Meta created Meta Advantage+, a fully automated suite of advertising tools, to help marketers streamline campaign management and improve performance.

With machine learning for targeting, placements, budgeting, and creative development, Advantage+ aims to reduce manual effort while delivering better results. But how much control do you still have over your campaigns? And what strategies can you implement to enhance your campaigns further?

This guide explores the entire Advantage+ ecosystem. It highlights its strengths and demonstrates how advanced performance marketers can use tools like Bïrch (formerly Revealbot) to regain control, conduct smarter tests, and boost ROI.

Key takeaways

• Meta Advantage+ is a fully automated suite of advertising tools that handles targeting, creative selection, placements, and budget optimization. It’s designed to simplify scaling and improve efficiency.
• Each Advantage+ tool plays a distinct role, from shopping and app campaigns to automated audiences and dynamic placements. Used together, they offer a powerful end-to-end automation system.
• Automation comes with tradeoffs. While performance often improves, you may lose visibility and manual control. This makes it harder to test, manage pacing, or prevent creative fatigue.
• Advantage+ works best when paired with strategic oversight. Let it help you scale what’s proven—but be prepared to step in when results plateau or logic becomes opaque.

What is Meta Advantage+?

Meta Advantage+ is Meta’s end-to-end automation system for performance marketers. Machine learning powers real-time decisions about who sees your ads, where they appear, how much to spend, and which creative performs best.

Instead of manually adjusting audiences, placements, budgets, or A/B tests, you can let Advantage+ learn from performance data and optimize these elements for you. It can save you time while improving results. For busy teams or brands ready to scale, it’s like putting your campaign on autopilot, and letting Meta’s algorithm drive toward your goals.

Overview of the Advantage+ suite

The suite includes several campaign-level and asset-level tools:

• Advantage+ sales campaigns (formerly Advantage+ shopping)
• Advantage+ catalog ads
• Advantage+ app campaigns
• Advantage+ creative
• Advantage+ placements
• Advantage+ audience
• Advantage+ campaign budget (ACB)

Meta Advantage vs. Advantage+

Meta Advantage refers to optional automation add-ons, such as dynamic creatives or auto placements. In contrast, Advantage+ offers full automation with minimal manual overrides.

Choosing Advantage+ means handing off key campaign decisions to Meta’s algorithms, like who to target, where to show your ads, how much to spend, and which creatives to prioritize. The goal is to maximize efficiency and performance by reducing the need for manual adjustments.

You might use Meta Advantage tools in situations where you want more manual control—whether for testing new creative angles, segmenting audiences, or pacing spend deliberately. Advantage+, on the other hand, is designed for fully automated delivery, making it especially effective when you’re scaling strategies that already show strong performance. Its strength lies in efficiency, although this can cost you some flexibility.

Core Advantage+ products

Advantage+ sales campaigns

Advantage+ sales campaigns (ASC), formerly Advantage+ shopping campaigns, is Meta’s flagship format for e-commerce and direct-response advertisers.

• ASC combines prospecting and remarketing into a single automated campaign.
• You can simply upload your catalog and creative assets—no manual ad set segmentation required.
• Meta’s AI dynamically matches creative and product to high-value users.
• ASC automatically prioritizes top-performing creative combinations.
• It’s ideal for scaling performance in DTC and retail environments.

Advantage+ catalog ads

Catalog ads offer a dynamic ad format that pulls real-time data from your product catalog and delivers personalized creatives based on user behavior. These ads adapt to each viewer by dynamically showcasing the most relevant items from your feed.

• Catalog ads enable personalized product-level delivery using real-time signals.
• They support both retargeting (e.g., abandoned carts) and broad prospecting.
• They automatically adjust creative layouts to fit each placement.
• They are ideal for brands with rapidly changing stock or large inventories.
• Catalog ads work across all Meta platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network.

If you want to try out catalog ads, here’s a quick setup checklist you could follow:

1. Make sure your product feed is clean, up-to-date, and free of errors.
2. Map key feed attributes (like category or price) to audience segments to improve targeting.
3. Double-check that your product images meet Meta’s quality specs—sharp visuals make a big difference.
4. Start with broad placement targeting to give Meta’s AI more room to optimize.

Pro tip: Brands that sync product feeds daily and structure catalogs with custom labels (such as price tiers or seasonal collections) often see higher ROAS.

Advantage+ app campaigns

Advantage+ app campaigns use Meta AI to optimize bidding, audiences, and placements—driving high-value installs or in-app actions with minimal setup.

• App campaigns optimize delivery based on real-time user signals.
• They support SKAN attribution, helping track performance on iOS devices for iOS.
• You can select a campaign optimization type that aligns with your primary KPI, whether it’s installs, clicks, or ROAS.

Key features and functionalities of Meta Advantage+

Advantage+ audience (automated targeting)

Instead of relying on predefined demographics or interests, Advantage+ audience uses machine learning to analyze real-time behavior, intent signals, and campaign performance. This means it can dynamically identify high-value users, including people you may not have considered reaching through traditional targeting.

• There’s no need to set up demographics or interests manually.
• Campaigns get smarter as they run, learning over time from performance data.
• You might reach broad audiences you didn’t expect.

Advantage+ creative (creative optimization)

This tool automatically selects the best version of your creative content—whether it’s an image, text, or format—tailoring it to each viewer. Guided by real-time data, it matches each individual with the most relevant ad variation.

This dynamic optimization raises engagement rates and ensures that your budget is allocated to the highest-performing combinations, so there’s no need for manual A/B testing.

• Dynamic A/B testing identifies top-performing creative combinations.
• Tailored ad experience shows the most relevant version of your ad to each viewer 
• The downside is that it may override some creative decisions to boost performance.

Here’s a quick reference table:

Advantage+ placements (dynamic distribution)

With this tool, you let Meta place your ads on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network based on their expected performance. The system dynamically allocates impressions to the placements where your ads are most likely to achieve your goals, helping you get more out of your spend.

Advantage+ placements include formats like stories, reels, and feed. However, Meta drives better CPMs and efficiency through diversification, so it might prioritize less obvious formats to deliver stronger results. 

Tip: We suggest you approve all of Meta’s suggestions when first trying out placements while monitoring placement performance in weekly breakdowns to spot underperformers and fully understand this feature.

Advantage+ campaign budget

Advantage+ campaign budget (ACB) automatically distributes your total campaign budget across all ad sets in real time, depending on performance signals and conversion potential.

• ACB dynamically shifts spend toward your high-performing ad sets.
• It prevents budget cannibalization and minimizes underspending.
• There’s less need for manual bid or budget adjustments.

This feature is especially helpful when testing multiple creative or audience variations under the same campaign umbrella. Instead of assigning fixed budgets to each ad set, ACB monitors results and reallocates budgets where it sees the best opportunity for return—minute by minute.

However, the tradeoff is limited control: you can’t guarantee specific spend per ad set, which can be challenging when trying to test hypotheses or control pacing across specific audiences. For those use cases, you can layer custom rules from ad management tools, like Bïrch, to restore flexibility.

ACB works best when you’re optimizing for efficiency at scale—but, like any automated system, it has blind spots. Full automation can make it harder to enforce testing discipline, maintain brand guardrails, or explore creative variations that don’t align with current performance signals.

For example:

• Budget allocation can drift toward a single ad set, even when others need visibility for learning.
• Creative fatigue may go undetected, especially if Meta keeps prioritizing the same top performer.
• Audience learning is opaque, as you don’t always know who you’re reaching or why.

That’s where tools that offer a flexible optimization layer come in handy. For instance, with performance management software like Bïrch, you can:

• Run intentional creative experiments inside automated campaigns.
• Apply rules that protect pacing, test integrity, or brand strategy.
• Detect when automation is stuck in a loop and intervene early.

How Bïrch helps you go beyond Advantage+

Advantage+ is powerful, but Bïrch can be useful if you want to remain in control over your campaigns, insights, and testing capabilities. Let’s dive into a few key features you could use alongside Advantage+ . 

1. Automate creative testing

Creative testing can improve ad efficiency and help uncover what truly resonates with your audience. With Bïrch, you can run structured tests across Advantage+ campaigns with versioning and insights.

2. Regain budget control with rules

You can use Bïrch to introduce layered automation rules that enable you to enforce your own pacing, caps, or conditions.

3. Scale what works and pause what doesn’t

With Bïrch, you can set custom performance triggers that send Slack alerts to you and your team. This feature lets you double down on winning creatives and sunset underperformers quickly.

4. Turn Meta automation into your performance engine

You can prioritize automation with Meta Advantage+, but if you don’t want to fully surrender control over your campaigns, you can use Bïrch to guide them with flexible automation built around your goals.

So, should you use Meta Advantage+?

Advantage+ is a powerful system for streamlining ad delivery and improving performance through automation. It can simplify campaign management and accelerate scale.

But full automation can mean making tradeoffs—less visibility into spend, fewer levers for structured testing, and limited flexibility when creative or audience strategy requires nuance.

That’s where complementary tools like Bïrch can play a role: adding layers of control, custom-testing logic, and monitoring performance without disrupting the automation layer underneath. If you want to balance efficiency with oversight, this combination lets you adopt a more adaptive and strategic approach to growth. Give Bïrch a try for free with our 14 day trial. 

FAQs

What is Meta Advantage+?

Meta Advantage+ is Meta’s fully automated suite of ad tools that use AI to optimize targeting, creatives, placements, and budget allocation.

What is the difference between Meta Advantage and Advantage+?

Meta Advantage includes optional automation tools, while Advantage+ gives you fully automated campaigns with minimal manual inputs.

What is Advantage+ audience?

Advantage+ audience is a targeting tool that lets Meta find users beyond your saved audiences using machine learning.

What is the maximum number of ad groups in Advantage+ app campaigns?

As of 2025, you can have up to nine ad groups in an Advantage+ app campaign.

What happened to Revealbot?
Revealbot underwent a comprehensive rebrand and is now known as Bïrch. This transformation reflects our renewed focus on blending automation efficiency with creative collaboration.