One of the main issues in Social Media marketing is ensuring that Meta effectively identifies the right audience for your ads. While Meta recommends allowing the platform to optimise towards this audience, this approach isn’t successful for every brand. To enhance targeting and improve performance Meta have introduced advanced AI capabilities, such as Advantage+ (A+) Shopping campaigns and enhanced creative options.
Advantage+ Suggestion Audiences have evolved from the A+ shopping campaign to allow you to use AI within Meta to find the best audience in standard campaigns. Meta’s AI will learn from the accounts performance, pixel data, conversion history and ad engagement to find the most relevant people for the content. Meta’s targeting expansion will adhere to audience controls, while audience suggestions influence the target audience, but Meta can expand beyond this.
Meta will prioritise reaching the suggested audience pool before going broader to gain optimal results, while remaining within the audience control boundaries. The suggested audience pool can also be leveraged to enhance personalisation of the ads as the creative can be tailored for the suggested target audience.
We conducted an official A/B test to test the A+ suggestion audience against a broad audience to assess how this can improve performance in a conversions campaign optimised towards purchases. The test ran for the duration of a week and each ad set contained a single image and a catalogue carousel ad with creative specific to a sitewide sale. We saw the A+ suggestion audience deliver 11% more purchases, 9% more revenue, a 7% higher ROAS from a 1-day-click view and an 11% lower CPA in 1-day-click view.
We have also tested this audience within a traffic campaign optimised towards landing page views. This wasn’t an official A/B test as we allowed Meta to optimise spend to the strongest performing audiences using campaign budget optimisation, but all other variables such ad creative and copy was the same so that the difference in audience would be the only aspect affecting performance. We saw the A+ suggestion audiences receive most of the spend, deliver a 20% lower cost per result and 90% more add to cart conversions.
We would recommend conducting your own A/B tests with this audience type to assess performance in your industry as Meta is championing it’s A+ solutions meaning the algorithm may prioritise campaign set ups including AI. By embracing Advantage+ Suggestion audiences and testing new strategies, you can ensure your Meta ads are evolving with the platform through data driven decision making.