Marketers Warm to Meta’s Advantage+ Commerce Tool While Promotional Ads See Tepid Adoption

“That is an improvement from where we were in 2022,” said Bornsztein. “CPMs back then were $1 to $2 higher, on average.”

Brands have previously noted concerns with Meta’s Advantage+ product for its limitation in finding new audiences, as well as more general concerns about Meta grading its homework.

“Our AI tools for advertisers are also driving results, with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns reaching a $10 billion run rate and more than one-half of our advertisers using our Advantage+ Creative tools to optimize images and text in their ads creative,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the company’s third-quarter-2023 earnings call.

Promotional ads underwhelm

Meta’s promotional ad units let brands run ads with special discounts so that shoppers click through to brand sites to claim offers.

The tool could be particularly crucial during holiday seasons, such as Black Friday, when advertisers target shoppers on social media platforms with promotional messaging to click through to their websites, generating first-party data.

A hospitality brand at marketing company Horizon Next has been seeing success from using promotional ads to target people with exclusive offers and send them to its website to drive revenue and bookings.

At the end of last year, the brand noticed that site-retargeting performance slipped and its ROAS became less efficient by 33%, according to Alex Weber, associate director, social strategy at Horizon Next. Although the brand was driving cost-effective traffic to the site, audiences weren’t converting.

The agency then implemented a retargeting strategy for the hospitality brand to capture cart abandoners and frequent shoppers in order to improve ROAS. Once the retargeting strategy rolled out, the new audiences outperformed ROAS benchmarks by nearly 59%, said Weber. He didn’t share specifics.

Drop-off at shopping carts is an issue for marketers, while other brands are hesitant about using the tool due to the potential loss of valuable website sales data to Meta.

“One of the biggest problems [in] ecommerce is the drop off at the shopping cart,” said Amy Luca, executive vice president and global head of social at Media.Monks. Several friction points—such as getting people to enter their credit-card details or type in their address—can hinder people from completing a purchase. “It gives a consumer a pause and makes them think, ‘Do I really need this?’” she said.