Some marketers told Adweek they still find the tool useful. In a recent test of 31 advertisers, ASC improved ROAS 32% and cost per acquisition by 17% compared to business-as-usual campaigns, according to data Meta shared with Adweek.

Limitations of Advantage+

Not all marketers have found that ASC produces consistent enough results to recommend it to clients.

“We can’t make recommendations to increase that budget [for ASC] unless we can do it with a lot of confidence,” said Ryan Jones, CEO of digital agency Juice. “We could take very similar businesses and, for whatever reason, it’s working on one account but not another account.”

A particular limitation of ASC is that it optimizes toward conversions, and it is more likely to over-index on existing or likely consumers instead of helping brands find new audiences.

Digital agency Markacy has found that when buyers specify that an ASC campaign only direct 10%-15% of spend toward existing customers, it performs similarly to prospecting campaigns, a tool which can be more effective than ASC at finding new audiences.

“There is a problem with Meta grading its own homework,” said Chris Rigas, vp of media at Markacy, who said the agency has not seen ASC drive significant improvements in Meta’s incrementality, according to the agency’s own analytics. “The [ASC] campaign is ceding all control to Meta that allows to find people who are more likely to purchase…it doesn’t necessarily mean that those are incremental purchases.”

Reporting obscures a more consistent performance picture

When Apple made it harder for mobile apps to track users via its App Tracking Transparency framework in April 2021, performance on Meta campaigns plummeted. But sources say that Meta’s reporting may have been a bigger culprit for bleaker campaign reports than actually worse performance.

“You often saw really dramatic assessments of how much performance fell off in 2021,” Rigas said. “It was a 10% or 15% decrease in performance [due to signal loss] and the rest was because Meta wasn’t able to report it.”

In February 2022, Meta said it was underreporting conversions by 8%, down from 15% in September 2021.

Of note, Measured found incremental ROAS for prospecting campaigns was $1.92 between September 2022 and September 2023, only 34% higher than the $1.43 ROAS level in March 2021, the month before ATT was implemented. The difference in incremental ROAS between this past year and March 2021 for retargeting campaigns was only 7%, Measured found.