Smartly Adds an Extra “+” to Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

TLDR; The 411 on ASC and why you need to start testing.

If you’re a performance marketer looking to drive online sales, then Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) are a must-have in your Meta strategy moving forward. This game-changing solution provides a better algorithm while helping combat signal loss, simplify campaign set up, and drive better performance with less effort.

With new features such as combining new and existing audiences into one ad set, as well as launching up to 150 creative variations to deliver across all creative placements, ASC helps to expand your reach and deliver personalization in a privacy-safe way. For advertisers who want to maximize conversions and grow existing customers, we believe ASC is the next evolution of Product Catalog Sales and Conversion campaigns. Read on to learn more about ASC and how Smartly.io can help.

It feels like ages ago when Apple released iOS 14, dramatically changing Meta's ad targeting system. To help protect user data, the iOS 14 update included a new policy requiring apps to get permission from users to track their activity. As a result, Meta advertisers can no longer retarget users who viewed their website as easily (unless they have opted-in to tracking), which strongly impacts pixel-reliant ad formats such as dynamic product ads.

With audience sizes and campaign delivery decreasing due to these changes, many advertisers still need help targeting potential buyers. These challenges have forced advertisers to rethink their strategies. For marketers who previously focused on audience segments that perform marginally better, advertising broader has unlocked new audiences and brought a refreshing change. And because success is no longer retargeting a user with a single product image, creative personalization and variety have also taken the driver's seat in attracting, impressing, and converting users.

Meta recently rolled out Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC), built to help maximize conversions, acquire new customers, and retain and grow existing customers. We believe this new campaign type will help advertisers with these new shifting strategies and combat signal loss.

Why use Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns?

ASC includes multiple tools for advertisers to combat signal loss, optimize performance, and increase personalization.

Signal Loss + Performance

Before the iOS 14 update, many advertisers split their audiences into many different ad sets, such as those who visited a website, those who added to cart, or those who initiated a checkout, to more easily target each segment with relevant messaging. However, because audience sizes have decreased post-iOS14, advertisers find better success when reducing the number of ad sets to create a higher reach.

With ASC, you can include new and existing audiences in the same ad set, while still differentiating reporting between the two, and leverage custom audiences created from web/pixel, app activity, offline activity, catalog, or a customer list. As a result, you can reach more qualified customers and deliver your ads beyond your core audiences to ensure less audience saturation.

Bonus! Combining prospecting and retargeting campaigns helps to simplify campaign management and run fewer campaigns to help drive efficiencies in your ad operations.  

Personalization

ASC combines all your creative into one ad set and delivers across all creative placements, to reduce creative fatigue and sustains performance overtime.

Having less data to depend on means brands need to deliver better creative that is delivered in the right place at the right time. To do this successfully, however, you need to commit to testing and learning, which takes creative time and resources. With ASC, you can generate up to 150 creative variations, which allows you to have unique creatives for different user segments along the customer funnel. Meta’s machine learning will then deliver the best creatives to those user segments.  to choose which variations will perform best in different placements. In other words, you can deliver more personalized ads in a privacy-safe way.

Results from a recent Meta test have shown that ASC drove a 17% lower CPA and a 34% higher ROAS than business-as-usual campaigns.

Leverage Smartly.io to drive ASC efficiency and performance

Smartly.io streamlines, automates, and enhances your ASC campaigns to drive efficiency and take performance to the next level.

Streamlined Campaign Automation

For brands with multiple countries, locations, or lines of business, Smartly.io’s powerful automation makes it easy to launch campaigns in minutes and reduce manual work.

• Accelerate execution by grouping multiple ASC campaigns targeted at different locations or countries to build, edit, manage, and launch at once.
• Remove tedious work by creating all your ASC campaigns from a single view and cloning campaigns, ad groups, and ads across accounts.
• Use multiple data sources such as a product feed or campaign planning sheet to automate to every level of ASC set up (campaign, ad groups, and ads), as well as additional fields including bids, product sets, and schedules.

Enhanced Creative

Reach customers across their journey by easily testing and activating different ad formats, as well as full funnel creative.

• Apply a brand safe design to all of your catalog’s items and create dozens of branded videos to use in your campaigns. Changes to the design update automatically in your ads.
• Enhance the look and feel of your ads as well as the information displayed within your product imagery
• Add multiple sizes within one template design to scale creative across placements instantly. This dynamically creates a new size in the same design to leverage for ASC and PAC to ensure the creative shown is always optimized.

Drive Performance

To maximize performance, Meta recommends using 150 creative variations. Without automation, creating these variations takes a lot of manual work. Smartly.io helps to streamline these workflows so you can quickly launch 150 variations and drive performance.

• With Ads Manager, creative variations are uploaded manually. Smartly.io’s image templates + automation reduce manual work so you can scale to Meta’s recommended 150 creative variations automatically.
• Connect a product feed, catalog, or any other data source to a Smartly.io template and automatically create Dynamic Ads, Collection Ads with Dynamic Hero Image, Static Card in Dynamic Carousel, or leverage PAC with both image or video templates.
• Leverage Smartly.io’s Ad Rotation to rotate ads based on time, frequency, or performance to reduce ad fatigue while serving your audience fresh ads with less manual work.
• Allocate budget across multiple campaigns to maximize delivery and performance and optimize towards your internal source of truth data with Smartly.io’s Predictive Budget Allocation.

“Smartly.io’s new workflow enabled us to create Advantage+ campaigns across all European markets within minutes. We saw an immediate, positive impact on performance following the launch of these campaigns and the team have been able to save time due to ease of set up and increased automation.” - Agency Account Director for large sports apparel company

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Interested in learning more about how Smartly.io can help with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns? Request a demo!