Another update to Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns…

When Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns were first introduced, Special Ad Categories did not qualify. If you were promoting something related to Credit, Employment, Housing, or Social Issues and Politics, you needed to go with a manual campaign.

But that has changed. You can create an Advantage+ Shopping CampaignAdvantage+ Shopping Campaigns offer a streamlined way of creating a Sales campaign that leverages machine learning to get the best results. Presets are locked in and can’t be changed. The advertiser provides custom audiences at the account level that define current customers and can then determine a budget cap for how much of the budget is spent on current customers. More to promote a Special Ad CategoryThere are legal restrictions related to targeting of people when running ads in the categories of Credit; Employment; Housing; or Social Issues, Elections, and Politics. Advertisers are required to select the appropriate Special Ad Category in the campaign when applicable, which will limit target options to keep their ad compliant. More now.

Like every update, there’s some haziness regarding how new this change is. But I just wrote a blog post about Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns a couple of weeks ago, and this restriction was still in place for my ad account. I ran a search of articles on this topic, and there were some from this year talking about how Special Ad Categories didn’t qualify.

But anyway. They do now…

How to Use

Using Advantage+ Shopping 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 for these categories may not have made much sense initially. These campaigns are optimized for e-commerce brands, and that’s just not a natural fit for credit, employment, housing, and politics.

But Meta rolled out a change during the past couple of months that allows you to select any standard or custom event as your optimizationThe 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 event.

While it’s technically a “Shopping” campaign, you could use Leads or Complete Registration. I could see that used for these categories.

Categorize Your Ads

If you’re not sure if what you’re promoting qualifies as a special ad category, some ad accounts see a “Categorize Your Ads” button when creating campaigns.

This takes you through a series of questions to determine if what you’re promoting needs to be categorized.

Will you use Advantage+ Shopping campaigns for special ad categories?