Meta recently made a curious update to Advantage+ Shopping campaigns. Before, you could only select Purchase. Now you can select any standard or custom event.

If you’re running a campaign that’s supposed to be for Shopping, why would you select a different event? While there are arguments for Add to Cart or Initiate Checkout, why would you use Lead?

Then it occurred to me…

Back in November, Meta announced some updates to lead generation. One sounded a lot like Advantage+ Shopping:

We’re testing full campaign automation for lead generation campaignsThe campaign is the foundation of your Facebook ad. This is where you’ll set an advertising objective, which defines what you want your ad to achieve. More, powered by Meta Advantage. Lead generation advertisers will be able to easily apply to AI to multiple campaign levers at once, including targeting, creative, placements, and budgetA budget is an amount you’re willing to spend on your Facebook campaigns or ad sets on a daily or lifetime basis. More.

If you change the conversion event to Lead or CompleteRegistration, that’s basically what this is, right? It won’t utilize instant forms, but maybe that wasn’t the plan.

The original announcement lacked details, and maybe there’s still an Advantage Leads product coming. But in the meantime, it would seem that this setup would largely work the same. The performance goalThe Performance Goal is chosen within the ad set and determines optimization and delivery. How you optimize impacts who sees your ad. Meta will show your ad to people most likely to perform your desired action. More and conversion event, after all, is what determines delivery.

Of course, one potential limitation is that you may want to exclude those who already opted in to what you’re promoting. Beyond adding opt-ins to your defined customers at the ad account level, I’m not sure how you’d address that here.

Even so, the idea is interesting and worth testing. Have you tried Advantage+ Shopping optimized for leads or registrations?