Advantage+ sales campaigns: what Meta now decides for you, and when a VSL offer is ready for one

Three settings turn a Meta Sales campaign into an Advantage+ sales campaign: one campaign-level budget, Advantage+ audience, and every placement left open. Meta then decides who sees the ads, where they run and how the budget is spent. You still supply the creatives, the budget, the bid strategy and the purchase tracking it learns from. One old control is gone: the percentage cap on spending for existing customers.

Advantage+ is a state, not a campaign type

There's no separate Advantage+ campaign type any more. Advantage+ is a state a Sales campaign reaches while three settings, which Meta calls automation levers, are all on (Meta for Developers):

1. Advantage+ campaign budget. The budget sits on the campaign rather than on each ad set, with a bid strategy Meta supports for it, and Meta decides how it's spent across your ad sets. The CBO vs ABO guide covers when setting each ad set's budget yourself serves you better.
2. Advantage+ audience. Meta chooses who sees the ads.
3. Advantage+ placements. No placement is targeted or excluded, so every placement is eligible.

With all three on, Meta's API reports the campaign's state as ADVANTAGE_PLUS_SALES, and the same documentation says these campaigns appear as "Advantage+ On" in Ads Manager. Turn any lever off and the state reads DISABLED: it's an ordinary Sales campaign again. You can't set the state yourself; it follows from the settings. A budget moved down to the ad sets, or a single excluded placement, is enough to lose it without anyone meaning to.

This setup is also where Meta now starts you. Its February 2026 API announcement calls the change Automation Unification: Sales, App and Leads campaigns default to the Advantage+ setup (Meta for Developers). You opt out of automation now, rather than in.

The old shopping campaigns ran with exactly one ad set; a campaign can now hold several. That matters more than it sounds, because separate ad sets are now how you keep new and returning buyers apart.

Placements have a middle path too. Since October 2025, Meta's Marketing API lets Sales and Leads advertisers who exclude a placement allow up to 5% of spend on each excluded placement when Meta expects it to help (Meta for Developers). It's opt-in, and Meta still recommends leaving placements to Advantage+ for most advertisers. The announcement doesn't say whether a campaign using the option still counts as Advantage+, so if you use it, check the campaign's state after publishing instead of assuming.

Put a manual Sales campaign next to an Advantage+ one and the difference is who makes each decision:

Manual Sales campaign vs Advantage+ sales campaign

Who decides what, under the three automation levers

At least one lever offManual Sales campaign

A Sales campaign with an ad set budget, a hand-set audience or a placement choice.

• Budget on each ad set, or on the campaign
• You set the audience
• You can pick or exclude placements
• As many ad sets as the test needs

Best for: new offers, creative tests and any test where you decide which ad gets the money.

All three levers onAdvantage+ sales campaign

A Sales campaign with Advantage+ campaign budget, Advantage+ audience and every placement eligible.

• One campaign budget, with a bid strategy Meta supports
• Meta chooses the audience
• Every placement eligible; one exclusion ends Advantage+
• More than one ad set allowed
• No existing-customer budget cap

Best for: scaling an offer that already sells, with proven ads and steady purchases.

What happened to Advantage+ shopping campaigns

Advantage+ shopping campaigns reached ecommerce and retail advertisers in August 2022. They were a campaign type of their own, with one ad set per campaign, and Meta promoted them as automating "up to 150 creative combinations at once" (Meta newsroom). That number describes the 2022 launch. It isn't a limit of today's campaigns.

Meta now calls Advantage+ sales campaigns "the updated, streamlined versions" of the shopping campaigns. It rolled the change out ad account by ad account, so there's no single switch-over date, but its developer changelogs show the pace:

From Advantage+ shopping campaigns to Advantage+ sales campaigns

1. Aug 2022Advantage+ shopping campaigns launchRolled out to ecommerce and retail advertisers from August 15, 2022, with one ad set per campaign.
2. Oct 8, 2025Marketing API v24.0Creating, duplicating or updating shopping campaigns is no longer allowed in v24.0 and later.
3. Feb 18, 2026Marketing API v25.0Shopping campaigns can no longer be created or updated through v25.0, and Sales campaigns default to the Advantage+ setup.
4. May 19, 2026Every API versionThe block on creating or updating shopping campaigns extends to all API versions.
5. Jul 29, 2026Marketing API v26.0Meta had said the remaining shopping campaigns would be paused with v26.0. Its v26.0 notes don't mention the pause, so check any old campaign in your account yourself.

If an old shopping campaign is still in your account, move it on your own schedule rather than waiting for Meta to pause it:

1. Export its results by ad for the last few months, so your baseline survives the move.
2. Write down its campaign ID. A rebuilt or duplicated campaign gets a new one, and anything keyed on campaign IDs, from the URL parameters on your ads to the reports built on them, will treat it as a brand-new campaign.
3. Build a fresh Sales campaign with all three levers on and two ad sets, one for new and one for existing customers.
4. Bring over the ads that sold. Meta's API can migrate a shopping campaign in place and keep its ID, but not one whose ad set holds more than 50 ads, and a campaign that used the existing-customer cap can only be duplicated into a new one. Since the new structure wants two ad sets anyway, a clean rebuild with your best ads is usually the simpler path.
5. Run both for a week or two if the old one can still spend, so you compare them on the same days.

When a VSL offer is ready for Advantage+

Automation needs something to learn from. An Advantage+ campaign optimizes on the purchases Meta receives, and an offer that sells a handful a week gives it very little. If yours already struggles to collect purchases in an ordinary ad set, the learning phase post works out how many Meta wants and what budget that takes.

The other input is creative. With audience and placements automated, the ads you load are the main lever left in your hands. For a VSL offer, the ad's angle decides who clicks through to a long video, so arrive with several ads that have already sold and a pipeline of new ones.

Manual campaigns still teach more when you need answers rather than scale. A new offer whose price, hook or VSL is still moving belongs there. So does a creative test in which every concept must get its share of spend; the ad creative testing framework sets the budgets and kill rules. Advantage+ can show you that an offer sells, but with audience, placements and budget in Meta's hands, it tells you less about why.

The tree asks the three questions that decide it, in order:

Should this offer go into Advantage+ now?

1Has this offer already sold at a profit from Meta ads?

YesNot yet

2Do purchases come in every week, steadily?

Yes, steadilyA few, unevenly

3Do you have several ads that have sold, and new ones coming?

YesOne winner

Best fit

Keep testing in manual campaigns

The offer hasn't sold at a profit from Meta ads yet. Find a winning ad, price and VSL first, in campaigns where you choose who gets the budget. Automation can find buyers for an offer that converts; it can't make one convert.

Read more: Facebook Ads for a VSL: Tracking, Testing and Scaling

Best fit

Build purchase volume first

The offer sells at a profit, but purchases arrive a few at a time. Consolidate into fewer ad sets and grow volume before handing the budget to Advantage+, which optimizes on the purchases Meta receives.

Read more: Facebook Ads Learning Phase: 50 Events, Budget, Edits

Best fit

Find more winning ads first

The offer sells steadily, but it rests on one winning ad. With audience and placements automated, creative is the main lever left to you, so test new concepts before you scale through Advantage+.

Read more: Ad Creative Testing: Budgets, Metrics and Kill Rules

Best fit

Run Advantage+ next to your manual campaign

The offer sells at a profit, purchases arrive steadily and several ads have sold. Launch an Advantage+ sales campaign beside your best manual campaign, split new and existing customers into two ad sets, and compare cost per new customer in your own sales data.

Read more: CBO vs ABO: Which Meta Budget Setup Fits Your VSL

The existing-customer cap is gone: split new and returning buyers

Shopping campaigns had a setting that capped the share of the budget spent on existing customers, anywhere from 0 to 100%. You defined "existing customers" yourself, as custom audiences built from website visitors, app activity, customer lists, catalog or offline activity (legacy guide). The cap was never free: the same guide warned that "lower values may lead to higher costs per conversion."

For the new campaigns, Meta's documentation is plain: the cap "is not available for new Advantage+ campaigns". Its suggested replacement is two ad sets in the same campaign, one for existing customers and one for new ones.

Two ad sets aren't a cap on their own, though: with one campaign budget, Meta shifts spend between them in real time (Meta for Developers). The cap now lives on the ad set. Meta's recipe for replicating the old setting gives the existing-customer ad set a spending limit and excludes the same customer audience from the new-customer ad set. That limit is an amount in your account currency, not a share of the budget, so revisit it when the budget changes, and check each ad set's spend every week, not only its results.

Supplement brands feel this most. People who already take your product reorder anyway, and when they do it inside the attribution window of an ad they saw, the campaign takes the credit. A campaign that spends part of its budget on them can post a cost per purchase that your new-customer economics will never match.

An illustrative week shows the size of the gap. An Advantage+ sales campaign spends $4,560 and Ads Manager reports 120 purchases: $38 each. Split by ad set, the existing-customer ad set spent $960 for 40 purchases ($24 each) and the new-customer ad set $3,600 for 80 ($45 each). Your manual prospecting campaign runs at $46 per purchase. On the headline number, Advantage+ looks $8 cheaper. On new customers, the only ones your target CPA was built for, the two campaigns are a dollar apart. Repeat buyers made the difference.

Those 120 purchases are Meta's count, made with the ad set's attribution setting, so your store will show a different number (why the two disagree). To see the split in your own orders, put the ad set ID in each ad's URL parameters so every sale records its ad set. Because the old shopping campaigns had a single ad set, Meta gave them an audience-type URL parameter for this (Meta for Developers); with two ad sets, the ad set ID does the job.

In RevvyScales the rvs parameter carries the campaign, ad set and ad IDs from Meta, Google and TikTok, so each sale your checkout reports back lands on the right ad set (setting up rvs).

How to set up an Advantage+ sales campaign

Before you touch the settings, run one division. A budget of $300 a day at a $45 cost per purchase buys about 6.7 purchases a day, roughly 47 a week for the whole campaign, and fewer for each of its two ad sets. If that's less than your manual ad sets collect today, Advantage+ starts with less to learn from than the campaigns it's meant to beat. Raise the budget, or wait until the offer sells at a volume that supports it.

Setup itself is mostly a matter of which settings you leave on. The seven stages below follow Meta's developer documentation, so they say what to set rather than which button to press. Each stage gives the reason behind it and the mistake that undoes it:

Setting up an Advantage+ sales campaign

What to set at each stage, per Meta's developer documentation

1. 1Sales objective
2. 2Campaign budget
3. 3Audience
4. 4Placements
5. 5Two ad sets
6. 6Ads and tracking
7. 7Check the state

1Start a Sales campaign

What happens: Create a campaign with the Sales objective. Advantage+ is a state of that campaign, not a separate campaign type.

Why it matters: The Advantage+ sales setup applies to Sales campaigns; App and Leads campaigns have their own versions.

What goes wrong:

• Trying to copy an old Advantage+ shopping campaign: those can no longer be created or updated through Meta's API, so build a fresh Sales campaign.

2Put one budget on the campaign

What happens: Set the budget at campaign level (Advantage+ campaign budget) and choose a bid strategy Meta supports for it.

Why it matters: A budget on each ad set switches Advantage+ off.

What goes wrong:

• A budget picked from hope: size it from your cost per purchase, so the campaign can buy enough purchases to learn from.

Read more: CBO vs ABO: Which Meta Budget Setup Fits Your VSL

3Leave the audience to Advantage+ audience

What happens: Keep Advantage+ audience on.

Why it matters: It is the second of the three levers. Turn it off and the campaign is no longer Advantage+.

What goes wrong:

• Expecting audience-level insight: Meta picks who sees the ads, so the creative and the ad set are what you can compare.

4Leave every placement open

What happens: Don't target or exclude placements.

Why it matters: One excluded placement turns Advantage+ off. Meta's API also offers an opt-in middle path for Sales campaigns, up to 5% of spend on each excluded placement, but Meta's announcement doesn't say whether a campaign using it stays Advantage+.

What goes wrong:

• Excluding placements out of habit from manual campaigns.

5Split new and existing customers

What happens: Create one ad set for a custom audience of existing customers, with a spending limit on it, and one for new customers that excludes the same audience. That is the replacement Meta's documentation gives for the old budget cap.

Why it matters: You see what each group costs instead of one blended cost per purchase, and the limit caps what existing customers can take from the budget.

What goes wrong:

• One ad set for everyone: repeat buyers make the cost per purchase look better than your new-customer economics.
• A limit left alone after the budget changes: it is an amount, not a share.

6Load proven ads and check tracking

What happens: Add ads that have already sold, with URL parameters carrying the campaign, ad set and ad IDs. Make sure the Meta Pixel reports purchases, ideally with the Conversions API alongside it.

Why it matters: The campaign can only optimize on purchases Meta receives, and you can only split results by ad set if your orders carry the IDs.

What goes wrong:

• A checkout that completes the sale but never reports it to Meta.
• Name macros instead of IDs: Meta takes the names from a snapshot at first publish, so a renamed ad set keeps its old name in your URLs.

Read more: VSL Tracking: Pixels, CAPI and Sale Attribution

7Confirm it reads as Advantage+

What happens: After publishing, check that the campaign shows as Advantage+. Meta's developer documentation says these campaigns appear as "Advantage+ On" in Ads Manager; through the API the state reads ADVANTAGE_PLUS_SALES.

Why it matters: If one setting slipped, the state is DISABLED and you are running a manual campaign without knowing it.

To see where the switch sits in Ads Manager today, Meta's own explainer runs under a minute and a half:

1:27

Judging Advantage+ against your manual campaign

The purchases and cost per purchase in Ads Manager are counted with each ad set's attribution setting, 7-day click or 1-day view unless you change it (Meta for Developers). Meta also optimizes each ad set on the conversions that setting counts, so compare the two campaigns only when both use the same window. Otherwise you're measuring with two different rulers.

Then compare on the number your business runs on: cost per new customer, from your own orders. The worked example above shows how a blended figure flatters a campaign, and it can mislead the other way too. A campaign that looks expensive in Ads Manager may simply be spending on people who haven't bought from you yet, which is the job you hired it for.

Set the comparison up so its answer means something:

1. Same weeks, similar budgets. Run the Advantage+ campaign beside your best manual campaign across the same calendar weeks.
2. One attribution setting on every ad set in both campaigns.
3. A decision date written down in advance, two full weeks or more of steady spend away, so a good or bad Tuesday can't decide it.
4. Creative changes in both campaigns or in neither. Change only one and the comparison can't tell you what moved the numbers.
5. A manual campaign that keeps running even if Advantage+ wins. It's where your next ad, angle and offer get tested on terms you control, and it's your benchmark if the automated campaign's results drift.