TL;DR: Meta has a long list of new ad features on the way. We picked out the four we think will help ecommerce brands most: AI-powered audience discovery, “Choose an audience for each ad,” ROAS goal expansion, and the performance-based scaling tool. Several are already live in some accounts, and the timing is good for brands with Q4 seasonality.
Meta is releasing a lot of new ad features, and they’re arriving right as brands head into the busiest stretch of the year. The list is long, and most advertisers don’t have time to test everything. So Sarah Drewry, Senior Social Media Analyst on our paid social team, chose the ones she’s most excited to use in client accounts.
Meta’s Future Forward conference highlighted the Meta product roadmap and holiday creative strategy. From the many new features on the roadmap, here are four that save time, give advertisers more control over who sees each ad, and protect profitability while scaling. A few are already live in some accounts, and the rest are rolling out soon. Here’s what each one does and why it’s worth watching.
AI-Powered Audience Discovery Speeds Up Detailed Targeting
Until now, building detailed targeting meant searching keyword by keyword. If you wanted to reach shoppers interested in luxury goods, you’d type in each individual luxury brand in that category, pick through any suggested interests or demographics, then check that you’d covered everything and that the audience was still a healthy size. Done properly, that takes around 15 minutes per audience.
With AI-powered audience discovery, you describe your audience in plain language, such as “users who are interested in high-end luxury goods.” Meta then surfaces the relevant interests, behaviors, and demographics for you. You still have full control to review, edit, or remove any suggestion before you launch.
But doesn’t the Andromeda update make interest targeting obsolete? Not entirely. For more than a year now we’ve been saying “the creative is the targeting,” and broad audiences are still essential. But for discovery and brand-building campaigns, and especially when you’re testing new creative types, interest-based audiences help ensure the message reaches the people it was built for.
Our recommendation: Keep broad audiences as your foundation, and use audience discovery to build targeted tests quickly when you need to know exactly who is responding.
“Choose an Audience for Each Ad” Brings Targeting Down to the Ad Level
This is one of Meta’s newest announcements, and it fixes a common frustration. Many advertisers load one broad ad set with lots of creative, but not every ad is meant for the same person. An ad for first-time buyers and an ad for returning customers shouldn’t be served to the same audience.
This new targeting option lets you assign a distinct audience to each ad within a single ad set, so you can tell Meta which ad is for which audience. It doesn’t replace your broad audience. It works on top of it, giving Meta an extra signal about who each creative should reach first.
Our recommendation: Pair this with broad ad sets that hold a lot of creative. It’s an easy way to keep new-customer messaging and loyalty messaging from competing for the same users.
ROAS Goal Expansion Lets Volume and Profitability Work Together
As advertisers we’ve always had to choose between two optimization paths in Meta:
- Highest volume: get as many purchases as possible.
- Highest value: go after higher-AOV purchases and maximize return on ad spend.
Meta has now made ROAS goals available on “Maximize number of conversions” campaigns, not just “Maximize value of conversions.” That means you can push for as many conversions as possible while setting a ROAS target that keeps you profitable.
There’s also a new bid flexibility control, labeled “Flexible ROAS goal” in Ads Manager. You can choose whether Meta should hit your ROAS target precisely or allow some flexibility to deliver more scale.
Our recommendation: If you’re balancing revenue and ROAS goals this holiday season, test a ROAS goal on your conversion-volume campaigns before peak weeks hit.
Performance-Based Scaling Protects Your Base Budget When Demand Spikes
We usually recommend daily budgets, and Meta already scales spend up or down within that budget based on demand. The new performance-based scaling tool, which appears in Ads Manager as “Performance-based budget increase,” adds another layer. You set an additional budget on top of your core campaign budget, along with a cost-per-result target.
Meta only spends that extra budget when performance holds near your target, and it stops once the additional budget is used up. You can capture more results when demand is strong without putting your base spend at risk or worrying about costs running away when no one is watching.
This feature is still in beta, and Meta notes the design may change based on testing.
Our recommendation: This one was made for Cyber Week. For brands with heavy Q4 seasonality, an additional scaling budget lets you take advantage of high-demand days without overcommitting your core budget.
Get More Out of Meta This Holiday Season
Meta’s recent direction has been toward automation: broader audiences and AI doing more of the heavy lifting. The new features described here, however, offer marketers strategic control. We recommend that you experiment with these features as soon as they’re available in your account. Pairing Meta’s automation with your own controls is how you’ll get the most out of the algorithm.
ROI Revolution’s paid social team stays on top of every Meta update so your campaigns are ready as soon as new features arrive. Want help planning your holiday Meta strategy? Reach out to our team to get started.
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