For E-commerce brands, 2024 is the year of 'AI Automation'. Google has Performance Max (PMax). Meta (Facebook/Instagram) has Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC). Both promise to use machine learning to find you customers automatically. Both remove manual controls. But they fundamentally do different things. PMax is a 'Capture' engine, excellent at finding people with high purchase intent across Google's inventory. Advantage+ is a 'Discovery' engine, finding people who didn't know they wanted your product until they saw it. We break down how—and why—you usually need both to scale.
No. Advantage+ is volatile. It can have incredible weeks and terrible weeks. We recommend keeping 30-50% of your Meta budget in manual control campaigns (CBO) as a baseline, using Advantage+ as a high-upside scaling layer.
Advantage+ generally needs more data to exit the learning phase—ideally 50 conversions per week per campaign. PMax can often work with slightly less data (30/week) because it leans on the strong intent signals from Search.
Not directly, but you can sync your customer lists (First Party Data) to both. Providing both platforms with the same 'Seed Audience' of high-value customers is the best way to align their learning models.
