Introducing the AI Sandbox for advertisers and expanding our Meta Advantage suite

With millions of businesses advertising on our platform, we are being deliberate in how we develop and roll out these tools, helping to ensure they are built responsibly and provide value to our customers.

Improving Meta Advantage to make campaigns smarter, faster

Meta Advantage is our portfolio of automation products that use AI and machine learning to help optimize campaign results, personalize ads by matching them to the right people at the right time and ultimately help advertisers save time and money. Last year we consolidated our automated products under this new portfolio in order to help businesses more easily identify and benefit from them. Since then, we have seen adoption grow. For example, there are 3x as many advertisers using Advantage+ shopping campaigns weekly as there were 6 months ago.

Today, we are introducing new Meta Advantage features that will allow advertisers to take advantage of AI quicker, give them more flexibility in the creative they use and help them measure what’s working. These include:

• Switching manual campaigns to Advantage+ shopping in one click: Businesses will be able to transform their current campaigns into Advantage+ shopping campaigns, allowing them to take advantage of AI quickly and easily. This will be available in Ads Manager when you click on “duplicate” within an ad campaign. It will start rolling out gradually to all advertisers with access to Advantage+ shopping campaigns within the next month.
• Using video creative in catalog ads: Catalog ads allow an advertiser to import a catalog of products and run ads to promote those products. Now, instead of only being able to use static product images, advertisers will be able to import and use creative like branded videos or customer demonstration videos. We’ll then use AI and machine learning to dynamically show the best video to people across Feed, Stories, Watch and Reels. Advertisers will be able to use video in their manual sales campaigns or in Advantage+ shopping campaigns - with or without Shops as a destination. This product is currently in testing with select advertisers, and we plan to roll it out more broadly later this year.
• Rolling out Performance Comparisons: This new automatic reportallows advertisers to compare existing manual sales campaigns to Advantage+ shopping campaigns to better understand the positive performance impact of automation. This is already rolling out gradually to advertisers using Advantage+ shopping campaigns.
• Improving performance with Advantage+ audience: This is a new Meta Advantage product that will provide advertisers with an updated way to reach people and drive conversions. Instead of using an advertiser’s audience targeting inputs as hard constraints, such as Men, 18-35 years, who like baseball, advertisers who use Advantage+ audience will add their audience inputs as suggestions to guide who sees an ad. This allows our ad system to find more people outside of those suggestions if we think they will be interested and likely to convert. For certain advertisers who have a need for hard constraints, such as a minimum age for certain products or shipping location parameters, we will still offer those at the campaign level through a new section called “Audience Controls”. We think this will be a helpful tool to improve performance for advertisers in all verticals and all sizes, and we are currently testing it with a select group. Based on those learnings, we will open up testing to more advertisers in the coming months.

AI Infrastructure and Modeling Investments

We invest tens of billions of dollars annually in our infrastructure, and an increasing portion of that has been dedicated to building out our AI capacity for ads. Those investments are what ensure that the AI-powered tools advertisers touch-and-feel reach their full potential at scale – like generative AI, which often requires more computing capability to work effectively.

As part of our ongoing work to advance our AI modeling, we’re now using larger, more complex models in our ads system to further improve performance and measurement when we don’t have access to the same granular level of data. These enhancements share learnings across our ads system and ultimately achieve better results for businesses and create better experiences for people.

For example, previously on Instagram, we needed one model for optimizing clicks on Story ads and another model to optimize conversions or sales for ads on Reels. Now, with more advanced AI modeling that optimizes across all surfaces (Feed, Story, Explore, and Reels), it allows us to transfer learnings across multiple objectives at the same time, which helps improve advertiser conversions and the quality of ads people see.

This is a closer look at our efforts to use AI to improve the performance of ads for businesses, but certainly not all we are exploring. We think there is a big opportunity across all of our apps to apply AI to improve the experiences for both advertisers and people. We look forward to sharing more as we continue to innovate in this space.