Meta Announces Updates to Advantage+ and Shopping Ads

Meta has announced a heap of new ad updates, primarily focused on retailers and those using its automated Advantage+ campaigns.

And there are a lot of niche use cases within these new updates, which could apply to your business.

The first update is “Advantage+ creative optimizations”, which will automatically optimize your video ads for viewing on Reels, or the mobile Facebook and Instagram apps with 9:16 ratio.

That will help more brands tap into the popularity of the various Meta video formats, with Reels being the key focus.

As per Meta:

“Reels and video on our apps continues to grow as daily watch times across all video types grew over 25% year-over-year in Q4. In fact people now reshare Reels 3.5 billion times every day.”

The new process will also enable advertisers to dynamically create multiple variations of an ad, so the system then has more options to display to users, depending on what they respond best to.

Meta’s also updating its Advantage+ catalog ads, with the added capacity to import and use branded videos or customer demonstration videos, instead of just static images.

Advantage catalog ads, which Meta first launched in beta testing last year, provide personalized recommendations to users, based on what Meta’s system detects that each will be most interested in, and this new process will provide more capacity to showcase relevant products within the display.

Meta’s will also now enable brands to upload a “hero” image in the center of their catalog ads, which Meta’s AI will then use to show people the best products from their catalog to drive performance.

Meta’s also adding more eCommerce ad options, with users of Magento and Salesforce Commerce Cloud now able to create Shops ads within their management systems. Meta’s also integrating its Shops ads and branded content ads (now called “Partnership ads”), which will enable direct purchasing from collaborative campaigns.

And there’s also new elements in Reminder Ads on Instagram:

“Now, advertisers can include external links to a new product or sale in their Reminder ads to help turn a person’s interest into a purchase. This summer, we’ll also give advertisers ways to notify people when an event starts and before it ends.”

Meta’s also looking to expand Reminder ads to Reels in the coming months.

There’s also new Promo Codes promotions on Facebook and Instagram, as well as ads with product tags:

“In March, we’ll bring ads with product tags to Facebook Feed (currently Instagram only), and in April, we’ll launch the global availability of ads with product tags to all businesses, whether or not they maintain a Shop.”

Meta’s also updating its Collaborative ads offering, to provide more analytics on performance, while it’s also testing the ability for advertisers to use Collaborative ads with Advantage+ shopping campaigns.

Finally, Meta’s also working on Advantage+ Catalog ads with omnichannel brand and product level reporting as a new managed service solution “to help RMNs prove that ads on Meta platforms drove sales online and in-store”.

So yeah, a heap of updates, all with varying levels of applicability and use. And while there may not be some huge, headline change that will get the most attention, there’s a lot of value for specific brands within these changes.

You can read more about Meta’s latest ad updates here.