Meta rebrands automated ad products, shopping campaigns coming soon

All of Meta’s automated ad products will exist together under the name of Meta Advantage, the company announced. Five of its existing ad products are getting a new name and will be joined by a sixth new-ish product – Shopping Campaigns – set to roll out to all advertisers sometime later this year. 

According to Meta, the suite will actually consist of two types of Advantage products:

• Advantage: This lets you automate a specific part of a manual campaign.
• Advantage+: This lets you automate a campaign from beginning to end or part of a manual campaign (e.g., placements or creative).

Same tools, new names. Here’s a quick recap of what Meta announced is changing: 

• Lookalike Expansion becomes Advantage Lookalike. This tool helps advertisers reach a broader audience than what is defined in their Lookalike audience. 
• Detailed Targeting Expansion becomes Advantage Detailed Targeting. This tool finds additional audiences based on the advertiser’s targeting preferences (e.g., interests).
• Automated App Ads become Advantage+ App Campaigns. This tool uses real-time data to adjust ads across audience, placement and creative.
• Automatic Placements become Advantage+ Placements. This tool decides where your ad will show on Meta (e.g., Facebook Feed, Instagram Stories, Reels), with the goal of delivering better results.
• Dynamic Experiences becomes Advantage+ Creative. This tool creates multiple variations of an ad using a single image or video.

Coming soon: Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. Currently known as Automated Shopping Ads, this is in beta testing. Meta said the goal of these ads is to help advertisers drive conversions by automating the optimization of ad creative, targeting, placements and budget. 

Why we care. The push toward automating everything continues. Most of this is a simple rebrand and making clear which of its products are automated – somewhat reminiscent of Google’s attempts at simplifying its ad offerings when it rebranded as Google Ads in 2018. In particular, the Shopping campaign rollout later this year will be one to watch for marketers. Meta made sure to highlight that all of these products can improve conversions, increase return on ad spend (ROAS) and reduce costs. However, as always, test for yourself. 

About The Author

Danny Goodwin is Senior Editor of Search Engine Land. In addition to writing daily about SEO, PPC, and more for Search Engine Land, Goodwin also manages Search Engine Land’s roster of subject-matter experts. He also helps program our conference series, SMX – Search Marketing Expo.

Prior to joining Search Engine Land, Goodwin was Executive Editor at Search Engine Journal, where he led editorial initiatives for the brand. He also was an editor at Search Engine Watch. He has spoken at many major search conferences and virtual events, and has been sourced for his expertise by a wide range of publications and podcasts.