Meta's AI Shopping Campaigns Disappoint Marketers

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) have been among Meta’s most high-profile ad product launches in the last year, but some marketers are finding the results lacking. The tool—which lets artificial intelligence, instead of the marketer, choose which audiences to serve an ad—has helped the company regain some of its mojo with buyers who had diverted spend away from the platform in recent years, especially after Apple’s privacy changes dampened Meta’s ad performance. On the company’s first-quarter earnings call in April, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said daily revenue from ASC campaigns was up sevenfold in the previous six months. The product was first introduced in August 2022 and released more widely later in the fall. But after playing with the tool for nearly a year, some marketers say its prowess has been overblown. While the tool can be effective, it’s not a silver bullet, or necessarily the best tool in Meta’s arsenal, ad buyers told Adweek. ASC is an example of Meta’s greater embrace of artificial intelligence. The introduction of AI into media buying has also been employed by rivals Google and TikTok, whose tools Performance Max and Smart Performance Campaigns, respectively, also aim to use automation to produce better results, at the expense of marketer control. “There is a reason to be skeptical of these newer automation tools,” said Katharine Painter, media director at independent media agency Apollo Partners. Before Performance Max, There Was Google's App Campaigns, Muddying Transparency Backing this observation of Meta's ASC is data from measurement platform Measured, which helps companies normalize measurement across multiple platforms and works with brands like Crocs, Foot Locker and Patagonia. Incremental return on ad spend (ROAS) for Meta, a measure of how much sales could be attributed to Facebook and Instagram alone versus other platforms, was $1.40 for ASC campaigns, compared to Meta's reported ROAS of $4.01, Measured found. The metrics are a mean of performance each month between September 2022 and 2023. Over-reporting is common among all platforms, who often take credit for conversions that may be driven by users seeing the same ads on other media properties, said Jim Greco, vp of professional services at Measured. Of note, the incremental ROAS Measured found was lowest for ASC campaigns, compared to two other Meta ad formats, prospecting and retargeting. According to the results Meta reports to marketers, ROAS for ASC campaigns is supposed to be between that of prospecting and retargeting, undermining the idea that ASC is Meta’s most effective format. Some marketers told Adweek they still find the tool useful. In a recent test of 31 advertisers, ASC improved ROAS 32% and cost per acquisition by 17% compared to business-as-usual campaigns, according to data Meta shared with Adweek. Limitations of Advantage+ Not all marketers have found that ASC produces consistent enough results to recommend it to clients. “We can’t make recommendations to increase that budget [for ASC] unless we can do it with a lot of confidence,” said Ryan Jones, CEO of digital agency Juice. “We could take very similar businesses and, for whatever reason, it’s working on one account but not another account.” A particular limitation of ASC is that it optimizes toward conversions, and it is more likely to over-index on existing or likely consumers instead of helping brands find new audiences. Digital agency Markacy has found that when buyers specify that an ASC campaign only direct 10%-15% of spend toward existing customers, it performs similarly to prospecting campaigns, a tool which can be more effective than ASC at finding new audiences. “There is a problem with Meta grading its own homework,” said Chris Rigas, vp of media at Markacy, who said the agency has not seen ASC drive significant improvements in Meta's incrementality, according to the agency's own analytics. “The [ASC] campaign is ceding all control to Meta that allows to find people who are more likely to purchase...it doesn’t necessarily mean that those are incremental purchases.” Reporting obscures a more consistent performance picture When Apple made it harder for mobile apps to track users via its App Tracking Transparency framework in April 2021, performance on Meta campaigns plummeted. But sources say that Meta’s reporting may have been a bigger culprit for bleaker campaign reports than actually worse performance. “You often saw really dramatic assessments of how much performance fell off in 2021,” Rigas said. “It was a 10% or 15% decrease in performance [due to signal loss] and the rest was because Meta wasn’t able to report it.” In February 2022, Meta said it was underreporting conversions by 8%, down from 15% in September 2021. Of note, Measured found incremental ROAS for prospecting campaigns was $1.92 between September 2022 and September 2023, only 34% higher than the $1.43 ROAS level in March 2021, the month before ATT was implemented. The difference in incremental ROAS between this past year and March 2021 for retargeting campaigns was only 7%, Measured found.

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Meta's AI-fueled Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns Underwhelm Marketers

Skepticism grows over platforms AI ad-serving tools

Catherine Perloff

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Catherine Perloff