Are Advantage+ shopping campaigns worth it?

A client asks why you are still running six ad sets when the agency down the road moved everything into one automated campaign and watched ROAS climb. Fair question. So you go to build one to compare, open Ads Manager, and the campaign type described in nine different guides is not there. What you get instead is Advantage+ Sales: ad sets, custom exclusions, audience suggestions, none of which those guides mention. They are all answering a question about a product Meta stopped letting anyone create.

Short answer: Advantage+ shopping campaigns are no longer a choice you can make. Meta renamed them Advantage+ Sales in February 2025 and later disabled creation of the old type entirely. The automation is worth running for most catalog advertisers, but only once you can separate new-customer revenue from the repeat purchases you would have won anyway.

The takeaways

• The campaign type you are researching was renamed and rebuilt. Advantage+ Sales took over in February 2025, brought ad sets back with no limit on how many, and added custom exclusions plus audience suggestions.
• The existing-customer budget cap is gone. The percentage lever that kept the algorithm off your repeat buyers was removed, so fencing off existing customers is now an ad set job.
• Reported ROAS flatters this campaign type more than most. It leans on modeled and cross-surface conversions, so a dashboard lift can be repeat business you were going to get for free.

What happened to Advantage+ shopping campaigns?

Meta renamed the format Advantage+ Sales in February 2025, and Jon Loomer's write-up of the replacement is still the clearest record of what moved. It was not a label swap. The old campaign was deliberately rigid: one ad set, almost no audience input, the whole pitch being that you got out of the way. Advantage+ Sales hands the levers back. There is no cap on how many ad sets you run, you can feed the system audience suggestions, and you can apply custom exclusions at ad set level. It also stretched past ecommerce into lead and app objectives. So if you are reading a guide that treats "the single ad set" as a live constraint, that guide is describing the old thing. Creating or structurally editing an old-style Advantage+ shopping campaign is no longer possible, which settles the migration question for you.

Why does the missing existing-customer budget cap matter?

Because it was the one honest guardrail in the whole format. The cap let you say: spend at most 20% of this budget on people who already bought. Jon Loomer's "No More Existing Customer Budget Cap" covers its removal. Without it, a campaign optimizing for purchase events does the rational thing and buys the cheapest purchases available, which are almost always your own customers. Someone who has bought twice converts at a fraction of the cost of a stranger. The algorithm has no idea that order was arriving via email anyway. So the campaign posts a beautiful ROAS while new-customer acquisition quietly flattens, and you find out two months later when revenue has not moved. It is the same failure mode as an over-fed retargeting audience, running at campaign scale, without the dial that used to limit it.

How do you keep the algorithm off your existing customers?

Structurally, since the percentage dial is gone. The clean version is two campaigns: one Advantage+ Sales campaign with your purchaser and subscriber lists excluded, and a separate one aimed at those lists on purpose. Two budgets, two ROAS figures, neither one hiding inside the other. If you would rather stay in a single campaign, build a dedicated ad set for existing customers with its own budget and apply custom exclusions to the prospecting ad set. That gets you most of the separation, though budget can still shift between ad sets in ways a hard cap prevented. Either way, the reporting is the real prize. You want a standalone number for what it costs to acquire someone new, not one blended with repeat orders. That number is what tells you whether the automation is paying for itself.

Is Advantage+ Sales better than a manual campaign?

Probably, on cost per result, for a catalog advertiser with enough conversion volume to feed it. I will not give you a figure, and I would treat anyone who does with suspicion. Search this topic and confident numbers appear everywhere: 4.5x ROAS versus 3.7x, 32% lower CPA, a 17% efficiency gain. Follow them back and they land on agency blog posts citing each other, with no study, sample or methodology at the end of the chain. Meta's own comparisons are marketing. Here is the version I trust from running these campaigns: the automation is good at mechanical work, placement mix, creative rotation, bid pacing, and it removes hours of fiddling that were never where the edge lived. Where it falls down is telling an incremental conversion from one you were getting anyway. That gap is where its reported ROAS gets most of its shine.

What should stay in your hands?

The decisions that cost money when they are wrong. Which audiences to exclude. What a new customer is allowed to cost. When to stop. Letting the algorithm do the media buying is reasonable; letting it define success is how an account drifts for a month before anyone notices. I made the same argument about Google's AI Max layer, and it holds here for the same reason: the system optimizes faithfully toward the goal you set, including when the goal is wrong. Placement is worth its own read of the placement breakdown rather than a blanket rule.

Our automation works from the reverse instinct. Rules only pause or kill, never launch or scale. Four safeguards sit in front of every kill: a learning-phase lockout under five days or €200, a ROAS floor that pauses a 1.5x ad instead of killing it, a CBO safeguard that leaves at least three ads active, and a frequency auto-kill at 3.5x. Every evaluation is logged, kills stay reversible for 24 hours, and full-auto is opt-in because the default is a recommendation you approve. Advantage+ Sales runs the other way round: it acts, then shows you the report. Worth using. Worth watching.