Solved: Advantage+ vs. Normal Ad Sets for Facebook Ads

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts on your question about Advantage+ vs manual ad sets on Facebook. It’s a really common question, especially now that Meta pushes Advantage+ so hard. The short answer is that there's a time and a place for both, but for a service business, one is often a much safer bet when you're starting out. I'll walk you through how I think about it and how we approach this for our clients.

So, what's the real deal with Advantage+?

You're right, Meta's big pitch for Advantage+ is that its AI is smarter than you. It automates audience targeting, placements, and creative delivery to find the path of least resistance to a conversion. In theory, it sounds brilliant. You give it your ad and your objective, and it goes off and finds customers for you. For a massive ecommerce brand with tens of thousands of purchases flowing through their pixel every month, it can be incredibly effective. The AI has a gigantic dataset of what a "buyer" looks like and can find more of them with scary accuracy.

But here's the catch, and it's a big one for service businesses. The algorithm is designed to get you the cheapest conversions possible, based on the data it has. If you don't have hundreds of high-quality conversion events (like 'lead' or 'schedule call') for it to learn from, it starts guessing. And its guesses are often based on finding people who are simply 'clicky' or prone to filling out forms, not necessarily people who are genuine, qualified leads for your specific service.

I remember one client who was selling a high-ticket B2B consulting service. They turned on Advantage+ and their cost per lead plummeted. They were thrilled. But then they looked at the quality. The 'leads' were from people who had no budget, weren't in the right industry, and had no decision-making power. They were cheap, yes, but they were utterly worthless. The algorithm did its job—it found the cheapest form-fills. It just didn't find any customers.

This is what I call paying Facebook to find non-customers. When you give the algorithm too much freedom without enough good data, you're essentially telling it: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm dutifully goes and finds users whose attention is cheap because they aren't in demand by other advertisers. They are, by definition, the worst possible audience for your product. Awareness is a byproduct of making sales, not a prerequisite. You have to optimise for the action you actually want.

We'll need to look at your customer's nightmare, not their demographic...

This brings me to the most important point. For a service business, you aren't selling a product, you're selling a solution to a problem. Often a complex, expensive, and urgent problem. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't "men aged 35-55 who like golf." That tells you nothing. You need to forget demographics and define your customer by their *pain*.

Your ICP is a nightmare. It's a specific, career-threatening, expensive situation they are desperate to escape from. For an accountancy firm, the nightmare isn't 'needing bookkeeping'; it's 'the gut-wrenching fear of a surprise tax audit revealing a critical error'. For a leadership coach, the nightmare isn't 'wanting to improve'; it's 'watching your best employee hand in their notice because of your poor management'. Your customer isn't a person; they are in a problem state.

Advantage+ can't find this. It can find 'business page admins' or people interested in 'small business'. But it can't find the person who was awake at 3 am last night worrying about cash flow. Only you can do that, with thoughtful, manual targeting. You need to become an expert in their world. What newsletters do they read (Stratechery)? What podcasts do they listen to on their commute (Acquired)? What software do they already pay for (HubSpot, Salesforce)? Who do they follow on Twitter for advice (Jason Lemkin)?

This intelligence becomes the blueprint for your manual targeting. You stop targeting vague demographics and start targeting proxies for their pain. This is how you find real customers, and it's something the AI, for all its power, just can't do without a massive amount of guidance from your pixel data first. This is a non-negotiable step. If you do this work first, your ads will have a fighting chance. If you skip it, you have no business spending a single pound on ads.

I'd say you need a proper audience structure...

Okay, so how do you actually build these manual audiences? You don't just throw a bunch of interests into an ad set and hope for the best. You need a structure. I always build campaigns for clients based on the marketing funnel: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

This isn't just jargon; it's a logical way to separate your audiences based on how familiar they are with you and how likely they are to buy. You talk to a complete stranger differently than you talk to someone who has already visited your pricing page, right? Your ad campaigns should reflect that.

Here’s how I prioritise building these audiences, especially for a new account:

1. Start with ToFu (Cold Traffic): This is your priority. You have to feed the funnel. Your best bet here is Detailed Targeting. This is where your ICP nightmare research pays off. Don't just target "business". If you're selling marketing services to startups, target interests like 'Y Combinator', 'TechCrunch', 'SaaS', and layer it with behaviours like 'Facebook page admins'. Get specific. The mistake most people make is choosing interests that are too broad. If you sell project management software for construction firms, targeting "Project Management" is useless. It’s full of students and people in other industries. But targeting interests like 'Procore', 'Autodesk', or magazines like 'Construction Executive'? Now you're getting somewhere. You are targeting things that your ideal customer is highly likely to be interested in, and teh general public isn't.

2. Build MoFu/BoFu (Retargeting) as soon as you can: Once you get traffic to your site, you can start retargeting. This is your lowest hanging fruit and will almost always give you the best return. You need at least 100 people in a custom audience to use it, but realistically you want more. In the begining, you can group them. For example, create a "All Website Visitors - Last 30 Days" audience. As you get more traffic, you can segment them by intent. Someone who visited your blog is warm (MoFu). Someone who visited your main service page and spent 2 minutes there is hot (BoFu). Show them different ads. The blog visitor might get a case study, while the service page visitor gets a direct offer for a free consultation.

3. Layer in Lookalikes later: Lookalike audiences are fantastic, but they are only as good as the source audience you give them. Don't create a lookalike of "all website visitors". That's too broad. You want to create lookalikes based on your highest-quality audiences first. In order of priority, I’d build them from:
-> Highest value previous customers (if you can upload a list)
-> All previous customers
-> People who submitted a lead form
-> People who visited your contact/pricing page
-> All website visitors (last resort)
Start with a 1% lookalike in your country, as it will be the most similar to your source. You can test broader audiences (2-5%) later as you scale.

You should have separate, long-running campaigns for each stage of this funnel. Test your different ToFu audiences against each other in different ad sets within your ToFu campaign. When you find a winner, give it more budget. Turn off the ones that don't work after they've spent enough for you to make a decision (e.g., 2-3x your target cost per lead). This systematic testing is how you find what works, rather than just letting an AI guess for you.

You probably should calculate what a lead is actually worth...

This is the part that most people skip, and it's why they get scared of high CPLs (Cost Per Lead). The real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but rather "How high a CPL can I *afford* to acquire a great customer?" The answer is your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Once you know what a customer is worth to you over their lifetime, you can work backwards to figure out what you can afford to pay for a lead. Let's say you run a marketing agency with a monthly retainer.

-> Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's your average monthly retainer? Let's say £2,000.
-> Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that? After your costs, let's say it's 70%.
-> Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of clients do you lose each month? Let's say 5%.

The calculation is: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

So, LTV = (£2,000 * 0.70) / 0.05 = £1,400 / 0.05 = £28,000.

Each client is worth £28,000 in gross margin to your business. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is at least 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £9,333 (£28,000 / 3) to acquire a single new client. Now, let's say your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a paying client. That means you can afford to pay up to £933 per qualified lead. Suddenly, that £100 lead from Facebook doesn't seem so expensive anymore, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that allows you to advertise confidently and agressively.

Now, what should you actually expect to pay? It varies massively by industry. We're currently running a campaign for an HVAC company in a competitive area, and they are seeing costs around $60/lead. We’ve run ads for childcare services where CPL was around $10 per signup. Our best consumer services campaign was for a home cleaning company which got a cost of £5/lead. For B2B, it's often higher. For one software client, we’ve generated leads from B2B decision makers on LinkedIn at around a $22 CPL, which is excellent. For you, it will depend on your service, your offer, and your targeting, but knowing your numbers means you won't panic when you don't get £1 leads on day one.

You'll need an offer they can't ignore...

This is probably the number 1 reason campaigns fail, even more than bad targeting. Your offer is broken. For service businesses, the default call to action is usually "Contact Us" or "Request a Quote". This is lazy and high-friction. It screams "I am going to sell to you". It presumes your prospect has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be pitched at. It instantly commoditises you.

Your offer’s only job is to deliver an "aha!" moment of undeniable value that makes the prospect sell themselves on your full service. You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

Instead of "Request a Demo", you need to get creative.
-> For a marketing agency: A free, automated website audit that shows them their top 3 SEO opportunities.
-> For a financial advisor: A free "Retirement Readiness" calculator and a 15-minute call to discuss the results.
-> For a corporate training company: A free 10-minute interactive video module on 'Giving Effective Feedback'.
-> For us, an ad consultancy: A 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns for free.

See the pattern? You give value first. You demonstrate your expertise rather than just claiming it. This builds trust and pre-qualifies your leads far better than a simple contact form ever could. Your ad copy also needs to reflect this problem-solving approach. We often use a formula like Problem-Agitate-Solve.

Problem: Are your cash flow projections just a guess?
Agitate: Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round?
Solve: Get an expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth. Download our free cash flow projection template to start.

This is a million miles away from "Accounting Services for Small Businesses. Contact Us Today." One speaks to a nightmare, the other speaks to a commodity.

This is the main advice I have for you:

So to bring this all together, here is the step-by-step process I would recommend for you instead of just switching on Advantage+ and hoping for the best. This is a framework that prioritises learning and control, which is what you need when you're starting out.

I know this is a lot to take in, and it's certainly more work than just clicking the Advantage+ button. But the difference is that this approach is a strategy. It's a system for predictably finding customers for your service, while Advantage+ for a new account is more like playing the lottery.

Getting this right can be tricky, and it involves a lot of moving parts. You need the right audience strategy, compelling ad creative, a high-converting landing page, and a solid offer. If one part is weak, the whole system can fail. This is where getting some expert help can make a huge difference.

We do this all day, every day for service businesses like yours. We've seen what works and what doesn't across dozens of industries and have the case studies to back it up. A lot of what I've outlined here is part of the initial process we'd take any new client through.

If you'd like to go over your specific situation, I'd be happy to offer you a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can have a look at your business, your goals, and your current setup, and I can give you some tailored advice on the best way forward. It's often the quickest way to get clarity and avoid costly mistakes.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh