Advantage+ Isn't a Button Anymore: What Meta's 2025 Campaign Overhaul Actually Changed

You go to build a campaign the way you've built a thousand of them. Sales objective, continue, and you wait for the fork in the road you've seen every time for three years: manual setup on one side, Advantage+ Shopping on the other. Pick a lane.

The fork is gone.

There's no prompt. No toggle. No little blue module asking if you'd like Meta to take the wheel. You're just dropped straight into a campaign builder, and somewhere off to the right it quietly says "Advantage+" as if it's always been there. Nobody asked you anything. The choice you used to make on purpose is now being made for you, based on how you fill the form out.

That's the change in one sentence, and it trips up nearly everyone the first time. So let me walk through what actually moved, what's noise, and the settings we're now running by default before you launch a cent.

Advantage+ is a state, not a setting

Here's the thing to get your head around. Advantage+ used to be a thing you switched on. You clicked the module, you were in, the campaign ran on its rules.

Now it's a state your campaign is in depending on how you set it up. Follow Meta's recommended path all the way down and you're "on" Advantage+ without ever choosing it. Start changing things to the older, more controlled setup and you slide off it. Same campaign builder, different mode, and the only thing deciding which mode you're in is the set of choices you make on the way down.

This matters because the two modes don't bid the same way. The Advantage+ mode optimises more one-to-one, matching individual people to individual creative. The older manual mode does a better job matching groups of people to groups of creative, which is exactly what you want when you're running structured prospecting with different angles in different packs. Neither is "better" in a vacuum. They're different tools, and now they live behind the same screen instead of behind a clearly labelled button.

So the first job isn't picking a setting. It's knowing which mode each campaign is actually in, because the interface will no longer tell you plainly.

The campaign score is the noise, not the signal

The most distracting addition is the little campaign score in the corner, counting up to 100 as you "comply" with Meta's recommendations. Turn off the catalog you weren't using and watch it drop to 80. Switch budget control or change the audience and watch it slide to 60.

Ignore it. I mean that almost literally.

That score is not a prediction of how your campaign will perform. It's a measure of how closely you've followed Meta's preferred default path, which is not the same thing as the path that makes you money. All it's really doing is nudging you back toward the fully automated setup. A 60 with your structure intact will routinely outperform a 100 you bent your whole strategy to reach.

I've watched founders quietly sabotage good campaigns chasing that number to green. They'll leave a catalog toggle on, or hand budget control back to Meta, purely because the score rewards it. Don't let a progress bar make your media-buying decisions. Read it as a compliance meter and move on.

The genuine wins worth being happy about

It's not all repackaging. A few of these changes are real upgrades, and they're easy to miss under all the renaming.

• You can finally exclude audiences from a broad Advantage+ setup. For years, broad Advantage+ meant you couldn't cleanly keep your existing customers or retargeting pools out of it. Your only blunt tool was an existing-customer budget cap. Now you can add a proper audience exclusion. That means a 100% broad campaign can be steered toward genuine net-new prospecting by simply excluding your purchaser and engager lists. That's a real structural win.
• Multiple ad sets can now live inside one Advantage+ campaign. Previously this was a single-ad-set world. Now you can duplicate ad sets into the same campaign, which opens up far more diversity inside your scaling vehicle than you used to be allowed. Used well, that's more room to let different creative breathe without spinning up a dozen separate campaigns.
• The budget naming is finally sane. CBO, then Advantage+ budget, now just "campaign budget" versus "ad set budget". Same mechanism we've always used, finally called what it is. Minor, but after years of renamed buttons, a clear label is welcome.
• Placements are no longer locked. For the first time in an Advantage+ setup you can actually touch placements, devices, and brand-safety controls instead of being forced onto everything, everywhere. More on the brand-safety part below, because that one has a catch.

The audience exclusion is the standout. If you take one practical thing from the overhaul, it's that broad prospecting and clean exclusions can now coexist, which is something we'd wanted for a long time.

The settings we're running by default

People want the actual recommendations, so here's where we've landed for a typical Shopify store. This isn't gospel, it's our starting point, and we'll tweak it as we test across accounts. Treat it as a sensible default, not a guarantee.

At the campaign level:

• Campaign budget, not ad set budget. For ecommerce, ad-set budgets are mostly outdated. We run campaign budgets nearly every time so Meta can move money to whatever's working inside the campaign.
• Catalog off unless it's genuinely a catalog campaign. Yes, switching it off dings your score. We don't care. Most of what we run isn't catalog-based.
• Highest volume as the bid strategy, for now. Until the ROAS-goal options loosen up around attribution windows, we're keeping it simple with highest volume rather than boxing Meta into a goal it'll struggle to hit.
• Engaged audiences and existing customers properly defined. Add-to-cart and visitor lists from both the pixel and your email platform for engaged; purchasers over the last 90 to 180 days for existing customers. This is plumbing, but it's the plumbing that makes your exclusions and reporting actually work.

At the ad set level:

• Website and Shop as the conversion location if your Instagram and Facebook shops are set up, otherwise just website.
• Purchase as the optimisation event. Always. Never an add-to-cart or anything higher in the funnel. Purchase is where the money changes hands, and that's the only signal worth training Meta on.
• A 7-day-click, 1-day-view attribution window. More signal in the platform, more accurately Meta can find the people who actually buy.
• The older, controlled audience builder for most accounts. We'll typically choose to limit reach and switch over to the original setup. It'll still read "Advantage+ on", but you regain control of age and gender, which a lot of brands genuinely need. That control is worth the lower score every time.

Which creative enhancements to keep, and which add untested risk

This is where the new flow can quietly hurt you. Meta now pre-selects a stack of creative enhancements for you, and on a fresh ad you'll often find five or six of nine switched on without your say-so. Some help. Several add risk to a launch you haven't tested yet.

What we keep on:

• Text improvements. Reliable, low-risk, generally helpful.
• Enhanced CTA. The other one we've consistently seen pull its weight.
• Relevant comments, so the social proof on the ad stays visible.

What we switch off before launch:

• AI-generated backgrounds, image expansion, 3D animation, visual touch-ups, brightness and contrast adjustments, and the various overlays. Not because they can never work, but because they're still effectively in beta and they change what your customer sees in ways you didn't approve. You spent real money and thought on that creative. Letting an untested filter quietly restyle it before it's even had a chance is risk you don't need on a launch.

The trap is that some of these hide. You'll deselect them in the enhancements panel, then find a few have crept back into the Advantage+ creative section lower down, and a couple more behind a "show more" link in the corner. So check it twice. The goal is a clean ad showing exactly what you signed off on, with only the two or three enhancements you actually trust doing any work.

One genuine unknown to flag: the new flow has been quietly shifting inventory filters toward "expanded", which means your ads can show against a wider, less curated pool of content than the moderate setting most brands have run for years. That's worth checking on each account and watching, rather than accepting blind.

Where to from here

None of this is settled. It's a fresh rollout, the labels will keep shifting, and anyone who tells you they've got the perfect 2025 setup nailed is guessing. What I'd actually do this week is open one live account, walk the new create flow slowly, and just notice where Meta has quietly made a choice on your behalf: the mode you're in, the enhancements switched on, the inventory filter, the score nudging you off your own structure.

If you'd rather not eyeball all of that alone, that's roughly what we do in a Signal/Noise Audit, with someone who's now seen this new flow across a stack of accounts mapping what's actually steering your delivery versus what's just Meta's default talking. Either way, the move is the same: read the new flow as a set of opinions, not instructions, and decide which ones you agree with.