Increasing incremental sales using Meta Advantage+ shopping campaigns

Starting as a market stall in 19th-century Leeds, Marks and Spencer (commonly known as M&S) is now a leading retailer that sells everything from clothing to food through nearly 1,000 stores across the UK and Ireland, and internationally via its ecommerce website.

Marks and Spencer Ireland had previously run Meta Advantage+ catalogue ads with success. With this ad format, advertisers simply upload their online product catalog to Facebook and Instagram. The machine learning functionality automatically pulls photos of relevant products, which customers can then purchase on the advertiser’s website.

Taking a test-and-learn approach, M&S Ireland decided to see if running Advantage+ shopping campaigns might increase website sales further. Advantage+ shopping campaigns use artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate, simplify and streamline the campaign creation, ad setup and account management processes. Rather than having to manually set up several different campaigns with a patchwork of ad targeting, creative, placements and budgets, advertisers can set up a single Advantage+ shopping campaign to test up to 150 different combinations, and then optimise for the best-performing ads.

M&S Ireland worked with digital marketing specialist Incubeta, a Meta Business Partner, to run a multi-cell conversion lift study that compared the performance of:

• Cell A: its usual Advantage+ catalogue ads
• Cell B: Advantage+ shopping campaigns

The team used the Advantage+ placements feature to automatically deliver ads across all of Meta’s placements based on which were most likely to drive the best campaign results at the lowest cost, as well as the Advantage+ campaign budget feature to automatically distribute the budget across the best-performing ads in real time.