Meta’s looking to help advertisers reach more prospective shoppers this holiday season with the launch of Advantage+ shopping campaigns, which largely rely on automation to find the right audiences for your ads, as opposed to intricate, manual targeting.

Advantage+ shopping campaigns are designed to simplify the ad creation process, by taking care of the audience targeting and ad creative elements for you. You just select the campaign dates and budget, and upload your creative assets, and Meta’s machine learning-powered processes will do the rest.

As explained by Meta:

“Rather than manually testing many campaigns and parsing through separate targeting, creative, placements and budget setups, advertisers can now more quickly and efficiently create up to 150 creative combinations at once by setting up a single Advantage+ shopping campaign.”

Yes, the system will generate up to 150 creative options based on your existing creative assets, then choose which variations will perform best in different placements.

It puts a lot of trust in Meta’s systems for targeting, and reaching the right audiences with your ads. But according to Meta, it works.

“We’ve found that 52% of surveyed consumers want to find brands and products they haven’t heard about that also align with their shopping preferences [while] 60% of online shoppers want shopping experiences to be personalized based on their unique interests and preferences. Advertisers can use Advantage+ shopping campaigns to personalize ads at scale through machine learning and show people personalized products from your catalogs in a privacy-safe way.”

Which is really the key consideration here. By leaning on Meta’s automated targeting, that enables the system to utilize the data that it has available, as opposed to you choosing your own audience, and Meta not having adequate data to reach those segments, due to changes in data collection processes.

Which seems like it would render also your campaigns less effective, but Meta says that, on average, companies have seen a 12% reduction in cost per action, and a 15% increase in their return on ad spend via Advantage+ shopping campaigns. 

Essentially, Meta’s automated campaign tools are getting better at finding the right audiences, potentially better than you could predict by defining the targeting yourself. This won’t work for all brands, but it may be worth trying out to see what results you get.

Advantage+ Shopping campaigns are part of Meta’s broader Advantage suite, which it first announced back in March, as part of a re-focus on campaign automation tools in light of the impact of Apple’s iOS 14 privacy update.

You can learn more about Advantage+ shopping campaigns here, or check out the overview below.