As the war on consumer privacy rages on, Facebook has revamped its ad automation tools to help advertisers better navigate the complicated and fast-moving world of data privacy.

Earlier in March, Facebook suggested ways that brands can make the best of ad campaigns. Its best practices focused on areas such as Detailed Targeting Expansions or Automated App Ads, and now the platform has announced it will be revamping these and much more.

Meta advantage!

From now, ad automation products will be called Meta Advantage and will be split into two broad parts.

Goksu Nebol-Perlman, VP of Product Marketing, Ads & Business Products, 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.”

The changes have been made to help advertisers optimise campaigns and ensure a higher return on investment. The name change will supposedly better communicate the purpose of each function, improving uptake and usability.

Goksu Nebol-Perlman, VP of Product Marketing, Ads & Business Products, Meta

“Today, we are announcing that we will consolidate all of our automated ad products under a new portfolio, Meta Advantage, to help you more easily identify these products and benefit from them.”

It will also allow brands to prevent ads from being placed next to unsuitable content and have better control over where ads are shown on Facebook and Instagram.

As Facebook’s timeline is notorious for promoting misinformation and inflammatory posts, the updates should give brands and social media managers a little more comfort that ads hopefully aren’t going to be shown next to content that could damage the brand.

Big new changes

Now that we’ve heard the rationale behind the changes let’s explore them further. Under Meta Advantage, brands will have:

1. Advantage Lookalikes and Advantage Detailed Targeting. These features enable advertisers to expand reach based on similar audience traits. They are currently known as Lookalike Expansion and Detailed Targeting Expansion.
2. Advantage+ App Campaigns (previously Automated App Ads) simplifies app install campaign creation and helps increase performance for app advertisers. It also helps automate campaigns in real-time and can lead to 6% medium lower cost per install and 9% median lower cost per action.
3. Advantage+ Placements (previously Automatic Placements) puts your ad in the place it’ll be most effective, which helps advertisers boost performance. For best performance, show your ad across six or more placements.
4. Advantage+ Creative (previously Dynamic Experiences) puts a set of creative optimisations into one entry point for ease of use – which can result in a 3% lower CPA.
5. Advantage + Shopping Campaigns (previously Automated Shopping Ads) works to make sure brands sell as much product with as little effort as possible. Shopping Campaigns optimises your adverts across creative, targeting, placement and budget to find the best way to drive conversions. For example, Popken Fashion were able to increase return on ad spend of 80% vs its normal campaigns.

Big impacts

Meta Advantage should be beneficial for businesses. Facebook says that it can provide advertisers with the following benefits:

1. Marketers should see better campaign results and should be able to sustain them over time thanks to intelligent optimisation.
2. Brands will be able to target the right people at the right time, with the right ad, thanks to deeper personalisation that connects with your audience.
3. Facebook Ads will be more efficient, which means marketers can spend less time building them and more time on the big-picture stuff. Meta Advantage uses automation to simplify ad creation and optimisation.

Goksu Nebol-Perlman, VP of Product Marketing, Ads & Business Products, Meta

“77% of advertisers testing these automated products said they saved several hours a week using them.”

The push towards internet automation is in full swing, and Facebook’s updates will be helpful to most marketers, especially time-poor ones.

However, the proof of the pudding is always in the eating, so advertisers should slowly dip their toes into automation. Automated systems have improved vastly over the years, and experts generally like them now, but learning is still required. Test first, and then commit once the gains present themselves.