Meta Phases Out Automated Ads in Favor of Advantage+

Here’s a relatively minor Facebook and IG ads update that could impact your process.

Meta has announced that its “Automated Ads” option is being phased out next year, and will be removed as an option in Ads Manager over the next few months.

Automated Ads were a precursor to Meta’s Advantage+ ad suite, and were more designed as a means to help advertisers maximize their campaigns amid changes to Apple’s app tracking. With Automated Ads, brands can launch campaigns from their Facebook or Instagram page, by answering a few questions about their campaign goals, which Meta then uses to optimize ad targeting.

The process also takes in images from your Page posts for your ad creative, making it easy to build a campaign quickly. It’s a little more complex than boosting a post, but a little less so than launching a full campaign, which really focuses on prompting the user through the set-up process.

But with Meta’s AI-powered Advantage+ tools now becoming the central focus, and providing a better variation of the same process, it’s decided that it no longer needs to offer Automated Ads as an option, as Advantage+ campaigns are the same, and will eventually become even more simplified, and accurate in their targeting.

Indeed, Meta’s vision is to create an ad generation platform that can build your whole campaign for you with minimal input.

Earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that:

“We’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.”

Within this, Automated Ads become more of a dated version of the same, with Meta’s ultimate goal to create, essentially, a one-click ad option, with all of the various elements guided by its ad AI, as opposed to manual inputs.

So it’s essentially redundant, which is why Meta is phasing out this option. If you were a regular Automated Ads user, Meta will be guiding you towards its Advantage+ options instead.

Meta says that it’s started phasing out Automated Ads, so you may no longer have access to it, but if you currently have an Automated Ad campaign running, it will continue to deliver for the time being.