Should you turn on Advantage+ Creative Enhancements? Are there certain enhancements you should turn off?
Luckily, Meta lets you preview these enhancements — and in some cases, make minor changes — prior to turning them on. Let’s walk through each enhancement and what you should consider…
A General Note on Advantage+ CreativeWhen turned on, Advantage+ Creative can make adjustments to your ad on a per-user basis to get you the best results. Adjustments include text (swapping headline and description), image brightness, turning images into a video, applying a template, adding music for Stories, and more. More Enhancements
Before we get to the specific enhancements, it’s important to cover some basic mechanics that are critical to understanding how these changes are executed.
Here’s how Meta defines Advantage+ Creative:
When you apply Advantage+ creative in Meta Ads Manager, your images and videos are automatically optimized to versions your audienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. More is more likely to interact with. Depending on the ad format or placements you select, different creative optimizations may be available to you.
Many of these enhancements are minor, and you may not even notice them at first. It may be logical to assume that these optimizations will be applied globally and in all placements. But it depends on the format and placements, and those enhancements won’t be applied in all cases.
A phrase you will see repeatedly when viewing the descriptions of these enhancements is “when the 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 is likely to improve ad performance.” These changes won’t be applied every time. In theory, they should only be used to help you, which is a critical point.
When applying any of the standard enhancements, Meta will show a personalized variation to each person based on what is most likely to elicit a response. These are personalized changes that aren’t shown to everyone.
Optimization Preview
When Advantage+ Creative first rolled out, advertisers turned it on or off with very little understanding of the changes that were made. Luckily, you can now preview each potential enhancement.
After you’ve finished adding all of the creative to your ad (image, video, carouselA carousel allows you to display two or more scrollable images or videos in the same ad, with the ability to link each to a different URL. More, primary text, description, and headline), scroll down to the Advantage+ Creative section and click “Edit.”
This will allow you to preview all of the potential enhancements generated by Advantage+ Creative.
The “All Optimizations” slider at the top allows you to turn them all on or off at once. Otherwise, you can turn them off individually.
You can also filter by “All Optimizations” or those associated with Standard Enhancements.
The first preview will be of the original creative.
These original versions are without any creative optimizations applied. Keep in mind that Meta will still show these original versions without enhancements. You can click through the carousel to view different aspect ratios by placementA placement is a location where your ad is shown. Examples include Facebook's mobile Feed, Messenger, Instagram feed, Audience Network, right-hand column, and more. More.
Let’s go through each enhancement, one at a time.
Music
Meta can automatically add music to your ad for certain placements that may benefit from that addition. For example, if you created a single-image or carousel ad with images, it may help to add music when shown in Reels or Stories feeds.
Meta will select three different music tracks for you. But you can click the “Change Music” button to pick your own.
Meta automatically selects popular music that is expected to improve the performance of your ad. One of the biggest complaints from advertisers is that Meta will automatically select music that doesn’t fit the brand or ad.
If you uncheck the box to “Automatically apply,” you can search for artists, genres, or keywords to manually apply music tracks. You can also filter by tempo and mood.
RECOMMENDATION: Apply this enhancement, but listen to the tracks first if there’s any concern about Meta choosing one that is inconsistent with your brand. Spend some time finding tracks that you can safely use in the future.
Relevant Comments
Meta can feature the “most relevant” comment below your ad on Facebook and Instagram. We’re unable to get a real-life preview because the ad would first need a comment to display in this way.
RECOMMENDATION: There’s a certain level of blind faith with this enhancement. Truthfully, I may have noticed this in action one or two times ever. That doesn’t mean that you should or shouldn’t do it. If you have a sensitive client, maybe turn it off. Otherwise, I tend to leave it on until I’m given a good example of it featuring a negative comment.
Image Filter
The changes here will be minor, but an artistic filter will be applied that sharpen, adjust the color temperature, or add a vignette or radial blur.
RECOMMENDATION: This one again is difficult to judge since you won’t be given an example of your own image in preview. This is likely fine to leave on in most cases, unless you are worried about impacting the artistry of the original image. An example is if you are a photographer or artist and don’t want Meta to make any minor adjustments.
3D Animation
You can see each version of this when flipping through the carousel. Basically, it takes an image and turns it into a simple movie with movement. In the image example above, it zooms in and out. Nothing overly dramatic, but it may help draw attention to the ad.
RECOMMENDATION: Like many of these enhancements, it all depends on how sensitive you or a client are to changes. It’s kind of weird when you see it the first time, but the change should only be used if it will help you.
Image Template
This might be every advertiser’s least favorite enhancement. It adds a solid block bar at the top of your image with your ad headline in the middle of it. It looks pretty awful. There’s no way to sugarcoat it.
Luckily, you can adjust the fonts and colors.
That sounds helpful, but you can only change the text style and background color. From what I can tell, you can’t change the font color. I’m no designer, but I’ve messed with it and it still looks pretty awful.
RECOMMENDATION: If you turn this one off, I understand. If you can, adjust the text style and background color to improve it. Like all of these enhancements, they shouldn’t technically be used to your detriment. If Meta sees over and over that it’s not working, it won’t (or shouldn’t) be used.
Visual Touch-Ups
Meta will automatically adjust the aspect ratio, brightness, and contrast of your ad creative. You can cycle through the carousel to see examples of these enhancements.
I uploaded 1:1, 9:16, and 1.91:1 versions, but Meta generates a slightly taller than square version for Instagram, as an example.
RECOMMENDATION: I actually appreciate the aspect ratio variations, especially when an image takes up more space than it normally does. But depending on the image, you’ll want to be sure that it still looks okay. I personally don’t consider brightness and contrast as significant changes that would worry me, but it may depend upon the situation.
Text Improvements
Any text that you provide for primary text, headline, and description can be swapped to a different location. The most logical example would be moving the headline to primary text for a placement that may have limited text. That headline could be a more effective call-to-actionA call-to-action is a button or link on your ad that suggests the action you want your audience to take. Examples: "Learn More" or "Sign Up." More.
RECOMMENDATION: If you’re going to turn this on, consider it when you add your text. It’s not that you should drastically alter your approach to text, but think about how a headline or description may appear as the primary text, for example. Don’t overthink it. I’d leave this on.
Expand Image
Meta automatically expands your image to better fit certain placements. I have to be honest, I have no idea how this is any different than the Visual Touch-Ups enhancement related to aspect ratio. But in both cases, I find it useful.
RECOMMENDATION: As long as the preview looks good, I’d leave it on. This can be a useful little enhancement to help take up more real estate.
Add Items From Catalog
I’ve found this appears when using a video. You’ll, of course, also need a product catalog. Meta will automatically feature products under your ad, which could be useful if they’re relevant to your ad.
If you click “Change Catalog,” you can select the specific catalog and product set that Meta pulls these products from to make it more relevant.
RECOMMENDATION: Especially useful if you can select a product set that’s relevant to the ad. If you don’t have a catalog, there’s no reason to turn this on. If you aren’t able to select a catalog or product set that’s relevant to the ad, maybe it doesn’t make sense to include it (though it still may be worth leaving on as an option).
Carousel Enhancements
There are a few enhancements that only apply to carousel ads.
Profile End Card allows Meta to automatically add a card to the end with your page’s profile. If you’ve long used carousels, you may see this as an odd optimization since it’s been a manual option for years.
Dynamic Description allows Meta to determine if and when to show the carousel card description to improve performance.
Highlight Carousel Card allows Meta to highlight the best performing carousel card first.
RECOMMENDATION: None of these are particularly huge enhancements that are likely to be problematic. I’d keep them all on when running carousel ads.
Other Ad-Level Compositional Changes
I’m not seeing these in my Advantage+ Creative previews, but there are a handful of other standard enhancements may be applied to your ads.
Adding Labels: Meta may add a label to helpful something about your business, like Page likes or ratings.
Adding Business Metadata: Meta can highlight information from your website or mobile app, app stores, and other business information that may encourage people to click on your ads.
Final Thoughts
Overall, it’s important to remember that these changes aren’t automatically applied to your ad creative in all cases, in all placements, and for all people. In some cases, it’s personalized. The original version of your ad will still be shown.
Personally, I’m adventurous and am generally okay turning on these optimizations by default. The one I’ll sometimes turn off is the image template, as explained earlier. As long as enhancements are applied the way Meta says they are, they should only be used to my benefit. If anything, I be missing out on improved performance by not activating these optimizations.
But again, it’s easier to say that with my own ads. Certainly more complicated when you have a client who sends you a frantic email of one of the “creative” variations. You’ll need to address this on a case-by-case basis, but the previews should help you make these decisions.
Watch Video
I also recorded a video to walk through this. Watch it below…
Your Turn
How do you approach Advantage+ Creative enhancements. Do you turn them all on? Or which ones do you turn off?
Let me know in the comments below!
