Following on from ‘Do more with less’ from our very own eCommerce Lead, adopting the Advantage+ Shopping Campaign (ASC) strategy on Meta did exactly that.
An ASC leverages machine learning with the purpose of maximising campaign efficiency, while focusing on performance-based results. By doing so, creative management is streamlined, campaign set-ups are timesaving with an always-on approach and distinguished audiences. Despite being an outwardly, simplified approach when it comes to your audience settings, this is where the algorithm performs best. Prospecting, engaged and existing users are in one place and it is this aspect that enables the algorithm to reach people likely to interact with your products.
Tasked with increasing engagement and enhancing profitability, we turned to ASC to optimise budget, whilst adopting a purchase driven automated campaign style beyond a standard sales campaign. For an eCommerce fashion brand, ASC aided in a 68% increase in purchases and a 33% improvement in ROAS. Utilising machine learning, we combined previously separated markets into one ASC, as the algorithm will find the best users across the UK and US much quicker with all audience types in the one place. This tactic resulted in a 30% decrease in cost-per-conversion, furthermore, showing ASC can lower costs.
Isn’t this just for eCommerce you ask? I’m glad you asked. Whilst shopping campaign is in the name, and purchases originally were the only conversion event, Meta introduced more conversion events in April. Alongside Q2 updates in 2024, special ad categories (SAC) were introduced. This means that the advanced campaign type is available to clients interested in results outside of purchases, i.e property, where we’re optimising towards ‘view content’ and SAC housing. This means campaigns can optimise as they would within a manual campaign but access the benefit of Adv+ features.
Due to the recent expansion of ASC features, this was something we wanted to explore for other verticals, given the results shown for ‘traditional’ eCommerce brands. We were able to run ads at national level targeting the UK, retargeting engaged and existing customers. As ASC allows for more ads in one campaign, we had various content running such as; events, interest rates, deposit incentives, own new, first-time buyers, downsizers and family homes. Prior to switching strategies, the same content was split out into individual campaigns, resulting in a dispersed budget. Moving to an audience including existing customers in a combined campaign, the audience size expanded exponentially, to 30M from 500k users per campaign. Topline results have seen a 52% increase in impressions and 57% increase in traffic. Consequently , metrics further down the funnel have shown an 85% increase in conversions and 21% decrease in CPV.
At Space & Time we believe ASC is the necessary step toward automation for optimisation. It is common for clients to misconstrue the streamlined approach for oversimplification, but ultimately algorithmic learnings are quicker than human learnings. Thus, making Meta work smarter and your budget harder.
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https://www.jonloomer.com/advantage-plus-shopping-campaigns