The promise of Andromeda’s AI brain sorting through a billion users to find your customers on auto-pilot sounds quite enticing!
I couldn’t help but wonder - is this a good thing for brands?
I say this because I’ve spent 10 years tracking Meta campaign performance against actual orders, and 4 things have remained true the entire time:
- Meta overstates its ability to drive immediate bottom of the funnel sales
- Meta understates its ability to drive TOF cold traffic that leads to new customers
- Meta shows a lot more ROAS when you widen the attribution time window
- Meta’s conversion API is highly optimized for immediate sales if using the default setup
With this push to almost force advertisers to Advantage+, or turn it on behind the scenes if you don’t read the fine print, I feel it is time to use actual data, not opinion, to determine how advertisers should best use Advantage+, and when to stick to their manual guns otherwise.
I had the fearless Wicked DB team pull the data on 55,661 Meta campaigns so I could compare January through May, 2024 vs 2025, and finally get to the bottom of a few things.
⬇ Let’s dive in ⬇
Adoption of Advantage+
There is a 4% swing in budget allocated to Advantage+ over Manual Campaigns.
Forced Advantage+ usage means that advertisers will need advanced Meta CAPI integrations to deal with the trends below.
The Metric That Matters Most: Calculating Your True New Customer Acquisition Cost
When using Advantage+ campaigns, the cost to acquire new customers has skyrocketed in the past 3 months. March through May 2025 is substantially more expensive, with May 2025 vs May 2025 showing a DRAMATIC escalation in nCAC, with the average cost going from $257 to $528 per customer. Ouch.
Meta Manual campaigns are actually acquiring customers more cheaply in 2025 than they were in 2024!
Meta Advantage+ Campaigns were destroying manual campaign performance at the start of the year. Then things took a very dramatic turn and manual campaigns in May are crushing Advantage+ when it comes to lower nCACs.
Meta First Click vs Last ROAS
First let’s benchmark the first click and last ROAS on all Meta campaigns, irregardless of campaign type. I was surprised to see that on average in 2025, first click and last click ROAS are very close to each other.
Next we exclude Advantage+ campaigns. The performance below shows that the manual campaigns track very closely to all campaign’s performance. I was also surprised to see the first and last click ROAS is very similar.
Finally we look at Advantage+ campaign first and last click ROAS performance. The last 3 months show that last click ROAS is significantly better than first click.
Additionally, 1st click ROAS plummeted in May.
Overall, May was a dramatically worse month for performance on Meta. If the nCAC and first click ROAS trends hold up for another month, it will be our recommendation to use Advantage+ for BOF and manual campaigns for TOF.
FAQ
What is the New Customer Acquisition Cost (nCAC) difference between Meta Advantage+ and Manual Campaigns?
Recent data from 55,661 Meta campaigns shows a dramatic increase in nCAC (New Customer Acquisition Cost) for Advantage+ Campaigns, with costs more than doubling from $257 to $528 per customer between May 2024 and May 2025. In contrast, Meta Manual Campaigns are currently acquiring new customers more cheaply in 2025 than they did in 2024. This trend suggests that Advantage+ is experiencing performance degradation in driving cost-effective new customer sales.
Should I use Meta Advantage+ or Manual Campaigns for Top-of-Funnel (TOF) and Bottom-of-Funnel (BOF) advertising?
Based on performance trends—specifically the increase in nCAC and the drop in first-click ROAS on Advantage+—the current recommendation is to use Advantage+ Campaigns for Bottom-of-Funnel (BOF) retargeting and use Manual Campaigns for Top-of-Funnel (TOF) cold traffic acquisition. Manual campaigns are currently outperforming Advantage+ in acquiring new customers at a lower cost (nCAC), making them superior for TOF efforts.
How does Meta Advantage+ attribution (First Click vs. Last Click ROAS) impact my reported performance?
Wicked Reports data indicates that Meta Advantage+ appears to be increasingly optimizing toward Last Click ROAS, where the final ad a customer clicks gets nearly all the credit. This is shown by last-click ROAS being significantly better than first-click ROAS for Advantage+ in recent months. This focus on last-click performance artificially inflates immediate sales metrics while causing Top-of-Funnel (TOF) First Click ROAS to plummet, directly leading to the higher New Customer Acquisition Costs (nCAC) observed in the data.
