Advantage+ Audience Prospecting
Last updated
Last updated
Advantage + to Meta is what Pmax is to Google. It’s a series of tight looped Machine Learning algorithms that allows a user to put in their creatives and assign a budget and objective, while it sets its targeting to audiences set across different stages of consumer journeys. In short, it is yet another black box that makes the job easier for its SMB users. However, after numerous tests we know that it is not always straight forward. Every now and then it will go astray and there is no handle we have on it to bring it back on track. Not because we don’t want to, but because we can’t take a look under the hood.
However, there is an amazing feature that allows the user to give it more direction by adding audiences to the Blackbox, so that it has a better sense of where to go. This campaign type learns from your 1st party or 3rd party audiences and builds signals that guide the advantage + campaigns to control their erratic behavior. You can add these signals directly in Meta, but these signals from consumr.ai are derived from your first party or third party audience and that data-driven intelligence is worth a lot.
There are 2 ways that you can start building a campaign:
When you create a new report or reopen an existing report (refer to our articles on how to create an audience report or reopen an existing report), you will see an action button “Create a campaign” at the bottom of the report. Click it to go to the campaign.
When you are on the insight page, you can go to the Organization drop-down, select the organization, portfolio and then click on “Activate Insights”.
You will go to the actioning area. To the right of the page, you will see a button called “New Campaign”. Click it to get started.
You ideally select this option when:
1. You have an Advantage + campaign on Meta
2. If you want to give more direction to the campaign
3. If you want more control of the campaign to optimize it
4. If you want to bring in more transparency
You are on the campaigns page, to the right top corner you will see a button called ”new campaign”. Once you click on it, a modal pops up where you can select the platform you want to build a campaign for. Since we're building an Advantage+ Audience Prospecting campaign for an audience platform. Once you select the platform, you will see the types of campaigns that you can create Advantage + Audience Prospecting is a type of campaign that is available only for Meta within consumr.ai. Then, go ahead and select the radio button that says Advantage + Audience Prospecting. You can only select one type of campaign at a time. After selecting, click on the button called “Setup”.
Setting up a campaign is a part of the workflow where you start adding intelligence derived from the insights and use them as inputs to sketch out a draft of a plan that, once activated, will set the campaign in the right direction. You can also see that now the modal changes into two sections vertically. To the left, you have the entire campaign creation workflow listed down in stages. To the right, based on the stage you are on, you will see forms with relevant fields that are either prepopulated with recommendations or blank (which means that they require manual input).
This phase of the campaign focuses on selecting the right intelligence and the right seed campaigns and ad sets that it will use to inherit basic settings from another Advantage Plus campaign. Let's go through each of the fields and understand their functionality:
1. Account: In this drop-down, you will see all the accounts that are mapped to this organization. Select an account name, where you want to activate this campaign.
2. Select Audience/Interest: This drop-down is also a search box that has autocomplete feature. It can allow you to select our first-party audience that is linked to your ad account or select a third-party audience from Meta. We always advise the users to select first-party audience if it's available to get more accurate results. While a third-party audience does not give you inaccurate results, since the nature of the audience is third-party, it may still give you generic signals. For example, if you select a first-party audience that are a group of people who have purchased your product in the past as against a third-party audience that only captures the interest through the cohort.
3. Seed Campaign (Advantage+): At ProfitWheel, one of our most followed rules is to avoid recreating the same wheel over and over again. Hence, if Meta already has a well-defined workflow that allows you to build and create campaigns, we did not want to reinvent the same workflow. Seed campaign is a way through which you can select a campaign and Consumr.ai inherits all the properties of this campaign, only to override the final output of the plan that Consumr generates. This allows a user to create a new campaign in a matter of seconds without going through the tedious process of entering data through multiple fields. In this type of campaign, you have to ensure that the seed campaign is an Advantage Plus campaign. We have already put a default filter in the drop-down, hence if you do not see anything populated in the drop-down, you might want to check if your account has an Advantage Plus campaign that already exists or not.
4. Seed Adset: This drop-down is the same as seed campaign, except that this drop-down is for inheriting the properties of another adset.
This section of the setup is to define specifications for your campaign. Let's look at each field and understand their functionalities:
1. Name your campaign: Once you complete entering the presets for the campaign, this field will auto name the campaign based on those inputs. The user will have an option to change the name as per their organization’s taxonomy. If you create a new campaign, the name you enter in this text box will be pushed to the platform during activation.
2. Campaign Budget: The nature of this field gets inherited from the seed campaign. Though the user will need to enter the campaign budget manually, the inheritance of the nature is limited to whether the campaign budget will be daily or lifetime. Hence, we advise the users to carefully select the seed campaigns as all the basic properties will be inherited from them.
3. Date Range: This is a calendar component that allows you to select a date range for the future. This date range will be sent to the platform during activation, and it will define the duration of the campaign. If you want the campaign to be always on, please ensure that you do not select an end date.
4. Targeting Precision: Like all other audience campaigns, the purpose of target precision still stays the same. It will always be defaulted to balanced, however, if you select broad, the targeting output will give you a broader targeting parameters, on the other hand, niche will give you more filtered targeting parameters even though that means compromising on the reach.
5. Create Draft Plan: Once you are done filling in all the setup parameters, you can click this button to start creating the draft plan. It takes somewhere between 2 to 3 minutes to create the draft plan, however, it is not always necessary that it would take that long.
As you can see in the screenshot above, in about two or three minutes you will have your draft campaign plan ready. At the top, it will show you a total audience size (it's an estimate) and the dot next to it indicates if the audience size is adequate. A blue dot means that the audience size is broad, green means ideal, yellow means niche and red means insignificant. If you ever see a red dot next to it, it is more likely that you will not get good results.
In this section, you will see two cards. The first one will be audience selection and the second one will be interest selection.
Audience selection: you will get approximately five audiences in this card, where the top two will be selected by default since they have the highest affinity towards your core audience selected in the setup. If you want to unselect any of the top two audiences, you can click the cross towards the right of the blue capsule. On the other end, if you want to add any of the remaining three audiences in light blue capsules, you can click on the + that is to the right of the light blue capsule. Deselected audiences will be passed on to an advantage plus campaign as added data-driven signals that can help in cause correcting and filtering down an advantage plus campaign further.
Interest selection: This is the same as audience selection, with an exception that you will see third-party interests from the platform that you can send out as data signals. Click on the cross button towards the right of the blue capsule and you can deselect a selected interest. On the other hand, if you want to add a new interest, you can click on the add more button right below the selected interests and search for more interests that you would like to send as signals. Remember, the top few interests will be selected by default since they have the highest efficiency score.
You do not have to update the activation settings if you do not want to activate the plan on the media platform. Let us do a walkthrough of every field you have to fill in this section.
There are two types of campaigns that you can activate. You can either go with a new campaign or select an existing campaign to activate these ad sets in. Select the option based on your preference. You can only select one. Users may choose a new campaign when they do not want the learnings of an existing campaign to dilute the essence of this new campaign. On the other hand, users may choose an existing campaign when they want the new ad sets to inherit the learnings of the existing asset and get them incremental results.
Name of the campaign will be the same as what you've chosen at the beginning of the workflow. However, this option is only applicable when you select a new campaign in the previous field. This field will disappear if you select an existing campaign in the previous field.
In consumr.ai, as a practice we do not want to reinvent the wheel. We also wanted the process to be extremely simple and time effective. Hence, to save the users from a lot of trouble we introduced the concept of seed campaign and adsets. In these drop downs you will see the names of all the existing campaigns and ad sets on the media platform. When you select a campaign and an adset, it will inherit all the features and parameters the way they have been set in the media platform. In other words, it will duplicate the campaign and the adset and then modify the parameters from this plan, keeping the other parameters the same. This means that parameters like interest targeting, budgets, date range will be updated, and the rest of the parameters will stay the same as the seed campaign and adset.
Once you're done with this selection, click on the activate button at the bottom of this modal to begin the push onto the media platform.
When you click on the activation button, a new card will appear that will show you the progress of the activation process. If this process succeeds, you will see the final checkpoint go green. However, if it fails, you will get the exact reason and place where the failure occurred, so that you can rectify the error and try activating it again.
