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.

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?

Have you ever wondered which ads are bringing in sales, and which campaigns are wasting ad spend?

The Brands Spending the Most on Digital Advertising: Trends and Insights

With brands pouring more money than ever before into advertising, it’s easy to understand why we’re inundated with ads on every platform, from the time we're reaching for our phones in the morning to when we’re dozing off to shows on streaming platforms at night. 

Today Wicked Reports announced the beta release of an entirely re-imagined Mission Control report suite to help ecommerce, subscription, and info course marketers optimize ad spend and increase ROI more easily.

Wicked Reports just upgraded the ROI report March 26th 2020, here are the highlights:

Analyze Lead Groups: Using Cohort Analysis to Measure Long-Term ROI

Imagine this scenario: