Solved: Manual targeting is being removed for Advantage Plus?

Hi there,

Thanks for getting in touch. I had a look over your situation with Meta ads and I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on my experience. It sounds incredibly frustrating, and honestly, a situation we see quite a bit. A lot of people are getting spooked by Advantage+, but I reckon we can get to the bottom of it.

First things first, don't panic. Lets get this sorted.

Let's talk about Advantage+ and manual targeting...

Right, that video you saw announcing manual targeting is going away... I'd take that with a massive pinch of salt. It's likely a bit of an exaggeration or a misinterpretation. Meta are definately pushing their "Advantage+" suite, which is their term for handing more control over to their AI for optimisation, but they haven't completely removed manual controls. It wouldn't make sense for them to.

What's actually happening is that they are making the AI-powered options the default and sometimes hiding the manual settings a bit deeper in the ad setup process. But you can still build campaigns with manual targeting, specific audiences, and manual placements. The narrative that its "Advantage+ or nothing" is just not true. You can still run 'classic' campaigns alongside Advantage+ ones.

The key thing to understand is that Advantage+ isn't a magic button you just press and hope for the best. It's a powerful tool, but it's only as good as the information and the strategy you give it. If you feed it a messy setup, you'll get messy results back. This sounds exactly like what's happening with your account.

We'll need to look at your audience targeting...

You mentioned your Advantage+ campaigns are burning money by retargeting your current customers and even your own page. Honestly, this is the biggest red flag and almost certainly the main reason your CPA is so high. Your basically paying to advertise to people who have already bought from you or are already fans of your page. It's like a restaurant spending its entire marketing budget on putting flyers on the tables of people who are already eating there. A complete waste of cash.

This tells me your campaign structure and, crucially, your audience exclusions are not set up correctly. The AI is being told to find "customers", and without the right instructions, it's just going after the lowest-hanging fruit it can find – which includes people already in your ecosystem. This is a classic mistake we see all the time when we audit new client accounts.

To fix this, you need to be ruthless with your exclusions. In any prospecting campaign (a campaign designed to find new customers), you MUST exclude:

-> All previous purchasers (e.g., a custom audience of 'Purchase 180 days')
-> Your email/customer lists
-> People who have recently engaged with your Facebook/Instagram pages
-> All recent website visitors (you'll retarget them seperately)

Getting this right immediately stops the money burn and forces the algorithm to go out and find genuinely new people, which is the whole point of a prospecting campaign. This also relies on your Meta Pixel working properly. If your pixel isn't firing correctly on purchase events, then Meta doesn't know who your customers are, and can't exclude them. So you need to check your Events Manager and make sure your purchase, add to cart, and other key events are being tracked without any errors. Your pixel is the brain of the operation, if its getting dodgy info, the whole system collapses.

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

Running just one type of campaign, like a single Advantage+ campaign, and hoping it does everything is a recipe for disaster. You need to structure your account to match a customer's journey. In paid ads, we call this a ToFu/MoFu/BoFu funnel (Top, Middle, Bottom of Funnel). It's a structure we've used to get great results for countless eCommerce clients. I remember one campaign for a women's apparel brand, where we implemented this structure and achieved a 691% return on ad spend because it stopped the wasted spend and focused the budget where it mattered.

Here’s how it works:

1. Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Prospecting:

This is your cold outreach. The goal here is to find brand new people who have never heard of you. This is where you can use Advantage+ Audience, but with those strict exclusions we just talked about. Or, you can use manual campaigns targeting Lookalike Audiences (e.g. a Lookalike of your best customers) or detailed interest-based targeting. The key here is to find what works to bring in cheap, relevant traffic.

2. Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Warming Up:

This is for people who've shown some interest but haven't taken a major step. This is a classic retargeting campaign. You'd target people who have visited your website, watched a percentage of your video ads, or engaged with your social pages in, say, the last 30 days. Crucially, you EXCLUDE anyone who has added to cart or purchased. The goal here is to stay top of mind and show them more about your products or brand story.

3. Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Closing the Deal:

This is your highest-intent audience. You'll run a seperate retargeting campaign targeting people who have added products to their cart or initiated checkout but didn't buy. These are your hot leads. The ad copy here should be direct, maybe mentioning a limited-time offer or reminding them about the items they left behind. The targeting window should be short, maybe 7 or 14 days. And again, you MUST exclude people who have actually purchased.

By splitting your campaigns like this, each one has a clear job. Your prospecting campaign finds new people, and your retargeting campaigns convert them. It stops Advantage+ from getting confused and trying to do everything at once, which is when it starts retargeting your existing customers and driving up costs.

You probably should focus on creative testing...

With targeting becoming more automated, the single biggest lever you have to pull for better performance is your ad creative. The AI is clever, but it’s not a creative genius. It can only optimise the images, videos, and copy that you give it. If you give it one ad, it only has one option. If you give it five different ads with different hooks and visuals, it can test them all and figure out what your audience actually responds to.

I remember working with a B2B SaaS client, where we found that simple User-Generated Content (UGC) style videos massively outperformed slick, professionally produced ads. You've got to test a variety of things:

-> Formats: Static images, carousels, videos, Reels-style clips.
-> Angles: Focus on a product benefit in one ad, the problem it solves in another, and customer testimonials in a third.
-> Hooks: The first 3 seconds of a video or the headline of an image ad are everything. Test different opening lines and questions.

Giving Advantage+ a healthy mix of creatives to play with is absolutly essential. It needs data and options to learn. If your CPA is high, it could be that your creative just isn't resonating, and the AI is having to show the ad to a huge number of people before it finds someone who clicks, which costs a fortune.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in, so I've put the main action points into a table to make it clearer. This is the framework we'd use to turn a struggling account around.

You'll need a clear strategy going forward...

Fixing this isn't just about ticking a few boxes; it's about shifting your approach from just 'running ads' to building a proper advertising system for your business. The things I've outlined—the funnel structure, the exclusions, the creative testing—are the foundations of pretty much every successful Meta ads account we've ever managed.

While tools like Advantage+ are designed to make things simpler, they paradoxically make a solid underlying strategy even more important. You can't just leave it all to the AI. Getting these foundations right is what seperates the businesses that see a huge return from their ad spend from those that feel like they are just burning money.

Implementing all this correctly can be complex and time-consuming, especially when you're also trying to run your business. If you feel you might benefit from some expert help to get this all set up and managed for you, we'd be happy to have a chat. We offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can take a proper look through your ad account with you and map out a more detailed plan.

Hope this helps clear things up a bit!

Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh