Explainer

Advantage+ campaigns in 2026: how Meta's campaign setup changed and what you still control

Advantage+ is no longer a separate campaign type you pick. A sales, app or leads campaign is Advantage+ when three settings are left automated: one budget at campaign level, Advantage+ audience and Advantage+ placements. Ads Manager shows an on or off label to tell you which state you are in. You still set hard limits on location, minimum age, language and excluded customer lists, and you can still exclude placements, though doing so switches the label off.

Last updated 9 October 2026

What makes a campaign Advantage+ now

Meta announced the change as a test on 6 February 2025. As Social Media Today reported that day, advertisers would no longer choose between a manual campaign and an Advantage+ shopping campaign. There would be one setup, and a campaign would carry an Advantage+ on label when it used Advantage+ audience, Advantage+ placements and Advantage+ campaign budget. In the same announcement Meta renamed Advantage+ shopping campaigns to Advantage+ sales campaigns and added leads campaigns.

Meta's developer documentation gives the exact rule. A campaign's Advantage+ state is read-only: you cannot switch it on directly. Meta works it out from three settings, and if any one of them is disabled the whole campaign shows as off.

The three settings that decide whether a campaign is Advantage+, from Meta's developer documentation
Setting	What counts as on
Budget	The budget is set on the campaign, not on each ad set, with a supported bid strategy.
Audience	At least one ad set uses Advantage+ audience, or sets nothing but a location, or uses its targeting choices as suggestions.
Placements	No ad set limits or excludes placements. Exclusions set for the whole ad account do not count against you.

The same page lists the three objectives this applies to: sales, app promotion and leads. Meta's leads campaign page says on is the default for the leads objective in Ads Manager, and that removing automated features or narrowing the settings too far turns it off.

What happened to Advantage+ shopping and app campaigns

The separate campaign types were closed in stages. The dates below are for Meta's Marketing API, which is what third-party ad tools use, because that is where Meta published dated notices. In Ads Manager itself, Meta's Advantage+ overview page now lists sales, app and leads campaigns and describes sales campaigns as the former Advantage+ shopping campaigns.

Timeline for the closure of the separate Advantage+ shopping and app campaigns in Meta's Marketing API
Date	What changed	Source
8 October 2025	From API version 24.0, new Advantage+ shopping and app campaigns could no longer be created through the old route.	Meta developer blog, 8 October 2025
18 February 2026	From version 25.0, creating, duplicating and updating them was no longer allowed.	Marketing API v25.0 changelog
19 May 2026	The same block applied to every API version.	Marketing API v25.0 changelog
Version 26.0, estimated by Meta for September 2026	All remaining Advantage+ shopping and app campaigns to be paused.	Meta developer blog, 13 February 2026

We could not confirm the last row. Version 26.0 arrived earlier than that estimate: Meta's version 26.0 changelog gives its release date as 29 July 2026. As we read that changelog on 9 October 2026, it does not mention pausing the remaining campaigns, so we cannot say whether the pause happened. If you still have an old Advantage+ shopping campaign, check its status in Ads Manager.

One feature did not survive the move. The existing customer budget cap, which limited the share of budget spent on people who had already bought, is not available in the new Advantage+ campaigns, according to the February 2026 post. That post also says a duplicated campaign gets a new campaign ID, and the developer documentation says a migrated or copied campaign goes back into the learning stage.

What Advantage+ audience does with your targeting

Meta's Advantage+ audience page separates two kinds of input, and the difference matters more than anything else in the setup.

Audience suggestions and audience controls in Advantage+ audience, as described by Meta
Input	What you can enter	How Meta treats it
Audience suggestions	Custom audiences, lookalike audiences, age, gender and detailed targeting.	A starting point. Meta looks at people who match first, then searches more widely when it expects better results.
Audience controls	Location, minimum age, languages and custom audiences to exclude.	A hard limit. Meta says its system should not expand beyond these.

In practice that means an age range of 25 to 40 or an interest entered as a suggestion is not a promise that only those people will see the ad. If a limit is a real business constraint, such as an age restriction or a delivery area, it belongs in the controls. Meta's leads page adds that controls set once for the whole ad account are applied to every campaign and do not change the on or off label, and it advises using controls only for specific business constraints.

What Advantage+ placements and campaign budget do

Advantage+ placements lets Meta choose where each ad appears across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network, including Feed, Stories and Reels. Supplying images in more than one shape helps here, and our guide to Meta ad sizes lists them.

Advantage+ campaign budget, formerly called campaign budget optimisation, takes one budget for the campaign and moves it between ad sets as results come in. Meta's page says you can still set a minimum or maximum spend on an ad set to limit how far the budget shifts.

What Meta reports about results

These are Meta's own figures from its product pages as they read on 9 October 2026. We could not read the footnotes behind them, so we cannot tell you the period, the sample or what each was compared with. Treat them as claims, not forecasts for your account.

Performance figures Meta states on its Advantage+ product pages, read on 9 October 2026
Product	Meta's claim	Page
Advantage+ sales campaigns	20% lower cost per result on average.	Sales campaigns
Advantage+ app campaigns	7% improvement in cost per action on average.	App campaigns
Advantage+ leads campaigns	14% lower cost per lead and 10% lower cost per qualified lead.	Leads campaigns
Advantage+ audience	Median cost per acquisition better by 7.2% to 14.8%, depending on how far down the funnel the campaign optimises.	Audience
Advantage+ placements	Average cost per acquisition better by 11.7% for ad sets using it.	Placements
Advantage+ campaign budget	Cost per acquisition lower by 4.6% on average.	Campaign budget

The only way to know what the settings do for you is to compare them in your own account. Our guide to testing ad creative covers how to run a fair comparison.

A checklist before you publish

The label. Check whether the campaign shows Advantage+ on or off, and that this is what you meant. Off is allowed. It only tells you one of the three settings is manual.
Location. Confirm the countries or areas in the audience controls. This is a hard limit, so a mistake here is spent in full.
Minimum age and language. Set them as controls if they are real constraints. An age range entered as a suggestion can be exceeded.
Exclusions. Add the customer lists you do not want to pay to reach. With the existing customer budget cap gone, an exclusion is the control Meta's pages still describe.
Suggestions. Read anything else you entered (interests, lookalikes, gender) as a hint to Meta and not a fence.
Placements. If you exclude any, look for an option allowing limited spend on them and decide whether you want it.
Budget level. Know whether the budget sits on the campaign or the ad sets. With a campaign budget, add ad set minimums or maximums only where you need them.
The ad itself. Automated changes to creative are a separate set of switches, covered in our post on Advantage+ creative enhancements.

Sources

Questions people ask

What makes a Meta campaign Advantage+ in 2026?

A sales, app or leads campaign is Advantage+ when three settings are automated: a budget set at campaign level, Advantage+ audience and Advantage+ placements. Meta works the state out from those settings and Ads Manager shows an on or off label. If any one of the three is manual, the campaign shows as off.

What happened to Advantage+ shopping campaigns?

Meta renamed them Advantage+ sales campaigns in February 2025 and folded them into one campaign setup. In its Marketing API, new ones could not be created from 8 October 2025, and creating, duplicating or updating them was blocked on every API version from 19 May 2026. Meta said the remaining ones would be paused with API version 26.0, which it estimated for September 2026.

Does Advantage+ audience ignore my targeting?

It depends where you enter it. Age, gender, interests, custom audiences and lookalikes entered as audience suggestions are a starting point, and Meta can show the ad to people outside them. Location, minimum age, language and excluded custom audiences entered as audience controls are hard limits.

Can Meta spend money on placements I excluded?

Meta's developer blog of 8 October 2025 introduced limited spend on excluded placements for sales and leads campaigns, allowing up to 5% of spend for each excluded placement when it is likely to improve performance. Meta says this is not switched on automatically for advertisers using its API. Check the placement section of your ad set in Ads Manager to see how yours is set.

Try it on your own competitors.

$9 for 7 days. Paste a competitor's Page and see their best ad rebuilt for your brand.

Start 7-day trial · $9

Mockingbird is an independent product from Onwards Analytics and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Meta. Meta, Facebook, Instagram, Meta Ads Manager and the Meta Ad Library are trademarks of Meta Platforms, Inc. Meta changes its tools often; check Meta's own help pages for the current detail before you rely on it.