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Meta Ads Manager is evolving rapidly, and with Advantage+ Creative Enhancements, you get new AI tools to automatically improve your ads. But what works, and what should you avoid?
Here are the three most important insights:
- Creative Enhancements can significantly increase performance – but require active management.
- It is crucial to choose the right improvements for specific campaign objectives and creatives.
- Meta activates improvements automatically, which you should review to ensure they support your brand and make sense.
1. What are Advantage+ Creative Enhancements?
Meta Advantage+ Creative Enhancements is an AI-driven function that optimizes your ads by automatically adding visual and auditory elements such as:
- Text overlays and text improvements
- Music and 3D animation
- Automatic image and video format adaptation
- Brightness and contrast adjustment
- Comments and view links
The purpose is to improve performance, reduce daily administration, and free up time in ad production. At the same time, it provides insights into which visual elements work best for your target audience, allowing you to make more informed decisions. Many advertisers have reported higher conversion rates and lower acquisition costs as a result of Creative Enhancements.
Creative Enhancements offer clear advantages but also involve compromises. The AI proactively optimizes creatives based on user preferences, improving performance in real-time. However, you lose some manual control over the ads. Therefore, it’s important to be attentive to the adjustments Meta makes and actively deselect elements that could harm your brand identity or distort the message.
2. Advantages and Disadvantages: What Works – and What You Should Avoid?
Based on the specific functionality of these features and our experience with campaigns across industries, we recommend focusing on the following:
Advantages – What You Can Advantageously Activate:
- Text Overlays: If your primary text or headline contains relevant elements like USPs, discount codes, or similar that could be obvious to highlight, consider using overlays. Overlays allow you to reuse existing texts and place them on top of the creative to create eye-catching and relevant content without having to design it yourself.
- Catalog Elements: If you sell products, utilize the function’s ability to automatically display relevant products from your catalog, which improves targeting and relevance for each user.
- Visual Touch-ups: Automatic adjustment of light, contrast, and format can improve image quality and make the ad more eye-catching.
- Automatic Image and Video Format Adaptation: Meta automatically adapts formats to different placements like feed, stories, and reels, saving you manual editing and ensuring consistent visual presentation across platforms.
These improvements typically relate to image quality and conversion signals without changing your message.
Disadvantages – What You Should Generally Turn Off:
- Music and 3D Animation: Using these elements can be distracting and remove focus from your primary message. There is minimal control over music selection, and 3D animations currently rarely work optimally.
- Text Improvements: Meta’s automated text changes can remove essential CTAs and product benefits, resulting in generic and tone-of-voice incompatible messages.
- Comments and Links: User-generated content that doesn’t fit your brand can reduce the credibility of your ad and create confusion.
- Brightness and Contrast Adjustment: While visual adjustments are often beneficial, excessive adjustments can create ads that don’t match your brand’s visual identity, creating an inconsistent user experience.
3. Which Advantage+ Creative Enhancements Suit Which Creatives?
To get the most out of Meta’s automatic creative improvements, it’s crucial to choose the improvements that match your creative format and campaign objectives. Here’s an overview of which improvements typically perform best – and which you should avoid – for different ad types in Meta Ads Manager.
4. How to Optimize Your Ads with AI – Without Losing Control
Advantage+ Creative Enhancements can elevate your campaign performance, but only if you use them strategically. Meta’s AI can be a strong ally, but it should be managed carefully to avoid unintended changes in message and brand expression. Here’s our approach to a targeted workflow that helps you leverage AI’s strengths – without losing control:
Start with a Solid Creative Basis
Upload high-quality images and videos so the algorithm has good material to work with. It is recommended to use a minimum of 3-5 different creative variants to give the AI sufficient material to work with.
Manually Deselect Irrelevant Enhancements
Carefully review available Creative Enhancements. Only activate the functions that actively support your campaign goals and brand expression – and deselect those that risk compromising message, tone, or aesthetics.
Test Before Scaling
Begin with a test campaign for at least 7 days with a moderate budget. This allows the system to collect learning and gives you insights into which combinations perform best before increasing investments.
Limit Dependency on Automation
Automation should support your strategy, not replace it. Supplement AI optimization with manual adjustments to ensure brand identity, messages, and visual consistency are maintained across campaigns.
Match Enhancements with Ad Type
Visual improvements typically work best for product-based ads and carousels, where eye-catching and clarity are crucial. For brand videos and Lead Ads, you should be more restrained, as AI adaptations can dilute key CTAs or disrupt the narrative.
Creative Enhancements in Meta’s Advantage+ introduce new opportunities to strengthen campaign effectiveness through automation – but also involve risks. By applying the functions strategically and selectively, you can leverage the potential of AI technology without compromising brand consistency or performance.
At IIH Nordic, we help companies navigate the complex advertising landscape and ensure that technologies like Advantage+ are used strategically and effectively. Our specialists are ready to advise you on structure, test setup, and creative performance optimization.
