Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) have been among Meta’s most high-profile ad product launches in the last year, but some marketers are finding the results lacking.

The tool—which lets artificial intelligence, instead of the marketer, choose which audiences to serve an ad—has helped the company regain some of its mojo with buyers who had diverted spend away from the platform in recent years, especially after Apple’s privacy changes dampened Meta’s ad performance. On the company’s first-quarter earnings call in April, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said daily revenue from ASC campaigns was up sevenfold in the previous six months. The product was first introduced in August 2022 and released more widely later in the fall.

But after playing with the tool for nearly a year, some marketers say its prowess has been overblown. While the tool can be effective, it’s not a silver bullet, or necessarily the best tool in Meta’s arsenal, ad buyers told Adweek.

ASC is an example of Meta’s greater embrace of artificial intelligence. The introduction of AI into media buying has also been employed by rivals Google and TikTok, whose tools Performance Max and Smart Performance Campaigns, respectively, also aim to use automation to produce better results, at the expense of marketer control.

“There is a reason to be skeptical of these newer automation tools,” said Katharine Painter, media director at independent media agency Apollo Partners.

Backing this observation of Meta’s ASC is data from measurement platform Measured, which helps companies normalize measurement across multiple platforms and works with brands like Crocs, Foot Locker and Patagonia.

Incremental return on ad spend (ROAS) for Meta, a measure of how much sales could be attributed to Facebook and Instagram alone versus other platforms, was $1.40 for ASC campaigns, compared to Meta’s reported ROAS of $4.01, Measured found. The metrics are a mean of performance each month between September 2022 and 2023.

Over-reporting is common among all platforms, who often take credit for conversions that may be driven by users seeing the same ads on other media properties, said Jim Greco, vp of professional services at Measured.

Of note, the incremental ROAS Measured found was lowest for ASC campaigns, compared to two other Meta ad formats, prospecting and retargeting. According to the results Meta reports to marketers, ROAS for ASC campaigns is supposed to be between that of prospecting and retargeting, undermining the idea that ASC is Meta’s most effective format.

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