- Meta stopped asking whether you want automation. Advantage+ is now the default state for sales, leads and app campaigns, and the choice between a manual and an automated build is gone from the interface.
- Three levers decide whether a campaign counts as Advantage+: budget, audience and placement. Configure all three the automated way and the campaign enters Advantage+ by itself.
- The Opportunity Score grades how many of Meta’s recommendations you accepted. It does not grade your results.
- Haus ran 640 incrementality tests over 18 months. Advantage+ beat manual campaigns in 42% of them.
- So the useful question is not whether to automate. It is which controls to hand over, and which to keep.
Quick answers:
- Can you still turn Advantage+ off completely?
- Does a higher Opportunity Score mean better performance?
- Which Advantage+ creative enhancements should I turn off?
- How do I stop Advantage+ from rewriting my ad copy?
- Is Advantage+ audience the same as audience controls?
- How do I test Advantage+ against a manual campaign?
Meta’s automation stopped being a feature you switch on. It became the shape of the product. Build a sales or leads campaign today and you are already inside Advantage+, unless you go and take pieces of it back. The old skill was knowing which automations were worth trying. The new one is knowing which are worth reclaiming.
The numbers, and who reported them:
| Number | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 42% | Share of 640 incrementality tests over 18 months in which Advantage+ beat manual campaigns | Haus, via AdExchanger, Oct 29, 2025 |
| 12% lower | Incremental return on ad spend for Advantage+, at 18% lower daily spend | Haus, via AdExchanger, Oct 29, 2025 |
| 12% median decrease | Cost per result among advertisers who adopted Opportunity Score recommendations, in Meta’s own testing | PPC Land, Jun 22, 2025 |
| 7% to 9% | Average CPA improvement Meta reported for Advantage+ advertisers | Social Media Today, Jun 9, 2025 |
| 6% recall, 8% ad quality | Improvement Meta Engineering reported from the Andromeda retrieval engine | Engineering at Meta, Dec 2, 2024 |
Meta did not add automation to your account. It removed the manual option.
The switch happened in stages, and the last stage is an API deadline. In February 2025 Meta removed the choice between manual and automated campaign creation. AI optimizations began applying automatically to sales, app and leads campaigns (Search Engine Land, February 7, 2025). By November 2025, Advantage+ was on by default for both audience and placements (Social Media Today, November 25, 2025).
Underneath the interface, Advantage+ is not one setting. It is a state you fall into. Meta announced a unified campaign structure on May 29, 2025. It runs on three automation levers: budget allocation, audience targeting and placement optimization. Campaigns enter the Advantage+ state automatically once all three are set the automated way (PPC Land). There is no master toggle. That is why advertisers keep hunting for one and failing to find it.
The old structure has a shutdown date, and it is a separate change from the interface one. Marketing API v24.0, released October 8, 2025, prohibited creating new Advantage+ Shopping and Advantage+ App campaigns through the legacy APIs. That still left a workaround: revert to version 23.0 or earlier and keep building them. Version 25.0, scheduled for Q1 2026, closes it by prohibiting Advantage+ Shopping and App creation across all API versions (PPC Land). If anything in your stack still creates those campaign types, that is a dated build item rather than a preference.
What the Opportunity Score actually scores
Meta rolled the Opportunity Score out to all advertisers globally on June 9, 2025 (PPC Land, June 22, 2025). It is a 0 to 100 number in Ads Manager, and the temptation is to read it as a report card on your account.
It is not a performance score. It is an adoption score. Your score is based on how many Ads Manager recommendations you have applied. Meta ranks those recommendations by estimated performance impact (Social Media Today, June 9, 2025). The score reflects all active advertising in the account, not a single campaign. Apply every recommendation and you land at 100, whatever your cost per result is doing.
The recommendations are predictions, not instructions. Social Media Today’s read on the launch is blunt: they will not always produce improvements, and they are not definitive guidelines. Meta reported that Advantage+ advertisers saw a 7% to 9% CPA improvement on average (Social Media Today). Early Advantage+ leads campaigns showed a 10% lower cost per qualified lead than campaigns without the AI features (Search Engine Land). Those are averages across Meta’s whole advertiser base. Your account is one draw from a distribution wider than the average suggests.
The number that should decide how far you let it run
The best independent evidence comes from incrementality testing, not from platform-reported results. Haus, an incrementality measurement firm, examined 640 tests run over 18 months across a range of client verticals. Olivia Kory, Haus’s Chief Strategy Officer, reported that Advantage+ outperformed manual campaigns in 42% of them (AdExchanger, October 29, 2025).
Manual won the other 58%, and the gap outlasted the tests. Haus measured 12% lower incremental return on ad spend for Advantage+, at 18% lower daily spend. It also measured 17% less lift during post-test observation windows (AdExchanger). Read the spend figure carefully, because it cuts both ways: Advantage+ returned less, and it also spent less to do it. Kory’s hypothesis for why is the interesting part: “Is it so good at finding purchases, it’s actually targeting people who are already going to buy?”
That mechanism reconciles the two sets of numbers. Meta’s figures run through Meta’s attribution, which credits conversions the campaign touched. Incrementality counts conversions that would not have happened otherwise. An automation that excels at finding people already close to converting looks outstanding on the first measure and mediocre on the second. Neither party is lying. They are counting different things. So the conclusion is not that automation is bad. It is that a 42% win rate, measured by Haus, is a coin flip weighted slightly against you. A coin flip is exactly when you stop arguing and start testing. Kory’s advice was the same: test the trade-off for your own business.
The four Advantage+ controls, and which to reclaim
Meta sets all of them the automated way by default. Two are usually fine to leave alone.
Control 1 – Placements
Keep it on
Which surfaces serve your ad. Manual placement picking is the weakest lever most accounts pull.
- Reclaim only with a placement breakdown showing real waste
Low risk
Control 2 – Budget
Keep it on, choose the bid strategy
Pooled spend across ad sets. Automation accepts four bid strategies, so the choice is still yours.
- Move to COST_CAP only with volume and a real cost ceiling
Low risk
Control 3 – Audience
Reclaim through audience controls
Advantage+ audience treats detailed targeting as a suggestion. Audience controls are the hard constraint.
- Any boundary that costs money to cross belongs here
Reclaim
Control 4 – Creative
Reclaim at the account level first
The Advantage+ creative default applies across all eligible campaigns, so per-ad fixes get overwritten.
- Use restricted words before disabling text generation
Reclaim
Which Advantage+ controls to keep on, and which to turn off
Three levers define the Advantage+ state: budget, audience and placement. Advantage+ creative is a fourth control that arrives on by default alongside them. The four behave very differently. Placements and budget give up little that most advertisers were using well. Audience and creative are where the real trade-off lives, and where a service-area business or a regulated vertical can lose money quietly.
| Control | Default | What you hand over | Keep it on when | Take it back when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Advantage+ placements | On (Social Media Today) | Which surfaces serve your ad | Almost always. Manual placement picking is the weakest lever most accounts pull | A specific surface is provably producing junk and you have the placement breakdown to show it |
| Advantage+ campaign budget | On, one of the three levers that define the Advantage+ state (PPC Land) | Which ad set gets the money | You have one clear objective and enough volume for delivery to learn | You are deliberately protecting a small test cell that pooled budget will starve |
| Advantage+ audience | On (Social Media Today) | Your targeting inputs become suggestions rather than limits | Your offer genuinely serves anyone in the country | You have a hard boundary that costs money to cross, such as a service radius or a licensing footprint |
| Audience controls | The separate hard constraint layer (Jon Loomer) | Nothing. This is the layer you keep | Always, when a boundary is real | Never turn this off. It is the guardrail that survives Advantage+ audience |
| Advantage+ creative, all enhancements | On, and the setting applies account-wide (Jon Loomer) | How your image and copy are presented | You have no wording or imagery you are contractually or professionally required to hold exact | Your creative carries claims, disclosures or figures that must appear as written |
| Text generation specifically | On within Advantage+ creative | Meta may rewrite your primary text and headline | The offer is simple and the wording is not load bearing | Exact phrasing matters, in which case use restricted words rather than switching everything off |
The distinction between Advantage+ audience and audience controls is the one most accounts get wrong. Advantage+ audience treats your detailed targeting as a suggestion. Audience controls are, in Jon Loomer’s framing, the tight constraints. The algorithm has mostly free rein to find your audience, and these controls set the strict guardrails around it. A real boundary belongs in audience controls, not in the targeting inputs Meta is free to overrule. We wrote up how that leak shows up in a service-radius business in Meta Advantage+ audience expansion for roofing lead gen.
Where these settings live, and the ones worth changing this week
Advantage+ creative has an account-level default, and that is the setting people miss. Loomer’s guidance is specific: your Advantage+ creative settings apply across all eligible campaigns for the ad account. They live in Ad Account Settings inside the Ads Manager menu, near the bottom (Jon Loomer). At the ad level, an “All Optimizations” slider sits at the top of the Advantage+ Creative section. It turns every enhancement on or off at once, with individual toggles beneath it. Check the account default first. Fixing one ad while the account default re-enables enhancements on every new ad is a loop people run for months.
Restricted words is the precision instrument, and almost nobody uses it. Meta added a control that lets you list terms you do not want appearing in AI-generated copy: “Specify if there are certain words or phrases you don’t want to appear in AI-generated text options and we’ll exclude them in Advantage+ Creative text generation” (Social Media Today, September 2, 2025). This is the setting to reach for before you disable text generation wholesale. A restricted list for a health insurance advertiser is typed in as plain terms, one per entry:
free guaranteed no cost $0 best plan qualify now governmentThat keeps text generation working where variation helps, while stopping the specific words that cause the trouble. Switching the whole enhancement off costs you variation everywhere. The restricted list costs you seven words.
It helps to see what the restriction is protecting. Here is asset copy as an advertiser would type it into the ad:
Headline: Compare plans in your county Description: See what you qualify for before enrollment closes Primary text: Plans and pricing vary by county and by household size. Enter your ZIP to see the options available where you live, and what each one covers.The headline is safe to vary. The primary text is not. “Compare plans in your county” can be rephrased twenty ways without changing what it promises, so text generation has room to work. The primary text is doing screening: it says plans vary and it asks for a ZIP, which frames this as a look-up rather than a giveaway. A generated variant that trims it to “See your options now” reads better and screens worse, because it drops the two qualifiers doing the filtering. Restricted words protect the vocabulary. Only you can tell which sentence is load bearing.
On budget, the automation only accepts four bid strategies: LOWEST_COST_WITHOUT_CAP, COST_CAP, LOWEST_COST_WITH_BID_CAP and LOWEST_COST_WITH_MIN_ROAS (PPC Land). The practical default is LOWEST_COST_WITHOUT_CAP, which spends the budget and takes whatever cost per result the auction gives. Move to COST_CAP when you have a cost per result you cannot exceed and enough volume for delivery to learn from. Point it at the deepest conversion event you can feed consistently, not at the form fill, because the cap is only as meaningful as the event it is capping.
Set the value off your own trailing number, not off an ambition. Take your trailing 30-day cost per result on that same event and set the first cap at that number, not below it. If the last 30 days ran at a 62 dollar cost per result, COST_CAP goes in at 62, and you move it down in roughly 10% steps once delivery holds. The failure mode is not overspending, it is underdelivery: enter 40 against a 62 dollar reality and the campaign quietly spends a fraction of its budget while you wait for volume that never arrives. If daily spend falls well short of the budget for three days straight, the cap is too low. Raise it, or move back to lowest cost.
One more setting decides whether any of this works: what you optimize for. Advantage+ optimizes hard toward the event you nominate, so a shallow event produces exactly what a shallow event should. That is the subject of its own piece, why your optimization event, not your audience, is what changed.
What Andromeda changed about how much creative you need
Meta rebuilt the retrieval stage of its ads system, and retrieval is what decides which of your ads is even considered. Andromeda is Meta’s personalized ads retrieval engine, running on NVIDIA Grace Hopper hardware. Meta Engineering reported a 6% recall improvement to the retrieval system and an 8% ads quality improvement on selected segments (Engineering at Meta, December 2, 2024).
Better retrieval rewards a wider pool of distinct ads. A system that is better at matching a specific person to a specific ad can only use that skill when there are meaningfully different ads to match. Three near-identical creatives give it nothing to choose between. That is a structural argument for creative variety rather than a testing one. It also raises the cost of letting Advantage+ creative do the diversifying for you, because automated variations of one asset are not different angles. Meta’s own generation tools are covered in what Muse Image in Advantage+ means for your ad creative. Enhancements vary the presentation, not the idea.
What Advantage+ automation does not do
It does not tell you whether it worked. Meta’s reporting credits conversions its own delivery touched. That is the gap Haus’s 640 tests measured. It is why an account can post excellent platform numbers and a flat business (AdExchanger).
It does not respect boundaries you only expressed as targeting. A radius you care about has to live in audience controls, or it is not a boundary.
It does not fix a bad conversion signal. Optimization toward a shallow event gets you volume at that event. Automation makes that faster, not better.
It does not replace judgment about what to say. Enhancements rearrange, crop, recolor and rephrase. None of that produces a new angle.
And it does not settle its own case. Meta’s number and Haus’s number both exist. Only a holdout resolves them for your account: run the automated build against the manual build, split by geography or a randomized holdout, and judge on business outcomes. That is the one recommendation here that costs nothing to accept and cannot be handed to an algorithm.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you still turn Advantage+ off completely?
Not as a single switch. Advantage+ is a state a campaign enters when its budget, audience and placement are all configured the automated way, which is the default for sales, leads and app objectives (PPC Land). You take control back lever by lever: set audience controls as hard constraints, choose your own bid strategy, and adjust Advantage+ creative at the account level. Separately, the legacy Advantage+ Shopping and App campaign types stop being creatable across all API versions in Q1 2026, so anything built on them needs a migration plan (PPC Land).
Does a higher Opportunity Score mean better performance?
No. The score is calculated from how many Ads Manager recommendations you have applied, ranked by Meta’s estimated impact, and it reflects the whole ad account rather than one campaign (Social Media Today). Apply every recommendation and you reach 100 regardless of results. Meta reported a 12% median decrease in cost per result among advertisers who adopted the recommendations in testing (PPC Land), but that is a prediction across a large base, not a guarantee for your account.
Which Advantage+ creative enhancements should I turn off?
Start with the ones that alter meaning rather than presentation, which in practice means text generation and anything that changes what a claim says. Enhancements that crop, resize or recolor an image rarely cause harm. Jon Loomer’s warning is worth taking seriously: “These enhancements look terrible” is rarely a good reason to turn them all off, and blanket disabling without evidence usually costs more than it saves (Jon Loomer). Check the account-level default first, since it will keep re-enabling enhancements on newly built ads.
How do I stop Advantage+ from rewriting my ad copy?
Use restricted words before you disable text generation. Meta lets you specify words or phrases you do not want appearing in AI-generated text options, and excludes them from Advantage+ Creative text generation (Social Media Today, September 2, 2025). List the specific terms that cause the problem rather than switching the whole enhancement off, because the enhancement also produces the variations that help. If exact phrasing is non-negotiable across the whole ad, turn text generation off at the ad level and confirm the account default is not re-enabling it.
Is Advantage+ audience the same as audience controls?
No, and the difference is where most service-area accounts leak money. Advantage+ audience treats your detailed targeting inputs as suggestions Meta may go beyond. Audience controls are the separate, tight constraints the algorithm is not free to overrule, which Jon Loomer describes as the strict guardrails around an algorithm that otherwise has free rein (Jon Loomer). If a boundary costs money to cross, such as a service radius or a licensing footprint, it belongs in audience controls. Expressed only as detailed targeting, it is a hint rather than a limit.
How do I test Advantage+ against a manual campaign?
Run a holdout rather than a before-and-after comparison. Split by geography or use a randomized holdout so you have a real control group, keep the offer and creative constant, and judge on business outcomes rather than platform-reported conversions. The two measurement approaches disagree. Haus found across 640 tests over 18 months that Advantage+ outperformed manual campaigns in 42% of them, and delivered 12% lower incremental return on ad spend at 18% lower daily spend (AdExchanger). Platform reporting would not have surfaced that gap, because it credits conversions the campaign touched rather than conversions it caused.
Where this leaves you
Meta made the automation decision for you. What it left is a set of reclaim points and a real question about which are worth reclaiming in your account specifically. Start with the account-level Advantage+ creative default and your audience controls, because those two are where the automation can do something you did not intend. Then run one honest holdout before arguing about the rest.
If you want a second pair of eyes on how your Meta account is configured and what the automation is doing with your budget, that is what our Meta ads management work is for.
