Chapter 3: Ads Structure
Over the last year or two, Meta has been pushing their AI on advertisers through the “Advantage+” features for campaigns, targeting, and placements. Leaning more heavily on the Meta AI has shown variable results across the board, so more traditional advertisers like myself have largely been avoiding Advantage+ every chance we get. Although as of May 2025, it has now become simply impossible to turn off Advantage+ in most cases, so we simply can’t ignore it any more. So what does this mean, and how do we work with it?
The Good Old Days…
Back when I first started advertising on Facebook in 2016, there was basically no AI assistance, so the success of your ads was solely due to how specific you could get with your targeting strategies. This meant loads of testing of individual cold interests, creating complex custom audiences with variable exclusions, and unfathomably complex ads managers. This meant an extremely high barrier to entry for anyone looking to get into advertising on Meta, since there was such a high skill requirement to running profitable campaigns, and losing money on half-baked strategies was incredibly easy.
That being said, once you did figure out how to run profitable ads, the rewards could be immense. Which is the main reason a lot of old school advertisers like myself have been resisting the recent push towards Advantage+ from Meta and sticking to all-manual strategies (because we knew how they worked).
Fast Forward To Today..
Meta has nearly completely eliminated a lot of the manual options for audience targeting and placements. While this makes it easier for more people to start advertising, and also harder for beginners to lose money, it can have negative effects if things aren’t going so well out the gate. Back in the day, if something wasn’t working, we would tweak it and try something new. These days, we don’t have those same options. So what can we do?
Meta hasn’t eliminated all targeting completely… yet. We can still use interest groups or custom audiences as “suggestions” to the AI for conversion ads (i.e. website purchases), and as of now, we still have manual targeting options for Lead and Traffic optimized campaigns (although these are likely to go away in the near future). These “suggestions” basically mean that the AI will try and find your customers in the audience that you requested, but if it thinks it can find better results by looking outside your specified audience, it will do that. It’s worth noting that personally I hate this, but there’s nothing we can do about it.
The implication of this is that the brunt of the work from an advertiser’s perspective has now shifted from targeting to ad creative & copy. Instead of testing 30 different audiences with 10 different ads, we test 300 different ads, and let the AI handle most of the audience selection.
I say all of this so that you’re familiar with what Advantage+ means for the following sections as we go through creating our Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads.