Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns Are Now Sales Campaigns: 2026 Guide

What happened to Advantage+ shopping campaigns?

Advantage+ shopping campaigns (ASC) are no longer a separate campaign type. Meta merged them into a single Sales campaign flow, and any Sales campaign that keeps a few key settings on Advantage+ is now called an Advantage+ sales campaign.

In practice, that means there is no longer an "ASC or manual?" fork at the start of setup. You pick the Sales objective in Ads Manager and then see three sections, each labelled Advantage+ on or Advantage+ off: Advantage+ campaign budget, Advantage+ audience and Advantage+ placements. Meta says its most advanced AI optimizations kick in when these run together. Narrow one of them too much and that section flips to off, and the campaign effectively runs as a manual campaign.

The API side has caught up as well. According to Meta's Marketing API documentation, since v25.0 every attempt to create a campaign in the legacy ASC structure fails on any API version, and v26.0 blocks all edits to legacy ASC and Advantage+ app campaigns and removes the migrate_to_advantage_plus option. If a tool or agency script still manages a legacy ASC for you, don't count on migrating it: as of September 2026, the safer move is to rebuild it as a new Sales campaign with Advantage+ settings and retire the old one.

Which settings keep Advantage+ on, and which turn it off?

Short answer: Advantage+ stays on when the budget sits at campaign level, audience inputs are used as suggestions and no placements are excluded. Hard audience restrictions, placement exclusions or ad set budgets across multiple ad sets turn it off.

Two details matter a lot in day-to-day work. First, account-level controls set in your ad account's Advertising settings (for example, excluded locations or an age floor) do not change a campaign's Advantage+ status. Second, excluding existing customers does not turn Advantage+ off either. So a pure prospecting campaign can run with Advantage+ fully on.

Is the existing customer budget cap gone? What replaces it?

Yes. The existing customer budget cap from legacy ASC is not available in new Advantage+ sales campaigns. Meta's help center shows two manual ways to get the same result: exclude existing customers entirely, or cap their share with two ad sets and a spending limit.

The developer docs confirm it: the existing_customer_budget_percentage field is not available for new Advantage+ campaigns, and legacy ASC campaigns that use it are paused under v26.0. Here is how to rebuild the cap.

Option 1: Spend nothing on existing customers

Use a campaign budget, then in the ad set's Audience section click Show more controls and exclude your existing-customer custom audiences. Because the exclusion sits under Controls, it is applied strictly rather than as a suggestion, and Advantage+ stays on.

Option 2: Cap the share that goes to existing customers

1. Campaign budget Set a daily or lifetime budget at campaign level.
2. Ad set 1: existing customers Under Budget & schedule, add an ad set spending limit as a maximum percentage. In Audience, choose Further limit the reach of your ads, include your existing-customer custom audiences and untick "Use as a suggestion".
3. Same creative Use the same ads in both ad sets so the comparison stays fair.
4. Ad set 2: new audience Duplicate the ad set, remove the inclusion and exclude those same customer audiences.
5. Publish and monitor Watch spend split at ad set level and results in the audience segment breakdown.

Worked example: your daily campaign budget is $1,000 and you want at most 20% going to existing customers. A 20% maximum spending limit on ad set 1 keeps its daily spend at or below roughly $200, leaving at least $800 for ad set 2, which excludes your customers. Meta notes delivery often stays below the limit. A percentage limit scales with the budget, while a fixed dollar limit does not: raise the budget to $2,000 and the 20% cap automatically grows to $400.

How do you define new, engaged and existing customers?

Audience segments split your reporting into new audience, engaged audience and existing customers, based on the lists you define in your ad account's Advertising settings. Without them, you cannot see how much of Advantage+'s budget goes to retargeting people who were going to buy anyway.

Setup path: in Ads Manager, open All tools > Advertising settings > Audience segments. You can build the engaged audience from website, app activity, catalog, customer list, offline activity and shopping sources, and existing customers from the same sources plus lead forms. The definitions apply to all Sales campaigns in the account. To see the split in reporting, use Breakdown > By demographics > Audience segments.

• Existing customers: purchase-based sources, such as buyers from the last 180 days and a customer list exported from your CRM or store
• Engaged audience: add-to-cart and product-view visitors who have not bought, plus Instagram and Facebook engagers
• Refresh the customer list regularly; a stale list makes recent buyers look like "new" audience
• Check that the Purchase event is sent by both the pixel and Conversions API, and that it is deduplicated

That last point matters because Meta lists connecting first-party data among its best practices for the delivery system. For a step-by-step walkthrough, see our Meta Conversions API setup guide.

Are Advantage+ shopping campaigns worth it?

Usually yes, if your account generates steady purchase data, your catalog is clean and you can supply plenty of varied creative. Advantage+ works by finding buyers in a broad audience, and that needs strong signals and many distinct ads. Weak data and thin creative lead to weak automated decisions.

A useful decision rule: ask "Am I adding this restriction because the business requires it, or out of habit?" Habitual narrowing, like stacked interests or a single tight age band, often just turns Advantage+ off and slows learning. Before comparing manual against Advantage+, pin down your profitability threshold with our break-even ROAS calculator; otherwise "which one is better" has no yardstick.

Are Advantage+ catalog ads the same as Advantage+ sales campaigns?

No. Advantage+ catalog ads (formerly dynamic ads) are a creative format; an Advantage+ sales campaign is a campaign structure. You can run catalog ads inside an Advantage+ sales campaign, and for most online stores that is the most efficient combination.

In the current flow, you choose the catalog while creating a Sales campaign: turn on Advantage+ catalog ads at campaign level and select your catalog, then pick the product set under Promoted products at ad set level. Because catalog ads show products based on each person's interests and behavior, they work for both retargeting and prospecting. Excluding recent purchasers is a sensible starting point unless you are deliberately cross-selling.

How many creatives do you need, and how should you test them?

There is no magic number. Meta's guidance is to supply many genuinely different creatives, and variety matters as much as volume: five color variants of the same image are still one idea.

Meta's help center counts adding ads, changing creative and changing targeting as significant edits that can put an ad set back into the learning phase, and large budget changes can do the same. So build a testing rhythm like this:

1. Add creative in batches Launch a weekly creative round instead of adding ads one by one every day.
2. Vary the idea, not the color Test product-focused, in-use, social proof, price or offer, and UGC-style video angles.
3. Scale budget gradually Prefer controlled increases over one big jump.
4. Read the audience segment breakdown Don't declare success before checking how many sales came from existing customers.
5. Compare with an A/B test Run Advantage+ and a manual setup as separate groups in the Ads Manager A/B test tool, with the same budget and creative.

We explain why creative diversity became decisive after Meta's Andromeda retrieval update in our piece on Meta Andromeda and AI creatives. For the broader logic of AI-assisted ad management, see the Knowledge Center guide.

How do you check Meta's results against your store data?

Purchases in Ads Manager are counted within Meta's attribution window, so they will not match your store's actual orders one to one. Make decisions by reading Meta's report next to your store, GA4 and your other ad channels, not in isolation.

When you compare Advantage+ with a manual setup, look at the new customers and order value each one brought into your store over the same period. Keep in mind the measurement gaps covered in our Meta Ads vs Google Ads comparison, since both platforms may claim the same order. If you manage several ad accounts and stores, Marpany's ad performance view puts Meta, Google, TikTok and store data in one table, which makes this comparison much quicker.

What to do this week

• Check the Advantage+ on/off status of budget, audience and placements in every Sales campaign; does each "off" have a business reason?
• If any campaign still runs on the legacy ASC structure, rebuild it as a new Sales campaign with Advantage+ settings and retire the old one.
• Define audience segments (engaged audience and existing customers) in Advertising settings.
• If you need to cap existing-customer spend, set up two ad sets with a percentage-based spending limit.
• Plan a weekly creative round for the next four weeks, with a different idea in each round.
• A/B test Advantage+ against a manual setup and validate the winner with store data.