On this page
- 01 · Is Meta Advantage+ worth it? The short answer
- 02 · What Advantage+ actually is now
- 03 · When Advantage+ earns its place
- 04 · When to switch it off or skip it
- 05 · Advantage+ creative enhancements: what to keep and what to switch off
- 06 · How to turn Advantage+ off in a sales campaign, section by section
- 07 · How to prove it is working for your account
- 08 · Mistakes we see most often
- 09 · Questions we get about Meta Advantage+
- 10 · Sources
Is Meta Advantage+ worth it? The short answer
Yes, for most Australian ecommerce brands running prospecting sales campaigns, as long as your pixel and Conversions API are sending purchases reliably. Keep Advantage+ on for budget, audience and placements, put your hard rules (location, minimum age, exclusions) into account controls, and review the creative enhancements one by one, because that is the part that can change what your ad says and looks like.
Switch Advantage+ off, or skip it, in three situations: retargeting campaigns, tests that need guaranteed spend on a specific ad or audience, and accounts where most of the reported sales come from people who already buy from you. Then prove the result with an A/B test against your manual setup, judged on cost per new customer rather than blended ROAS.
What Advantage+ actually is now
Advantage+ is Meta's name for its AI settings, not one product. When you choose the sales, leads or app promotion objective in Ads Manager, you start in the Advantage+ campaign setup, and each section of the campaign shows Advantage+ on or Advantage+ off depending on what you choose. Meta says its most advanced optimisations switch on when a sales campaign uses Advantage+ audience, Advantage+ campaign budget, Advantage+ placements and Advantage+ destination together. Manual settings are all still available.
Here is exactly what flips each section, from Meta's own rules:
| Section | Shows Advantage+ on when you | Shows Advantage+ off when you |
|---|---|---|
| Budget | Use campaign budget as the budget strategy, with one or many ad sets, including optional ad set spending limits | Run several ad sets with their own ad set budgets |
| Audience | Use your audience settings as suggestions; raising the minimum age up to 25 or excluding a custom audience keeps it on | Use Further limit the reach of your ads and untick Use as a suggestion |
| Placements | Use Advantage+ placements | Exclude any placement in any ad set, or opt out of mobile or desktop |
Two things in that table matter more than they look. First, account controls (set under Advertising settings) do not change a campaign's Advantage+ state, so your fixed business rules never cost you the optimisation. Second, Advantage+ creative is separate: it lives at ad level and is managed through creative enhancements, whatever your campaign shows. If you want the fuller picture of how budget and ad set choices fit together, our Meta ads account structure guide maps the lanes we use.
When Advantage+ earns its place
We leave Advantage+ on for budget, audience and placements when these are true:
- The campaign is prospecting. Its job is finding new buyers, and the audience you would build by hand is broad anyway.
- Purchase tracking is trustworthy. Pixel and Conversions API both send the purchase event with value, and the numbers in Ads Manager sit close to Shopify. If they disagree badly, fix that first; our attribution gap diagnostic shows where the gap usually comes from.
- You have creative variety. Meta's own sales campaign guidance points to a mix of images, videos and 9:16 vertical video with audio. The system can only choose between the ads you give it, so three near-identical statics leave it little to work with. Check every vertical asset in our safe-zone checker before it goes live, because Advantage+ placements will put it in Reels and Stories.
- Your rules are in account controls. Shipping only within Australia, an 18+ product, a list of current customers you want excluded: set these once and every campaign inherits them without switching Advantage+ off.
In that setup the main decision left to you is budget and bid strategy. If you want Meta to hold an average cost per purchase, the bid cap vs cost cap guide covers where those settings sit when the budget lives at campaign level.
When to switch it off or skip it
| Situation | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Retargeting site visitors, cart abandoners or engagers | Manual audience, Advantage+ audience off | Meta itself does not recommend Advantage+ audience for retargeting campaigns. The point is to stay inside the audience you chose. |
| A creative or offer test that needs a set amount of spend | Give each test its own ad set budget, which turns budget to Advantage+ off | Campaign budget sends spend to the early winner, so a new ad can be starved before it has a fair read. If one ad needs a guaranteed minimum, it needs its own ad set and budget. |
| A placement that keeps breaking your creative | Exclude it, or fix the asset | Excluding a placement turns placements to Advantage+ off. Fixing the crop is usually cheaper than losing the placement. |
| Most reported sales come from existing customers | Keep Advantage+ on, exclude your customer list, read new and existing customer results separately | Excluding a custom audience keeps Advantage+ on, and protects your budget from paying for sales you would have made anyway. |
| Special ad categories or pharmaceutical campaigns | Expect a different setup | Meta limits some Advantage+ features for these campaigns. |
Turning one section off does not undo the others. A campaign with ad set budgets can still use Advantage+ audience and Advantage+ placements, and Meta says manual campaigns still benefit when you keep the other settings as broad as possible.
Advantage+ creative enhancements: what to keep and what to switch off
Creative enhancements are where Advantage+ can change your actual ad. Meta adjusts your images, video and text into versions it expects people to respond to, and some enhancements are on by default. Meta currently lists more than thirty, and the ones using generative AI are labelled as such. They fall into three groups for us:
| Group | Examples from Meta's list | Our default |
|---|---|---|
| Formatting and display | Adjust brightness and contrast, Flex media, Add product tags, Add product browsing, Profile end card, Relevant comments, Store locations | Keep on, then check the preview |
| Generated words | Text generation, Text improvements, Enhance CTA, Show summaries, Translations, Dynamic description | Off when your copy carries prices, offer terms, claims or a tone you have approved |
| Generated or changed visuals and sound | Image generation, Background generation, Image touch-ups, Visual touch-ups, Video touch-ups, Add animation, Add video effects, Add music, Add overlays | Off for founder-led, UGC and brand-controlled creative; test on catalogue and simple product statics |
The reason is simple. An Australian store running a sale cannot have Meta rephrase "25% off sitewide this weekend" into something the terms do not say, and creator content often comes with usage terms that do not cover edits. For everything else, the enhancements are worth testing because they are cheap to try.
To turn enhancements off while creating an ad: in the Ad setup choose Single image or video or Carousel, then in the Ad creative section click Set up creative and go to Enhancements. Some enhancements only appear in Advanced preview, so click Expand on the ad preview, open the Advantage+ creative tab and check each card there too. For a live ad: go to Ads, tick the ad, click Edit, then Edit in the Advantage+ creative section, and check Advanced preview the same way before you publish. Meta also has a bulk edit for enhancements across many ads. Run the final version through our Meta ads preview tool so you can see how it sits in Feed, Stories and Reels.
How to turn Advantage+ off in a sales campaign, section by section
- Budget: choose ad set budget instead of campaign budget. With two or more ad sets, budget shows Advantage+ off. A single ad set on campaign budget stays on.
- Audience: open Further limit the reach of your ads and set the limits you need, with Use as a suggestion unticked. If all you need is an older audience or an exclusion, raise the minimum age (up to 25) or exclude the custom audience instead, and Advantage+ stays on.
- Placements: switch to manual placements and remove the ones you do not want, or opt out of mobile or desktop.
- Rules that apply to everything: set them once in Advertising settings as account controls (audience and placement controls). They apply to every campaign in the ad account, including existing ones, do not change Advantage+ state, and changes to existing campaigns can take up to 48 hours. Meta is still rolling these controls out, so some accounts will not see them yet.
- Creative: switch enhancements off at ad level as above. Campaign settings never control them.
How to prove it is working for your account
Meta's sales campaign guidance suggests two ways to measure: an A/B test against a manual setup, or Conversion Lift for incremental sales, plus audience segments so reporting splits results into new, engaged and existing customers. Set up audience segments before you test, because blended numbers hide the most common problem.
Worked example: a store tests an Advantage+ sales campaign against its manual prospecting campaign at $120 a day each for 14 days, so $1,680 per side.
| Result | Manual | Advantage+ |
|---|---|---|
| Purchases reported | 30 | 38 |
| Cost per purchase | $56.00 | $44.21 |
| Share from existing customers | 30% | 60% |
| New customer purchases | 21 | 15.2 |
| Cost per new customer | $80.00 | $110.53 |
On the dashboard Advantage+ wins by $11.79 a purchase. On the number that grows the business it loses by $30.53 a new customer, because it found the cheapest sales, which were repeat buyers. The fix in that case is not switching Advantage+ off. Exclude the customer list (Advantage+ stays on), keep the list fresh with something like our automated Meta customer lists, and run the test again.
Give each side at least a week of full spend before reading it, change nothing during the test, and compare against your break-even cost per new customer, which the Shopify ecommerce calculator works out from your margin. If you would rather we ran this test on your account and read it for you, that is part of our Meta ads management.
Mistakes we see most often
- Turning everything off because of one bad week. Switch off the specific section causing the problem, and keep the rest.
- Narrowing the audience to protect a rule. Location, age and exclusions belong in account controls or the settings that keep Advantage+ on.
- Never opening Advanced preview. Some enhancements only show there, so ads go live with music, overlays or rewritten text nobody approved.
- Judging on blended ROAS. Read new and existing customers separately, or the cheapest repeat sales will look like growth.
- Feeding it too few ads. If spend sits on one ad and the campaign barely delivers, the fixes in Meta ads active but not spending apply here too.
Questions we get about Meta Advantage+
Is Meta Advantage+ worth it for small businesses?
Usually yes for prospecting sales campaigns, if purchase tracking works and you can give it a varied set of ads. Keep budget, audience and placements on, put fixed rules into account controls, and review creative enhancements before ads go live. Prove it with an A/B test against your manual campaign on cost per new customer.
How do I turn off Advantage+ on a Meta sales campaign?
There is no single switch. Budget shows Advantage+ off when you run several ad sets on ad set budgets, audience when you use Further limit the reach of your ads with Use as a suggestion unticked, and placements when you exclude any placement or opt out of mobile or desktop. Creative enhancements are turned off separately at ad level.
Can I set a minimum age or exclude customers without turning Advantage+ off?
Yes. Meta lets you raise the minimum age up to 25 or exclude a custom audience and keep Advantage+ on. Account controls in Advertising settings also do not change a campaign's Advantage+ state.
Should I use Advantage+ audience for retargeting?
No. Meta does not recommend Advantage+ audience for retargeting campaigns. Build retargeting with a manual audience so delivery stays inside the people you chose.
How do I turn off Advantage+ creative enhancements?
While creating the ad, go to the Ad creative section, click Set up creative and switch enhancements off under Enhancements, then check the Advantage+ creative tab in Advanced preview, because some enhancements only appear there. For a live ad, select it in Ads, click Edit, then Edit in the Advantage+ creative section.
Is Advantage+ the same as Advantage+ shopping campaigns?
Advantage+ shopping campaigns are now Advantage+ sales campaigns: a sales campaign using Advantage+ audience, campaign budget, placements and destination. Advantage+ itself is the wider set of AI settings across campaigns, audiences, placements and creative.
Sources
- Meta Business Help Centre: What turns Advantage+ on and Advantage+ off
- Meta Business Help Centre: About the Advantage+ campaign experience
- Meta Business Help Centre: About Advantage+ sales campaigns
- Meta Business Help Centre: About Advantage+ audience
- Meta Business Help Centre: Set audience and placement controls for your ad account
- Meta Business Help Centre: About Advantage+ creative
- Meta Business Help Centre: Turn off Advantage+ creative enhancements in Meta Ads Manager
- Meta for Business: Advantage+ sales campaigns