r/betterfacebookads

Hi All,

Appreciate this page being set up to actually discuss creating better advertisements and usage methods. I know META has not been performing all that well since February and I am not here to hash that out, as that appears to be all over the the old forum.

I would like to know what everyones thoughts are on the current Advantage+ (ADV+), Value Rules, and if it is still worthwhile to use? Am I better off just inputting my own data, location, etc?

A bit about me; New(ish) fashion brand, scaling social media platform, mixed with ads pushing new product drops. Customer (and follower) Age is 25-44, mixed 55/45 split on men and women (currently), primarily in NYC area, LA area, and Miami. All Ads attribute to Add to Cart or Purchase (except for awareness/promotional ads). Typical setup is a CBO testing 2 ad sets with 3-4 creatives per ad set, then scale the winners.

I am struggling to justify ADV+, but my findings are as follows;

• When testing new creatives or copy via image/static and video ads, ADV+ has exceptionally poor copy changes, poorly written, with too many emoji's, and adds terrible music and weird effects to the video and images - none of which match branding or aesthetic. I am resigning to turn these off, even though it decreases my "opportunity score" (which I feel is a scam now anyway to rely even further on their AI). None of the ADV+ changes appears to bring value to the creative or to the data.
• When testing new creatives with ADV+ turned fully on (with or without Value Rules guiding more spend to my target market location, age, and gender); ADV+ appears to love to spend 60%+ of my budget on FB with people over the age of 65+, which is not even close to the age of my actual target and customers, of which META says it has (never changed my pixel, I share all data). Most of my customers and sales growth have come from Instagram, which is tracked via my Shopify (and triplewhale), so I am unsure why the high spend on FB? Winning ads have slowed dramatically because of this in the past 2 weeks.
• Value Rules - when trying to bid for higher spend on my Target Market (TM), it appears to sort of work, but ADV+ seems to override all my inputs, especially on locations and age and platform. I just started testing this out, so maybe it is still in the learning phase, but has anyone found these to be helpful recently?

Winners are coming more slowly with bad learnings from ADV+, so am I better off manually inputting all my data and locations (etc.) than trying to let ADV+ figure it out? ( Which is seemingly what all the "gurus/coaches" on youtube keep saying - test creatives & copy, let the AI do the audience development.)

I’d estimate these factors are the root cause for a huge chunk of why my learning phase won’t exit post in this sub.

I spent 7 years as an engineer at Meta building the ad delivery systems that run this exact process. Learning phase threshold isn't just 50 events. the system is also weighing signal quality (not just volume). you can hit 50 events and still see sluggish learning if the match rate is low.

While you are in the learning phase, higher cost variability, less efficient delivery, and less predictable results are actually normal and expected. the problem is when the learning phase goes on much longer than it should or when it never exits at all.

Most brands assume learning limited is purely a budget issue. well sometimes it is. Budget affects how fast you can collect that signal but it's not the only thing blocking it. a $5/day budget on a $100 product is obviously a budget problem but I see most people are spending a decent amount of money mistaken for insufficient budget where in fact what they have is data quality problem. But in my experience is the common root cause is purchase events that are not reaching meta at all, or reaching meta in a form the algorithm cannot use effectively and below.

1. Yes, your browser pixel is missing iOS and ad blocked traffic (you already know this). but depending on your audience’s device mix and browsing behavior a browser-only pixel setup can miss 20-40% of conversion events. every missed event is a missed learning phase.
2. Your express checkout events are disappearing. they all redirect the customer away from your domain during checkout. remember that the browser pixel is tied to your domain. when URL changes, session context breaks and pixel either misfires or fires without the fbc click ID. No fbc means meta can’t connect that purchase to an ad click and event arrives orphaned.
3. If you’re running pixel + CAPI (which is correct), you need dedup configured correctly. I see setups where the same purchase is being counted twice. more events is not always better. duplicate events actively confuse the model.
4. Your EMQ is too low. even when Purchase events are reaching meta, the algorithm cannot use them effectively if it cannot match them to a specific facebook users.
5. You are making too many changes during the learning phase. every time you make a change to and ad set, budget increase 20% and up, audience change, bid strategy chnage, new creative, meta resets the learning phase counter. If you are constatnly doing this because the learning phase seems stuck, you may be the reason it is stuck.

“But my pixel shows 9.3 Purchase EMQ” ok cool! that literally doesn’t matter. At purchase level you will get 100% pf customer data anyways. What changes the EMQ score is the volume of ads you’re running, aka how many click IDs. It does not mean good or bad. It’s just means you’re running a lot of ads.

Hello everyone I am very new to running meta ads and I have been facing a problem,, the lead quality is terrible, I believe the ad is doing well in terms of cpa and numerically it's doing great but most of the leads I'm getting are not worth my time and I was wondering if this is because of my budget being low? Because in the targeting section I have made it very clear what kind of clients I want but barely any are anything like I've outlined. Please let me know if you have any helpful information