Meta has introduced a slate of new advertising tools ahead of what the Facebook parent company is referring to as “the first AI-powered holiday season.”
Meta advertisers now have access to tools providing new ways to optimize budgets for seasonal demand, the ability to target distinct audiences within the AI-powered Advantage+ shopping campaigns and expanded access to tools that help drive purchases directly on Facebook and Instagram.
“This year is gearing up to be a big one for digital marketers, as the first-ever AI-powered holiday season,” said Justin Osofsky, VP and Head of Online Sales, Operations and Partnerships at Meta in a blog post. “AI is taking center stage across the advertising industry with more tools available to marketers than ever before.”
The new capabilities include:
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- Making it easier to shop in-platform: The existing “Shops ad” product enables users to make a purchase directly within Facebook or Instagram. Now Meta is testing a series of new integrations with leading ecommerce providers to make is easier for businesses to set up their Facebook and Instagram Shop and run Shops ads. Among the new partners added are Adobe Commerce, Magento Open Source and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. They join existing partners that include Shopify, BigCommerce, Feedonomics, ProductsUp, GoDataFeed and ChannelAdvisor.
- Managing and optimizing campaign spend: With the new “budget scheduling” feature, advertisers can better optimize their budgets for moments when they anticipate higher sales. Previously, if an advertiser wanted to increase its budget to capitalize on a peak sales moment or promotional period it would have to create a new campaign, but now that shift can be made directly within existing campaigns. After the designated period ends, the budget will then automatically revert back to the initial daily budget set for the campaign. Beginning in early Q4, advertisers will be able to use budget scheduling for both manual and automated campaigns like Advantage+ shopping campaigns.
- Making it easier for customers to find and use promo codes: Meta began testing its “promotional ads” product — designed to help businesses connect people with their best offers and simplify the process of finding and using discount codes — in May 2023. Now the offering will be made available to more advertisers in the U.S., the UK, Canada and Australia this holiday season.
- Enhancing the ability to create event reminders: Advertisers already have access to “reminder ads,” which allow users to opt in for reminders of brand events like a sale or product drop. Users that opt in from these ads receive three notifications, in the form of an Instagram post one day before, 15 minutes before and at the time of the event. Now the functionality of reminder ads is being enhanced to make it easier for brands to deploy them by uploading the creative for reminder ads directly in Ads Manager and allowing reminder ads to be placed in Stories.
- More control over audience targeting in Advantage+: Meta’s Advantage+ shopping campaigns tool already uses AI to automate the process connecting the best ad creative with the right audience to drive success. Now Meta is testing the ability for advertisers to share their preferences about the audiences they value most and increase their bids when targeting those users.
Tapestry, owner of brands like Coach and Kate Spade, has been an early tester of bid multipliers and successfully used the tool to target a Gen Z audience at scale. “Having additional controls within Advantage+ shopping campaigns has allowed us to realize additional performance gains with the audiences that matter the most to our brand,” said Greg Merwede, Senior Director at Tapestry in a statement. “With bid multipliers in Advantage+ shopping campaigns we’ve been able to confidently increase our ad spend and reach younger audiences.”
