s format from single image, carousel, or collection in the ad setup. 

Bonus: Read our blog on Facebook carousel ads.

18. In destination, you can set up an Instant Experience or select from Advantage or Manual Destination depending on your ad format. You will also have to add your website URL. 
19. In Ad Creative, you must upload images, videos, or even cards per your campaign format. Since we selected Meta Advantage+ Catalog ads earlier, we will just need to select the catalog and product set we want to advertise.

Then, we will have to configure the media setup. Within that, you can select if you want Meta to use media from your product set automatically or if you want to upload images or videos manually. 

After that, you will have to add the primary text, descriptions, CTAs, etc., for your ads. 

Note: With Advantage+ creative, Meta will automatically optimize your ads for users.

20. Finally, configure tracking for your ads. 
21. Preview your ad, and then you can publish it! 

Best Practices for Meta Advantage+ Sales Campaigns   

Meta recommends some best practices for these Advantage+ sales campaigns. These include: 

1. Connect First-Party Marketing Data: Ensure you connect your Meta pixel or conversions API with Meta. These tools collect first-party marketing data. Meta’s ad delivery systems then use this data to optimize your ad’s performance or even personalize it. 
2. Use a Wide Range of Creatives: Meta recommends adding various creatives for your ads. It will allow its system to create different types of ad combinations, test and match those with different users. This can help boost your ad’s performance. 
3. Leverage Meta’s New Value Tools to Guide Its AI: While the suite of Meta Advantage products helps to automate most campaign settings, you can still use signals or value tools to guide Meta’s AI. These tools can include Lookalike audiences, or even custom audience inclusions.  
4. Create Audience Segments for Better Reporting: You can create audience segments like new visitors, past customers, etc. That will enable breakdown reporting of your sales campaign and provide you with granular insights. 

Meta’s Renaming and New Advantage+ Campaign Setup Flow

It’s important to note that Meta recently renamed Advantage+ Shopping campaigns to Advantage+ Sales campaigns. 

However, even though the name of the campaign has changed, even if you choose Advantage+ Sales campaigns, you will still get the same performance benefits that Advantage+ Shopping campaigns used to for your sales objective use cases. 

Also, Meta recently introduced a new Advantage+ Campaign setup flow as part of its latest updates. To help businesses leverage AI and achieve better results for their ads, Meta has now streamlined the entire setup process for sales, app promotion, and lead campaigns. 

In this new setup, advertisers will no longer be able to manually configure some campaign settings, such as placements, audience targeting, creatives, etc. Rather, these will be replaced by Advantage+ single-step solutions such as Advantage+ audience, campaign budget, creative, placements, and more. And as part of this change, all sales, app promotion, and lead campaigns will be Advantage+ campaigns by default. 

Wherever Meta’s AI optimizations are applied, you will be able to notice the ‘Advantage+ on’ label. 

Note: While all campaigns will use Advantage+ solutions and features, Meta will continue providing manual features and controls if you need them. The new campaign setup flow is still being rolled out. So, there is a chance that you may not see it, and you may have the option to set up your Meta Sales campaigns manually.

Benefits of Using Advantage+ Sales Campaigns 

Let’s discuss the benefits of Advantage+ Sales Campaigns: 

1. Faster Setup and Less Manual Work: Thanks to the advanced AI features and automation that Advantage+ sales campaigns leverage, the setup process of these campaigns is quicker and better. This reduces the manual effort and time you would otherwise spend creating your sales campaigns and adjusting them over time. 

2. Better Ad Performance and Return on Ad Spend: As Advantage+ Sales campaigns use AI, which optimizes campaign performance in real-time (of course, along with finding the best placements, audiences, and other opportunities for your campaign), your ad performance improves. 

For example, as per a study from Meta, Advantage+ Sales campaigns, using the Advantage+ Audience feature can get 7.2% lower cost per result. 

3. Support for Multiple Ad Sets: After renaming and upgrading Advantage+ Shopping campaigns to Advantage+ Sales campaigns, Meta now allows the creation of multiple ad sets within Sales campaigns. Using that, you can target different types of audiences. 

4. Advertisers Still Retain Access to Manual Controls: While Meta encourages automation, especially with this new campaign setup flow, you still get access to those manual controls that were available earlier. 

This flexibility, where you can use Meta’s AI features and solutions along with your own inputs, helps to ensure that you can meet your specific business requirements without losing the benefits of automation.

Conclusion

To conclude, if you want to leverage Meta’s AI and machine learning systems for better ad results and accomplish your sales objectives, then Meta Advantage+ sales campaigns are worth considering.  

We hope this blog helped you. 

FAQs

1. How can I effectively target the right audience using Meta Advantage+ Sales Campaigns?
You can use Advantage+ Audience. It uses AI to automatically find users likely to convert. But apart from that feature, you can also guide the Meta ad delivery system by suggesting custom audiences, lookalikes, or adding basic controls like age and location. Just don’t narrow it too much if you want to keep AI fully active.

2. How do I set up a budget for Meta Advantage+ Sales Campaigns?
Advantage+ Campaign Budget is enabled by default. This allows Meta to automatically manage your spend across ad sets. You can set a daily or lifetime budget, and the system shifts spend to the best-performing ad sets for better results without manual distribution.

3. How do I measure the success of my Meta Advantage+ Sales Campaigns?
Track key performance metrics like cost per result, return on ad spend (ROAS), and total conversions. Ads Manager also provides detailed breakdowns by audience type, helping you evaluate performance across new, engaged, or existing customer segments.

4. How do I implement A/B testing in Meta Advantage+ Sales Campaigns?
You can create A/B tests directly in Ads Manager using the toolbar, the Experiments tool, or by duplicating campaigns. Meta allows you to test variables like audience, creative, or placement to compare results and find the best-performing strategy.

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