Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns: Do They Work?

 If you sell your books directly to readers, on your own store, you may have come across Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns when setting up your Facebook Ads.

I've tested them in the past and never had great results.

But, over the previous couple of months, I've been doing some more rigorous testing with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASCs for short).

Today, I'd like to share my top 10 findings with you (in no particular order):

#1: I see higher Frequency metrics because ASCs tend to focus on warm and hot audiences.

#2: For best results, use existing, proven Ads (or Post IDs) with ASCs. Don't use ASCs for testing new Ads (save that for regular campaigns).

#3: Have 3 active Ads inside an ASC at any one time. Meta will tend to latch onto one Ad, in rare cases, it will latch onto 2 Ads, so not much point in having any more than 3 active Ads.

#4: New ASCs take 5-7 days to stabilize and start generating consistent purchases.

#5: Only advertise one product (one book) per ASC. As an example, we have 1 ASC for Book 1 and another ASC for the Box Set/Bundle.

#6: You can safely increase the budget of an ASC by 50% - 100% without destroying performance (a maximum of 20% per day is the recommendation with regular campaigns).

#7: After making a change to an ASC (such as budget increase/decrease, adding/turning off an Ad, etc), let things stabilize for 2-3 days – ASCs take longer than regular campaigns).

#8: Don't rely on ASCs for 100% of your purchases. Continue running regular unrestricted targeting campaigns too; they work in harmony together.

#9: $10 budgets on ASCs won't cut it. Ideally, start with $20 - $30 daily budgets per ASC.

#10: As soon as you turn off an Ad in an ASC, replace it with another one. It's best to have a bank of proven Ads that are ready to roll which you can add straight into the ASCs.

Some authors have tested ASCs and haven't seen great results from them, so they're not a magic bullet by any means.

But, providing you're using proven Ads, you have patience and are prepared to spend $60 - $100 without a purchase as Meta figures things out, you stand a good chance of ASCs working well for you.

Remember... the first purchase is always the most expensive on any new campaign, as the algorithm has a lot of data points to look at and test.

If you do sell direct, I would encourage you to give ASCs a serious go.

They are driving a lot of additional purchases for us, with an acceptable Cost-Per-Purchase and a higher Average Order Value in some cases than our regular unrestricted targeting campaign.

One final note here on ASCs...

The campaign structure is a little different to regular campaigns.

The glaringly obvious difference is that there is no Ad Set level. It's just the Campaign level and Ad level.

Plus, there's no targeting aside from country.  

I'll be creating a new module on Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns in The Direct Sales Blueprint For Authors course over the coming weeks, where I'll dive much deeper into how to set them up, how they work, optimizing and scaling them, etc.

Have fun with ASCs if you decide to test them out for yourself.

To Your Success
– Matt