If you went looking for "Advantage+ shopping campaign" in Ads Manager lately, you didn't find it.

It hasn't gone. It's been renamed, and it's no longer a separate campaign type you pick from a menu.

Here's what changed, how it works now, and what you still control.

The short version

Advantage+ shopping campaigns are now called Advantage+ sales campaigns. Any sales campaign counts as one when its budget, audience and placements are all left on Meta's automated settings.

Advantage+ sales campaign = sales objective + Advantage+ on for budget, audience and placements

Meta describes them as "the most efficient way for advertisers using the sales objective to drive online sales", and says advertisers who used them saw a 9% improvement in cost per conversion on average (Meta Business Help Center). That's Meta's number, not mine. Test it on your own account.

What changed

The old version was a separate campaign type with its own rules: one ad set, almost no targeting options, and a cap on how much budget went to existing customers.

Now there's one setup for everything. Choose the sales, leads or app promotion objective and you start in what Meta calls the Advantage+ campaign setup, with the automation switched on by default.

You can still build a manual campaign. You get there by changing settings, and Ads Manager tells you when you've crossed the line.

The three switches

I think of the new setup as the three switches: budget, audience and placements. Each one shows "Advantage+ on" or "Advantage+ off" as you build the campaign.

1. Budget. On when you use a campaign budget, which lets Meta move money between ad sets. Off when you run several ad sets with their own budgets. More on that choice in CBO vs ABO.

2. Audience. On when you use Advantage+ audience, where most of your targeting is a suggestion Meta can go beyond. Off when you force it to stay inside an age range, a gender or an interest list. The details are in Meta Advantage+ audience.

3. Placements. On when Meta can choose where the ad appears. Off when you narrow the placements too far.

Meta's wording, from its page on what turns Advantage+ on and off: "If you narrow your budget, audience or placements too far, you will see Advantage+ off on that section."

All three on is the old Advantage+ shopping campaign. Flip one off and you have a manual campaign with some automation left in it.

What you still control

More than the name suggests.

  • The creative. Every ad, every angle, every format. This is the biggest lever you have left.
  • The budget and the bid strategy. How much, and whether there's a cost or ROAS goal.
  • The conversion event. What counts as a result.
  • Hard limits. Location, minimum age, languages and audiences to exclude all stay as real limits, even with Advantage+ on.
  • Account controls. Rules set once in your ad account settings, such as a minimum age or countries you can't ship to. Meta says these don't change a campaign's Advantage+ state.

What Meta takes over

Who sees the ad inside those limits, where it shows, and how the budget is split between ad sets and ads.

That's why the inputs matter so much. Meta's own best practices for these campaigns come down to four things: connect your first-party data, give it a wide variety of creative, tell it what a valuable customer is, and set up audience segments so you can see who it reached.

Two of those are whole topics. The data part is the Conversions API. The creative part is why creative volume decides so much on Meta now.

The check I never skip: who is it reaching?

An automated campaign will happily spend on people who were going to buy anyway. They convert cheaply, the ROAS looks great, and the business doesn't grow.

The fix is audience segments. In Ads Manager, under Advertising settings, you define two groups: engaged audience (people who know you but haven't bought) and existing customers. Meta then breaks your sales campaign results into new audience, engaged audience and existing customers.

If most of the purchases come from existing customers, the campaign isn't finding buyers. It's taking credit for them.

Two ways to respond. Exclude your customer list, which is allowed as a hard limit. Or judge the campaign on new customers only, using aMER, which I explain in what is MER.

When I leave all three on, and when I don't

All three on: proven products, clean conversion data, and enough purchases to learn from. Most of the scaling budget goes here.

Budget switch off: creative tests where every concept needs a guaranteed amount of spend.

Audience switch off: when the product can only be sold to a specific group, or for retargeting, where Meta itself says Advantage+ audience isn't recommended.

Placements switch off: rarely. Only when a creative clearly doesn't work in a placement and I can't make a version that does.

One caution about the scores. Ads Manager shows a campaign score while you build, and an opportunity score for the account. Meta's own note says a high opportunity score "does not guarantee performance". Treat them as a checklist, not a grade.

Pool rule 006Screenshots aren't results. P&L or it didn't happen.

Quick answers

What happened to Advantage+ shopping campaigns? They were renamed Advantage+ sales campaigns and folded into the normal campaign setup. A sales campaign with Advantage+ on for budget, audience and placements is the same thing.

What is an Advantage+ sales campaign? A Meta sales campaign where Meta's AI chooses the audience and placements and distributes the budget, inside the limits you set.

Can I still target a specific audience? Yes. Location, minimum age, languages and exclusions stay as hard limits. Forcing age, gender or interests as limits turns Advantage+ off for the audience.

Do Advantage+ sales campaigns work for small budgets? They need enough conversions to learn from, usually about 50 a week per ad set. Below that, expect unstable results. See the Meta ads learning phase.

How do I stop it spending on existing customers? Exclude your customer list as an audience control, and use the audience segments breakdown to check where the purchases came from.

The one-line version

Advantage+ shopping didn't go away. It became three switches, and your job is knowing which ones to leave on.