Meta Is Pushing Advantage+ Campaigns Relentlessly. Here's What 55,661 Campaigns Reveal.

The promise of Andromeda's AI brain sorting through a billion users to find your customers on auto-pilot sounds quite enticing. But I could not help wondering: is this actually a good thing for brands?

I ask because I have spent 10 years tracking Meta campaign performance against actual orders, and four things have stayed true the entire time.

Meta overstates its ability to drive immediate bottom-of-funnel sales.
Meta understates its ability to drive top-of-funnel cold traffic that leads to new customers.
Meta shows a lot more ROAS when you widen the attribution time window.
Meta's Conversions API is heavily optimized for immediate sales on the default setup.

With Meta now all but forcing advertisers into Advantage+, or switching it on behind the scenes if you do not read the fine print, it is time to use actual data, not opinion, to work out how advertisers should really use Advantage+, and when to stick to their manual guns instead.

So I had the fearless Wicked DB team pull the data on 55,661 Meta campaigns, comparing January through May 2024 against 2025, to finally get to the bottom of a few things. Let's dive in.

ADOPTION OF ADVANTAGE+

There is a 4 percent swing in budget allocated to Advantage+ over manual campaigns.

Insight : we will be watching this trend closely over the summer. There are rumors that advertisers are being forced into Advantage+ with no ability to manually configure campaigns. If that is true, this number should jump sharply. And forced Advantage+ usage means advertisers will need advanced Meta CAPI integrations to deal with the trends below.

THE METRIC THAT MATTERS MOST : YOUR TRUE NEW CUSTOMER ACQUISITION COST

When using Advantage+ campaigns, the cost to acquire new customers has skyrocketed over the past three months. March through May 2025 is substantially more expensive, with May 2024 versus May 2025 showing a dramatic escalation in nCAC, the average cost going from $257 to $528 per customer. Ouch.

Meta manual campaigns, meanwhile, are actually acquiring customers more cheaply in 2025 than they were in 2024.

So Advantage+ campaigns were destroying manual campaign performance at the start of the year, then things took a dramatic turn, and by May manual campaigns were crushing Advantage+ on nCAC.

Insight: this could be the start of model degradation, or just a temporary blip. Either way the trend is dangerous, because when new customer costs are sky high, budget gets cut on those campaigns. That means less cold traffic spending, which means less traffic at the top of the funnel, which leads to lower performance at the bottom of the funnel down the line.

META FIRST-CLICK VS LAST-CLICK ROAS

First, let's benchmark first-click and last-click ROAS across all Meta campaigns, regardless 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 manual campaigns track very closely to all-campaign performance, and again first-click and last-click ROAS are similar.

Finally we look at Advantage+ campaigns on their own. Here the last three months show last-click ROAS significantly better than first-click, and first-click ROAS plummeted in May.

Insight: Advantage+ appears to be optimizing toward last-click ROAS. That supports the nCAC trend above. If Advantage+ is chasing the easy last-click conversion, it is harvesting existing demand rather than acquiring new customers, which is exactly what the rising nCAC shows.

WHAT TO DO WITH THIS

Overall, May was a dramatically worse month for performance on Meta. If the nCAC and first-click ROAS trends hold up for another month, our recommendation is clear: use Advantage+ for bottom-of-funnel, and manual campaigns for top-of-funnel new customer acquisition. Let the automation do what it is now good at, closing warm demand, and keep human hands on the prospecting that actually grows your customer base.

And whatever you do, do not judge any of it on Meta's own numbers. The whole reason these trends were invisible until we pulled 55,661 campaigns against real orders is that Meta's reporting will not show them to you. Measure against your actual sales, or you will scale the wrong thing with total confidence.

FAQ

WHY IS NEW CUSTOMER ACQUISITION COST RISING SO DRAMATICALLY ON META ADVANTAGE+ CAMPAIGNS?

Wicked Reports data shows that between March and May 2025, the average nCAC for Advantage+ campaigns skyrocketed, going from $257 to $528. This escalation suggests the automation may be optimizing for easier, immediate last-click sales rather than efficiently acquiring new cold-traffic customers, which can be an early sign of model degradation.

ARE MANUAL META CAMPAIGNS CURRENTLY OUTPERFORMING ADVANTAGE+ IN 2025?

The analysis of 55,661 Meta campaigns shows that while Advantage+ started the year strong, manual campaigns are now acquiring customers more cheaply as of May 2025. Manual campaign nCAC is actually lower in 2025 than in 2024, whereas Advantage+ nCAC rose dramatically, which means human-guided manual campaigns can currently be more efficient for new customer acquisition.

HOW IS THE SHIFTING ROAS DATA INFORMING A NEW META AD STRATEGY?

The data shows Advantage+ campaigns favoring last-click ROAS significantly over first-click ROAS, which suggests the automation is optimizing for immediate lower-funnel conversions. The most effective strategy may be to use Advantage+ for bottom-of-funnel retargeting and manual campaigns for top-of-funnel cold traffic acquisition.

WHY CAN'T I SEE THESE TRENDS IN META'S OWN REPORTING?

Because Meta reports on its own performance and optimizes toward the conversions that flatter it. These trends only became visible by reconciling 55,661 campaigns against real orders, which is what separates first-click from last-click performance and reveals the true nCAC. Platform reporting alone will not show you when its automation shifts from acquiring customers to harvesting them.