Meta’s at it again—major changes are rolling out inside the ad platform, and if you’re not adapting, you’re already behind. In this fast-paced episode, Ralph Burns and Lauren Petrullo rip into the new developments around Advantage+ campaigns on Meta. No fluff, no filler—just hard-hitting insights on how the new algorithmic shift affects advertisers differently depending on their vertical, budget, and approach.

The duo breaks down what’s really changing inside Meta, why this isn’t just another temporary tweak, and how to adapt before it’s too late. Whether you manage multimillion-dollar campaigns or are just looking to optimize your ad spend, this is a tactical must-listen. Expect conversation on creative fatigue, campaign segmentation, broad targeting, and what “control” in Meta advertising actually means now.

Chapters:

• 00:00:00 – Kicking Things Off: What’s Really Happening Behind the Ads
• 00:00:49 – Meta Drops a Bombshell—Here’s What You Need to Know
• 00:02:18 – Is Advantage+ Your Friend or Foe? The Real Scoop Inside Ads Manager
• 00:05:17 – What These Changes Actually Mean for Your Ad Strategy
• 00:12:39 – Future-Proofing with Custom Conversions (Before It’s Too Late)
• 00:19:13 – Your Move: What Smart Advertisers Should Do Right Now

LINKS AND RESOURCES:

• Get Your nCAC Calculator Now!
• Maximize your campaign performance with AI.
• About Advantage+ sales campaigns
• Tier 11 Jobs
• Perpetual Traffic on YouTube
• Tiereleven.com
• Mongoose Media
• Perpetual Traffic Survey
• Perpetual Traffic Website
• Follow Perpetual Traffic on Twitter
• Connect with Lauren on Instagram and Connect with Ralph on LinkedIn

Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on iTunes and leave us a review!

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READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

The MAJOR Meta Advantage+ Changes You Must Know

[00:00:00]

Ralph: [00:01:00] [00:02:00] [00:03:00] [00:04:00] Hello and welcome to the Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, the CE and founder of 11, alongside my amazing Chicago originally, but Wisconsin based co-host.

Lauren: Lord e [00:05:00] physically in Chicago today, but New York tomorrow, and Washington on Friday.

Ralph: Oh, I thought you were in Wisconsin. We had all this

Lauren: I came back the other day.

Ralph: Oh, he came

Lauren: You know, what’s this?

Ralph: Okay, so you’re back

Lauren: You and my team, they’re like, where are you? I’m, I’m in the, the bedroom I grew up in.

Ralph: That’s awesome. Where in the world is Lauren? Lauren’s in Chicago right now. Well, you’re in Wisconsin last week. It’s hard to keep track of you.

Ralph: Yeah. Um, so today we’re gonna do a, uh, a quick show because we’re, we’re both, you know, actually because Scratch that, Kevin. Today we’re gonna get right into it because we don’t have any time to waste. We really don’t. We’re just gonna get right into the whole show. No. No witty rap. All the things that people probably like change and move, move over to another podcast when they start hearing us ranting about our certain things.

Ralph: Apparently that’s not the case though, because our, our last show we were talking about the five health hacks, which you didn’t wanna put hacks in there, by the way, and the title. [00:06:00] Um, but now it’s like one of our more popular shows, which is kind of crazy. Uh, we’re gonna be getting right into something tactical here, which is huge news that came out, which was leaked.

Ralph: Wouldn’t even say leaked. It was intimated back on February 4th of this past year, and I don’t think a lot of people really took it all that seriously, is that meta has changed yet again. Drum roll please. And. This time it looks like they ain’t going back. So Lauren, drop the bomb here, drop the news. What has changed inside the meta platform, and then we’ll talk about what the hell markers should do about it.

Lauren: Essentially, advantage Plus is becoming more or less advantageous to those meta advertiser depending on which side of the line you reside on.

Ralph: So everything that you’re gonna do from here on in is Advantage Plus like going. [00:07:00] Advantage question is, is it an advantage that might be a good title for the show? Is Advantage plus really an advantage? You know, listeners wanna find out, uh, anyway, enough with that. So.

Lauren: I.

Ralph: All right, so let’s show here. Kevin.

Ralph: Kevin, Kevin. I’m gonna switch over to screen share because it’s super janky here. So let’s go right into Ads Manager and actually show you what we’re talking about here. ’cause this is, uh, I haven’t actually screened this account ’cause this might be one that still is manual and, uh, on, full on Advantage Plus.

Ralph: So we will, we will see. I love it when we just do live demos. We have no idea what’s on the other side here, but, um. Kevin. Kevin. Kevin, Kevin. Let’s see. Which one is it? There it is. All right, so here we are. [00:08:00] Kevin. Kevin. You can see my screen, obviously. Yep. Is it just, it’s not like the entire screen. It’s only the tab. It’s just the

Lauren: I can only see the tab. I can’t see the others. I can’t see the UL or anything.

Ralph: Okay. Got it. All right. So we are inside, uh, we are inside obviously Meta Ads Manager. This is probably gonna be blurred out here.

Ralph: What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna create a campaign and just to give you an idea if you have not been in there, obviously campaign objective. We’ve got awareness, traffic, engagement leads, app promotion, sales. A lot of people. Obviously would produce or would choose sales here, which is the former conversions based campaign, and we go over, we click continue.

Ralph: Let’s see, we can’t, we still actually do have the manual setup here, so surprise, surprise. This is the area that we see in other ad accounts, which is going away. You can’t do manual [00:09:00] anymore, so. Right here is Advantage Plus Shopping Campaign. So Advantage Plus shopping is obviously one of the many, many advantage pluses.

Ralph: I don’t know how many there are. I think there’s like five or six or seven of them, and there was supposed to be about.

Lauren: creative budget, all the different

Ralph: All the different pieces. So it defaults to Advantage Plus shopping campaign here. And if, obviously if you’re just listening to this, you’re out walking the dog or you’re on the treadmill at the gym listening, uh, I highly recommend that you hit on over to our YouTube channel over on perpetual shopping.com/youtube so you can see exactly what we’re doing here.

Ralph: But anyway, we’re inside the Ads Manager. The first thing you do. Choose your objective. We obviously chose sales. We have two options here. We’ve got manual setup, which we can still do, but in a lot of the other ad ad accounts that is not there anymore, it’s basically dis, it disappears and you choose this one only, which is Advantage plus Shopping, or really Advantage Plus.

Ralph: Then you click continue.

Lauren: So, [00:10:00] oh no, keep going. Delete my audio. I was gonna show you, like I can show you alternatively of what it would look like, the screen of what it looks like on one of our accounts where it’s completely gone. So it’s like this is what you can see when it’s manual and this is what you can see when it’s not manual. So I have this screen in front of me ’cause it doesn’t show anything.

Ralph: Oh,

Lauren: no claim,

Ralph: Hey Kevin, why don’t we go over to that? Why don’t we cut into that?

Lauren: And just be like, Hey, this is what it looks like. Here’s what it is. And then you can go into building.

Ralph: can show your screen.

Lauren: I control my screen that shows the prop of like, there’s the two options. You have the one option where you still have the manual or you have the one option. If you see this on your account and you’re like, what the fuck?

Lauren: You can’t do anything now. This is what you’re gonna see, and then now go back to yours. And it’s like, this is what happens in the build.

Ralph: So Lauren actually has a one of them, which is actually. [00:11:00] You do not have that option. So Kevin, if you could edit this in here. I’m stopping sharing my screen. It’s just so janky.

Lauren: So now you can see on the screen

Ralph: I can’t see your screen yet. Now it’s coming

Lauren: we to stop sharing

Ralph: Okay. I stopped sharing mine. Are sharing yours. Okay, so we just showed you, uh, a legacy account in which you have both. However, that is gonna be deprecated over the course of the next couple of weeks as of this recording here, which is, uh, right at the end of April.

Ralph: So what we’re seeing here on this screen is what all ad accounts are gonna look like within the next couple of weeks. Literally, some have already migrated over.

Lauren: So when you go to the sales objective and you continue forward, you are gonna have this message that reads in front of you of where you can’t choose anything while you want

Ralph: [00:12:00] Yeah, so it’s just called Advantage Plus Sales Campaign as opposed to Advantage Plus Shopping, which you had an option to be able to do that before, and you don’t. However, this does say manual options are still available, so I wonder if that will stay.

Lauren: you can go in and make the edits, but that’s gonna be available for only so long. It’s like the same thing, tailored campaigns. It’s just now, instead of the tailored campaigns before, which is where it did all that manual setup and you lost. So much it’s gonna have this, but it’s going away. Trying to make this as the advantage plus only.

Lauren: But you know, theoretically speaking, crystal ball, tin hat, foil meta has rolled out stuff and had to roll it back because I believe they’re doing this specifically for smaller advertisers. If you’re spending less than one to five a day, this gonna advantageous for you. My personal opinion, my personal feelings is.

Lauren: Unless you are spending like million a month, [00:13:00] this isn’t going to be what’s working now.

Ralph: I don’t know. The people on my team are like, they’re torn between the two sides at this point, because Advantage Plus is not, is a supplemental campaign just to begin with. However, because the creative is gonna be so heavily weighed here and we’ll just sort of show as we build this some. So my team is actually excited about it.

Ralph: Uh, now provided that we also have what we refer to as CAPI custom events, which is something that we’ll talk about here on the show, I believe that’s, that episode is coming up, uh, in a week or so, which we can talk about it even more. I. But that is when you’re actually optimizing for one specific product in your product catalog as opposed to the entire purchase on for your entire catalog.

Ralph: So there’s advantages and disadvantages, um, but we’ll have to see how all that turns out. So here we are inside Advantage Plus [00:14:00] Shopping campaigns. As you can see, you’ve got, um, this is all of our stuff here. Audience location, audience segment, reporting.

Lauren: What

Ralph: Uh, you’ve got your daily budget, you’ve got your start date.

Ralph: What are we, what are we missing here? We’re on.

Lauren: I think it’s important to note that on the left hand side you only have the campaign and then you have your. Assets collection. So it’s your audience ad set and ads as in one single place. It’s going by the name of dataset where if you remember, I wanna say like six, seven months ago, if you’re calling it a pixel, it’s no longer a pixel.

Lauren: It’s called a dataset inside of, uh, business manager settings. There’s still the line item for pixels, but that’ll be empty ’cause your pixel. Change into a data. Essentially what they’re doing is reorganizing everything. It’s no longer a business manager. You have the business portfolio. So it’s this huge rollout where they’re trying to be more efficient and clean, but.[00:15:00]

Ralph: It’s, it’s going full automation. So we’re toggling here between sort of campaign and ad set. And Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. This is super, super janky here. This might not have been a great idea. Hang on. ’cause it’s just, it’s so stalling on me here. All right, so we are on campaign pain. Okay. All right, so under here you can actually see your, your, uh, your presets, just sort of, um. And then there is obviously, are you going to the website and shop or are you going to website? You’re gonna a website and app, maximize number of conversions, maximize value of conversions. We don’t really use that as much as we used to.

Ralph: And then there’s audience location, which is obviously the country in which you’re gonna be targeting. Specifically. You can [00:16:00] exclude some of your locations, your audience segment. Is, this is a very interesting section right here. Audience segment reporting. Define your ad accounts. Audience segments, and advertise settings.

Ralph: Reporting engaged audience.

Lauren: We did a whole episode on this a few weeks ago where it was showing how the engaged audience and the active customers helps you see one, and where Meta is claiming that these are cold audiences, but actually are they? But it’s being brought in the ads manager section of where you’re doing the ad creation versus it living.

Lauren: Audience and to bring it in on the dashboard with this, but you’re watching it on YouTube or you can obvious see what we’re talking about. But for those just listening inside, what is the ad set combined ad aspects of the campaign itself, we’re starting to see that being layered in because Matt is listening and saying like the things [00:17:00] that matter for us to understand the conversion impact of a in app.

Lauren: Or performances, uh, what is our view through conversion versus click through conversion, and then who are the audiences? Are they representative of truly cold audiences? Are they engaged or are they current customers?

Ralph: What I’m. Not seeing here is I’m not seeing ads set or going, here’s campaign level, right? Mm-hmm.

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Ralph: Where’s my audiences?

Lauren: Your audiences are now, that’s where it’s, you only have two your ads. The same because, so with audience, don’t, as before this properly exclude. In theory audiences, which you haven’t been able to do before when you’re doing Advantage Plus, everything is just a mere suggestion, but the audience in the ad itself is combined [00:18:00] into one place, and because it’s an Advantage plus audience, you have very little control over who you’re introducing into the audience.

Lauren: But the reality is you didn’t have control before anyways. Now they’re just streamlining it and making it clear. Whereas before it was like kind of subterfuge. You’re like, wait, why do I have warm audiences in this advantage? Plus cold? Why are you going after people that are a different gender or a different age group than what I’m recommending?

Lauren: Like that kinda stuff is now more obviously disregarded.

Ralph: So a lot of your targeting options, all of a sudden you don’t have. It’s releasing control back to the algorithm and you’re uploading, and we didn’t really do it here in this short demo here today, but you’re, in essence, you’re uploading. All of your creative, all of your ad copy, all of your, you know, video images, you name it all into what sort of, kind of looks like the ad set.

Ralph: That’s actually, it’s, you’re, you’re building the ad and that’s a [00:19:00] huge difference right there, because now you have zero control over what combination thereof. Is gonna be the one that’s, they’re ultimately gonna reach your customer wherever they are in your customer journey. So you’re giving up a lot of control here, which I think is gonna be frightening for a lot of advertisers.

Lauren: I think it’ll be frightening for a lot of advertisers and, uh, a godsend for others, like, again, those that are doing smaller budgets. If you’re a solopreneur, you don’t have a lot of resources like an agency to support you. This is making it easier. It’s the in between boosting a post on Instagram and doing a full fledged campaign and ads manager, but with this like dynamic creative.

Lauren: Because now this is what the new place is. So if you’re used to doing DCA, like you didn’t have a lot of control because they would serve whichever combination made the most sense. Now, what’s good here is you have the intersection of video and static. You also have, um, the opportunity to see on other conversion style.

Lauren: So [00:20:00] I know we’re looking at like purchases, wraps, but even on the lead form side, uh, further things that they’re doing is that there was an updated Wednesday, three weeks ago. Where there actually now changing the order of your questions and potentially removing questions from your lead form, if it’s gonna generate in theory a higher quality, lower cost lead on meta.

Lauren: But I’m obsessed with asking a lot of questions on lead form, so I don’t want that. I’m okay with reorganizing, not with removing. Um, but the whole purpose of this is meta, is trying to remove barriers, decrease friction. Eliminate the burdens of operations and make it where you’re like, Hey, meta, here’s what I have.

Lauren: Make me some money, please.

Ralph: Mm. I do think that custom conversions or custom events become very, very important here all of a sudden, because if you can can, if you can optimize your ads for a specific conversion, not just a [00:21:00] generalized like. Standard event purchase, you can actually optimize for individual products and then have exclusions potentially for those previous customers for that particular product.

Ralph: This could be a way to arrest some of the control back ’cause you wanna be finding those individual audiences for your specific product. Let’s say you have six SKUs, you sell six different supplements, somewhat related. Uh, and we’ll have an example of this in a future show here is that all of a sudden now, instead of just trying to find the same customer for all six products that maybe has bought product number four and now is gonna buy product number one, the custom

Lauren: a melatonin versus a gut

Ralph: Exactly.

Lauren: of probiotic There.

Ralph: Having your copy integrations for that specific custom event for that specific product. I now, now I think that’s a way in which to leverage this. So that’s one of the reasons why our team is kind [00:22:00] of excited about it, provided that you do that work ahead of time and I. Meta is going out and finding specific audiences for that product itself.

Ralph: And hopefully, ’cause they’re always going to include, you know, previous client, previous customers, previous purchasers. Going after the, the incremental sales for specific products as opposed to your entire catalog. So that’s where we see this as maybe being an advantage. And so far, the initial testing has been really positive on it, but it does require some tech setup just to begin with.

Ralph: And.

Lauren: On that initial stuff like yeah, tech set is is a lot, but that’s where like most of the times when we go into ad accounts, they’re not feeding the data back into the algorithm correctly, just in general. But where I see this being great is for the business that’s spending under one to $5,000 a day and they have a smaller ad account.

Lauren: And so it’s just making it easier, especially for those solopreneurs. And then I see this advantageous for [00:23:00] those that are spending a million dollars a month because they have enough data to have. Statistical significance, but I think the large majority of everyone else is between, you know, a thousand and a million dollars of their ad spend a day.

Lauren: And this is just, I don’t believe it’s gonna be, um, the red reduce reduction English, the reduction of control will be worth the eliminated effort because again, where we are, at least at Mongos Media, I was all in on all things Advantage Plus. Last year in the very, very beginning of this year, and then come mid-January through now, we’ve just seen way stronger performance when eliminating the assumption that the AI will be correct.

Lauren: And since that’s what the Advantage Plus is built upon all I see this as is a streamlined user interface aspect of the Advantage Plus, which isn’t working. Predominantly across our accounts. I mean, there’s exceptions, of course. It always, it depends, but the accounts that [00:24:00] you’re seeing that it’s working on, I would venture to say that they either have significant ad spend or have done significant work to ensure that the information being uploaded into meta is put correctly in.

Ralph: True. True. Yeah. I mean, I think this is yet another way in which Meta is trying to get the smaller advertiser. However, at the flip side of that, it reinforces the importance of tracking specifically specific events, custom events. Mm-hmm. And if you don’t know what those are, we’re gonna put links in the show notes for that, obviously.

Ralph: But then vitally important if it really is the way that Meta has been claiming it to be, and. We were at a conference two weeks ago. Uh, one of my guys was at a conference. He actually spoke with the meta representative about this. He said it’s really important now, more than ever, to have creative that hits people at the top of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, and the bottom of the funnel.

Ralph: You don’t know which one is gonna resonate based upon where they are on your customer journey, ’cause you just [00:25:00] load it all up and then we’ll decide, which is a frightening thought right there.

Lauren: Uh,

Ralph: If it works at the end of the day in getting and acquiring new customers and our initial tests show us with this new advantage blush setting with custom events.

Ralph: That’s the key. We are seeing lower NAC numbers, lower new cost to acquire customer numbers, but obviously we’ve got the advantage of using the tier 11 data suite, which the data is really pure and it’s matching up with inside the CRM. So initial tests look good, but the jury from my standpoint, still out.

Ralph: And, but I, I don’t think they’re rolling this one back, Lauren. Like, they come out with these things and all of a sudden they’re like, oh, wait a second. We didn’t really mean it. Like they’re serious on this. They’ve been telegraphing this for a long time. And if you go back and we’ll leave a link in the show notes through February 4th, they issued a press release.

Ralph: We heard about it. I was at a conference a year and a half ago, and they basically said, Hey, we’re gonna do like 30 different advantage plus campaigns, but [00:26:00] then we’re gonna consolidate them down into one.

Lauren: I heard about this and had a image I cannot share, but I have something from like 20 18, 20 19 that was along this line completely. And it’s the simplification. I mean, we knew back then they were talking about like the Power five, I think is what the meta team had been doing. Um, but this was the, like where the Power five is and where the power five is going.

Lauren: And it, it’s exactly what this is right now. But, uh, where I think they’re gonna scale it back is, I, I, I really think the large majority, those that aren’t small or those that aren’t massive are going to need to have some levels of control because, uh, this is gonna give the illusion that you’re gonna have stronger conversions.

Lauren: And like I’m all for specific on the product, especially when you have a big SKU store and you have very many different ICPs, like your ideal customer profiles. I just don’t trust it. We’ll see, we’ll see. But the custom conversions, where you’re saying is so key for those in the health, the [00:27:00] political and the finance space who’ve already lost all those bottom of funnel conversions.

Lauren: Like you can’t even generate a lead unless you’re doing custom conversions. Like that has to be the workaround for what they rolled out the beginning of this year for those audiences. So the custom conversions coming back, people let ’em go. They stop building custom conversions, so they’re not even tracking how many people are progressing through the funnel.

Lauren: So I agree that like that’s coming back. But the overall is if Meta’s gonna streamline the Advantage Plus side and some of that campaign creation, we have to go back and do the foundational pieces, which ensures that we’re telling data into meta of what we actually want.

Ralph: Hmm. True. Well, I think it’s.

Lauren: So

Ralph: Because this

Lauren: like, I’m so frustrated.

Ralph: it hasn’t even, we just saw it here in our screen share. It hasn’t even been fully rolled out yet. Some accounts it is, some it isn’t. So it’s still early days here, but obviously we will [00:28:00] keep you updated and that’s the reason why you should be listening to the show twice weekly and making sure that you stay on top of all these changes and how it affects you as a marketer, uh, trying to navigate this complicated digital marketing landscape, Lauren.

Ralph: So if you, uh, like this show. You wanna leave us a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts, certainly do. So we’d love to have that. We love those five star ratings and the comments over on Spotify especially, we’re getting some good feedback there. We actually caught like an editing mistake based upon a comment, not that we make any mistakes in editing because we never do, um, but this just so happened to slip through.

Ralph: The point is, is, uh, wherever you listen the podcast, leave us rating and review. Really appreciate that. Of course, everything we talked about here today, all the references, especially with all the changes with meta. We’ll be in the show notes over@professionaltraffic.com, and to see the screen share, head on over to the YouTube channel, perpetual traffic.com/youtube.

Ralph: But you already subscribed to [00:29:00] that, so I don’t have to say that, Lauren, every time. Uh, so on behalf of my amazing co-host, Lauren Petillo Till next show, see ya.