Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, updated its ads platform, introducing more automation into campaigns, as the company continues to adjust to privacy and data restrictions in online marketing.

On Tuesday, Goksu Nebol-Perlman, Meta’s VP of product marketing, ads and business products, announced the new automation and machine learning tools within Facebook’s ads platform. A newly branded ad service called Meta Advantage consolidates the automated ad products, Nebol-Perlman said. Automation helps advertisers set app-install ad campaigns and create “lookalike” audiences, by relying more on Meta’s artificial intelligence. Lookalike audiences are people who resemble—based on their internet behavior and other factors—existing customers of brands, and “lookalikes” are ripe for targeting with ads.

Last year, Apple implemented rules that limit how much apps like Facebook and Instagram can track users on web browsers and mobile devices. The app-tracking changes made it more difficult to create “lookalike” audiences and to measure ads. It became more difficult to quantify the effectiveness of app-install ads, for example. In the past year, Meta has made a series of updates to its ad platform in response to Apple and notified marketers of nagging issues with some of its ad services. In September, Meta outlined how it was not accurately reporting “conversions,” or the rate at which ads lead to concrete results such as app downloads and sales. In February, Meta said it was making progress at tracking conversions.

“This move is in line with the industry’s desire for a more fully integrated tech stack that gathers all actionable data on one platform for more automated and efficient mobile growth," said Simon “Bobby” Dussart, CEO of Adjust, a mobile marketing analytics platform, in an email to Ad Age, referring to Meta’s new automation.

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Meta has more than 10 million advertisers, and many of them are sophisticated online marketers that are used to running their own ad campaigns. As data becomes harder to collect and connect online, advertisers have to lean on machine learning models and aggregated data sources, which don’t identify individual users.

'Advantage Detailed Targeting'

Meta’s Nebol-Perlman said that the automated upgrades help ad targeting and lead to lower costs on the ads. One example Nebol-Perlman pointed to is “Advantage Detailed Targeting,” which looks for audiences based on the “preferences of advertisers.”

“If Advantage Detailed Targeting finds better performance opportunities outside your defined audience,” Nebol-Perlman wrote in a blog post, “the product makes dynamic updates to attempt to optimize those performance opportunities by expanding your audience.”

That means that Meta’s ad platform is looking for audiences outside the defined targets that marketers already brought to the platform. The automated targeting led to “37% lower median cost per incremental conversion than when not used,” Nebol-Perlman said.

Akvile DeFazio, a social media advertiser who runs the agency Akvertise, said that the new tools could help streamline ad management on Meta. The automation could be a “leaner” way to set ad campaigns, pawning some of the work to Meta’s machine learning.

Still, sophisticated marketers like to keep their hands in the campaigns, because often they have special expertise for individual brands, DeFazio said. “I am still hesitant to relinquish all control to Meta, as many tactics we implement that are more manual still outperform more automated or broader options that Meta has been progressively recommending,” DeFazio said.

Many of the changes are cosmetic because Meta already offers automation in the ads platform, but now they fall under Meta Advantage and Advantage+.

Meta was already using the automated technology to power app campaigns and decide where to place ads, whether on Facebook or Instagram, for example. Meta also announced the automation would come to shopping campaigns.

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