It’s the age of AI, and marketing is no exception. You can ask a platform to build an entire social media plan with pre-written posts for you or ask it to analyze your existing strategy.

But when it comes to advertising, there are no shortcuts because AI is missing a crucial piece of information: who your audience is, what they value, and why they buy your product or service.

While Meta Advantage+ can take a strong ad campaign and scale it for even greater ROI, it can’t take a failing campaign and make it resonate with customers. Let us explain why, and what to do instead.

The Problem with Thinking AI Alone Can Solve for Failing Meta Campaigns

Overwhelmed marketing teams see Meta Advantage+ as an easy button or silver bullet for getting greater ROI from their marketing. 

Marketers turn to Meta Advantage+ when the following scenarios happen with their ads:

• Underperforming campaign
• Rising lead costs
• Creative fatigue

Under the right conditions, the AI advertising tool can improve performance, but the essential pieces of your campaign must already be there. 

The problem is, your underperforming campaign might be due to poor messaging, not poor targeting. Your creative might be stale. Conversion tracking could be broken or not formatted at all.

In these cases, using AI wastes budget and further lowers your campaign ROI making the situation worse after promising to finally make your campaigns soar.

Ultimately, artificial intelligence is only as effective as the inputs you give it. So if you don’t know how to run a Meta ad effectively, the AI platform won’t save you.

How Does Meta Advantage+ Work?

While Meta Advantage+ can’t rescue a failing campaign, there are some pretty great things it can do to speed up the ad creation process or optimization, if you know how to guide it.

The system offers automated campaign features that use machine learning to optimize campaigns. Optimization features include:

• Audience targeting
• Placements
• Creative combinations
• Budget allocations across Facebook and Instagram

Basically, the tools take out some of the manual process of controlling every ad variable. But you have to be ready to hand off your decision-making to Meta’s algorithm.

Obviously, the appeal of the AI tool is speed and efficiency. But you’ll also be taking advantage of Meta’s behavioral data, which can have great outcomes.

When your advertising account has strong conversion history, large data sets, diverse creative assets, and a healthy budget, using the AI tool can lead to lower acquisition costs and a stronger return on ad spend (ROAS). 

But the key here is in recognizing that these campaigns were already fundamentally sound before using automation to further grow and improve them. Plus, you’re talking about ad campaigns with big budgets where machine learning can take all that data to further hone the campaign.

For most advertisers, the problem isn’t that AI gets it wrong, it’s that the inputs just aren’t there.

Missing Input #1: A Broken Offer

Most marketers believe that ad campaigns fail due to poor targeting. But the reality is, it’s more often a problem with the offer. That could manifest in a variety of ways.

• Poor product differentiation
• Lack of a landing page or poorly designed landing page
• Messaging that fails to make an emotional connection

Machine learning simply can’t fill these gaps. It’s designed to optimize delivery; not create market demand. 

Many marketers forget to look at the campaign’s foundation. Instead, they look for technical shortcuts in the form of bidding strategy changes, audience adjustments, new ad sets.

The Meta Advantage+ relies on user response signals. So if people aren’t clicking, engaging, converting or purchasing, the system has nothing to optimize.

Missing Input #2: Bad Creative

Your ads matter more than ever. Weak visuals, generic copy, uninspiring videos, and forgettable hooks fail no matter how good the audience targeting is.

In fact, if you turn on Meta Advantage+, it will likely recommend scaling your spending to gather more user behavior inputs to optimize around. And as you scale your spending, your ROI will further drop if the creative is weak.

You don’t want to leave your creative in the hands of a machine. Brands that have enabled Meta’s AI-generated creative adjustments have seen some pretty wild ad creatives and messages that are off-brand, according to Business Insider.

The most important thing you can do for your ads is start with a strong creative strategy that uses emotion and persuasive storytelling that will resonate with your specific audience.

Missing Input #3: Messy Data

Machine learning only really works if you have incredible data to use to train it.

A misfiring Meta Pixel or one you’ve just configured won’t have sufficient conversion events and insights for the algorithm to work off of. 

Likewise, if your CRM data is messy or your attribution is inconsistent, you’ll struggle to see meaningful results from activating Meta Advantage+.

If you read the documentation from Meta, you’ll find it recommends substantial conversion volume before activating Advantage+ on your campaigns. Ideally, you have at least 100 conversion events per week to work from, according to a report from Stackmatix.

Small businesses or local service providers likely don’t have the budget to run ads with that kind of conversion volume, let alone to follow up on that many leads.

How to Improve Meta Ad Campaign Performance

If Meta Advantage+ won’t rescue your flailing ad campaigns, what will?

Strong strategy with focus on the fundamentals is what will take your campaign to the next level.

Working with the Meta ads experts at Two Wheels Marketing gets you:

• Audience understanding
• Thoughtful messaging
• Clear positioning
• Compelling offers
• Strong creative strategy
• Effective landing pages
• Accurate conversion tracking
• Consistent testing
• Constant monitoring and adjustments

No automation will ever replace these fundamentals. Schedule a free consultation with our team to discuss your marketing goals and discuss what might be holding your campaigns back.