Meta has made its AI-driven Advantage+ the default for Sales, Leads, and App campaigns. This automation promises scale, but it means advertisers no longer have full manual control over key aspects of their ads. And there doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to turn it off.
In this article, we’ll explain what’s changed, what controls you still have, and how to use Advantage+ campaigns effectively.
Meta’s end-to-end Advantage+ campaigns now come in three versions. Each uses AI to automate audience, placements, budget, and creative, reducing setup time and shifting optimization to Meta’s systems.
Meta Advantage+ campaigns are built around four core components. Each one uses automation to handle tasks advertisers used to manage manually.
Meta blends your inputs (custom audiences, lookalikes, or interests) with its own machine learning signals. But the system quickly expands beyond your suggestions to find people most likely to convert based on its algorithm.
Benefit for advertisers: Advantage+ Audience gives you quicker reach and the chance to uncover high-performing segments you might not have tested manually.
Budgets are set at the campaign level and automatically distributed across ad sets based on performance. This is Meta’s default Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) model.
Benefit for advertisers: Spend automatically flows to the best-performing audiences and ads, reducing manual reallocation.
Most targeting options, including demographics and exclusions, are treated as suggestions. Meta optimizes delivery using its own signals unless you manually restrict it.
Benefit for advertisers: The setup is simplified and with a broader reach, while the system handles constant micro-adjustments.
Meta automatically adapts your creative assets. This includes everything from resizing images to adjusting brightness and even applying overlays to fit different placements.
Benefit for advertisers: Faster creative testing and better alignment with platform-specific formats without extra design work.
In June 2025, Meta started rolling out updates that reshaped how advertisers interact with Advantage+. Here are the biggest changes:
In summary, Advantage+ removes a lot of the manual control we had over campaigns. By default, you no longer decide exactly who sees your ad, when, and on which placements. Instead, the system continuously shifts spend and creative delivery based on its models.
Here are Meta’s notes on the new Advantage+.
According to Meta, for every dollar spent through Advantage+ campaigns, businesses see an average of $4.52 in revenue, which is a 22% lift compared to traditional campaign setups.
This is proof that advertisers have seen great upsides with the Advantage+ products. But, there are downsides as well.
Unfortunately, you can’t completely disable Advantage+ as it has become the backbone of Sales, Leads, and App campaigns. But you can dial back the automation and regain control in the following key areas.
By default, Meta treats your audience inputs as “suggestions.” To take back control:
This lets you lock down demographics or exclusions that matter, like filtering out existing customers.
Advantage+ defaults to automatic placements, which means Meta decides if your ads show in Reels, Stories, Messenger, or Audience Network. To refine this:
This is especially important for advertisers who care about brand safety or only want visibility in premium environments like Instagram Feed.
Advantage+ Creative Enhancements are switched on automatically. To turn them off:
This keeps your brand’s look consistent across placements. However, they may not be perfectly optimized for the placements.
Campaign budget optimization shifts spend to whichever ad sets it thinks will perform best. That has the potential to starve retargeting or over-fund broad prospecting. To limit that:
Both Meta Advantage+ and Google’s Performance Max are fully automated campaign types that use AI to optimize targeting, creative, and budget across multiple placements.
The key similarity is the “black box” approach: you have to trust the algorithm to find the right audience and creative combinations for your goal. PMax covers all Google properties (Search, YouTube, Display, etc.), and similarly Advantage+ operates on Meta’s properties (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network).
Both can drive impressive results with minimal effort, but both have a tendency to chase “low-hanging fruit” conversions if left unchecked. For example, they will likely favor users who are already likely to convert (e.g. retargeting or brand searches) to boost ROAS, which can inflate reported performance.
Advantage+ campaigns work best when Meta has large volumes of conversion data to learn from. But it can be useful for small businesses to quickly test their offers, run broad campaigns alongside manual ones to find cost-effective options, and even scale winning ads once they find stable conversion volume.
But it’s not recommended in every case. Advertisers with big budgets or mass-market products typically see better performance with Meta Advantage+, but the system can struggle with smaller budgets.
CBO stands for “Campaign Budget Optimization” and is the default setting where you set a campaign-level budget and let Meta’s AI decide how to split the money across all your ad sets. With ABO (“Ad Set Budget Optimization”), you assign a fixed budget to each ad set, and spend is locked to that choice.
You can switch between CBO and ABO by setting how much budget each ad set gets, instead of setting budget at the campaign level.
Meta doesn’t disclose the full list of signals Advantage+ uses to optimize delivery, and much of the system remains a “black box.” However, based on how it works, it likely pulls from a wide range of inputs, including:
If you’re new to ads, it’s usually better to start with manual campaigns. They give you more control, cleaner insights, and help you validate your offer before scaling. Once you have proven offers and steady conversion data, Advantage+ can help you scale efficiently.
Don’t rely on automation alone. Use manual campaigns to test targeting and creative, then scale winners through Advantage+.
Automation doesn’t solve ad fatigue. Rotate in new images, videos, and copy every few weeks to keep performance steady.
Set “Ad Set Spending Limits” to guarantee budget for retargeting or high-value segments that Meta might otherwise ignore.
High reported ROAS can be misleading. Run lift tests or check external analytics to see if Advantage+ is driving net new results.
Automation performs best with proven offers and steady conversion volume. Start manual, validate your funnel, then hand scale to Advantage+.
Meta is making Advantage+ the default for Sales, Leads, and App campaigns in 2025. That shift means less manual control and more reliance on Meta’s automation. For some advertisers, this unlocks faster scale and simpler campaign management. For others, it introduces volatility, inflated metrics, and the risk of wasted spend.
The key for many marketers is balance; using Advantage+ where it shines (scaling proven offers and tapping into Meta’s data signals) but keeping manual campaigns in play for testing, niche targeting, and tighter control.
It’s also critical to protect your campaigns from click fraud. According to Facebook’s own reports, the platform removes billions of fake bot accounts every quarter, and many more slip through. Additionally, advertisers lost $84 Billion to click fraud in 2023, and estimates say the number will only keep rising
Fraud Blocker can help boost your ad performance by removing bots, accidental clicks, and more from your Facebook campaigns. Start a 7-day free trial and see how much money we can save you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Iyiola
Matthew is the resident content marketing expert at Fraud Blocker with several years of experience writing about ad fraud. When he’s not producing killer content, you can find him working out or walking his dogs.
Matthew is the resident content marketing expert at Fraud Blocker with several years of experience writing about ad fraud.
