Advantage+ creative vs Advantage+ sales (formerly shopping) campaigns: five things called Advantage+, explained
Half the confusion about "turning off Advantage+" comes from five products sharing one name. You can run an Advantage+ sales campaign with Advantage+ creative off, and a manual campaign with it on. Here is the map.
One name, five levers
Meta's own definition: "Meta Advantage+ is a suite of products that helps advertisers maximize performance by using AI to optimize campaigns in real-time." The products sit at different levels of the account, and that is the whole confusion:
| Product | Level | What it automates | Where it is switched |
|---|---|---|---|
| Advantage+ creative | ad | the creative itself: crops, text placement, overlays, music, animation and more | Enhancements panel on the ad; API creative_features_spec |
| Advantage+ sales campaigns (formerly shopping) | campaign | budget, audience and placement together, for the sales objective | campaign setup |
| Advantage+ audience | ad set | targeting: "lets advertisers use Meta's advanced AI to find their Meta ad campaign audience" | ad set audience section |
| Advantage+ placements | ad set | where the ad runs; Meta claims "an average CPA improvement of 11.7%" | ad set placements; "the default setting on API" per Meta's developer blog |
| Advantage+ campaign budget | campaign | budget distribution across ad sets | campaign budget setting |
Sources: Meta help pages on Advantage+ creative, audience and sales campaigns, Meta's placements product page, and Meta's developer blog of 3 June 2025 (fetched 31 August 2026).
The sentence that untangles most support tickets: a campaign type does not set the ad-level enhancements, and the ad-level enhancements do not care which campaign type they run in. You can run an Advantage+ sales campaign with every creative enhancement off, and a manual campaign with all of them on.
The rename: shopping became sales in February 2025
If you still see "Advantage+ shopping campaigns" (ASC) in older guides, that is the same product. Jon Loomer, 10 February 2025, quoting Meta: "Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns will be renamed Advantage+ Sales Campaigns 'to better reflect the full range of advertisers that can benefit from this product.'" Foxwell Digital dated the official communication to 6 February 2025, with a beta from 10 February and rollout through Q2 2025. Search Engine Land covered the same announcement on 7 February.
It was not only a label change. Jon Loomer's summary: Advantage+ sales campaigns gained Advantage+ audience with exclusions, brought ad sets back, and dropped the existing-customer budget cap. Meta's current help page uses only the new name and claims "Advertisers who used Advantage+ sales campaigns saw 9% improvement in cost per conversion, on average." On the API side, Meta's developer blog (June 2025) moved these campaigns to a unified structure; per later coverage, the old ASC creation path was disabled from v25.0 in February 2026.
What is on by default, honestly
Several 2026 blogs state that "since February 2026 everything is on by default". We could not trace that date to any Meta page; the dated, Meta-sourced event is the February 2025 streamlined campaign setup that removed the manual-versus-automated choice at creation, and it says nothing about creative enhancements. What Meta does say, on the Advantage+ creative help page: "Some enhancements may be turned on by default, but you can turn them off at any time." Treat "on by default for most eligible enhancements" as the working assumption, and verify on the ad.
The account-level setting, and what it is not
This one matters because it is widely misdescribed, including by us in an earlier version of our guide. Meta documents exactly one account-level control for Advantage+ creative: under Advertising settings, in the "Creating ads" section, a "Creative features" option to tick or untick "Test new creative features". Meta's scope sentence: "If you opt in to test new optimisations, Advantage+ creative enhancements and other creative features in testing may be applied to eligible campaigns." Jon Loomer described the same checkbox in 2023 as applying "to fewer than 5% of your ad impressions" across the account, and in March 2025 noted it had become greyed out for many accounts.
What Meta does not document is a general account-wide switch that turns the standard enhancements off for every new ad. Several vendor guides describe "Business Settings > Advertising Settings" as such a master default; we found no Meta source for that. Until Meta documents it, the reliable controls remain the per-ad toggles, bulk edit, and the per-creative opt-out through the API. The full map is in how to turn off Advantage+ creative enhancements.
What this means for a bulk launch
- Pick the campaign type on its merits (Advantage+ sales for broad e-commerce scaling, manual when you need structure). It does not decide your creative policy.
- Set the creative policy per ad account and enforce it per creative. Adlio stores the enhancement toggles per account and per creative type and writes the opt-out into every creative it creates, whichever campaign or ad set you launch into.
- Verify on the ad, not on the campaign. Check 6 on the pre-launch QA checklist, or the API read in how to audit enhancements via the API.
Whichever campaign type you launch into, Adlio creates the ads with every creative enhancement key opted out and every ad paused. See bulk upload Facebook ads with enhancements off.
Frequently asked questions
Were Advantage+ shopping campaigns renamed?+
Yes. In February 2025 Meta announced that Advantage+ shopping campaigns would become Advantage+ sales campaigns; Jon Loomer quoted Meta's reason, "to better reflect the full range of advertisers that can benefit from this product", and Foxwell Digital dated the official communication to 6 February 2025. Meta's current help page only uses the new name.
If I run an Advantage+ sales campaign, are creative enhancements automatically on?+
They are separate settings. The campaign type decides budget, audience and placement automation; Advantage+ creative is set per ad, in the Enhancements panel or through the API, and its enhancements are mostly on by default for eligible ads whatever the campaign type. You can and should set them independently.
What does the account-level Advantage+ creative setting do?+
Less than most guides claim. Meta documents one account-level control: an "Opt in to or out of testing new creative features" checkbox under Advertising settings, which governs whether "creative features in testing may be applied to eligible campaigns". Jon Loomer described it as applying to "fewer than 5% of your ad impressions". Meta does not document it as a switch that turns standard enhancements off account-wide.
Sources
Adlio team
Built by media buyers who launch Meta ads in volume. Questions or corrections: support@adlio.ai.
Topic cluster
Advantage+ control
Keeping Meta's automatic creative enhancements off, on every ad, and proving it.
- Advantage+ "Text improvements": what Meta changes in your copy, and how to turn it off
- Advantage+ "Expand image" and video expansion: the generated pixels around your creative, explained
- Advantage+ "Visual touch-ups" and "Adjust brightness and contrast": the edits that change how your product looks
- Advantage+ "Add overlays", dynamic overlays and standard labels: the text Meta puts on top of your image
- Advantage+ "Add music": which ads get a soundtrack, how to turn it off, and why the API handles it differently
- How to audit Advantage+ enhancements on existing ads through the Marketing API
- Advantage+ creative vs Advantage+ sales (formerly shopping) campaigns: five things called Advantage+, explained
- Do Advantage+ creative enhancements improve performance? What Meta has published, what practitioners report, and how to test it yourself
Related guides
- How-toHow to turn off Advantage+ creative enhancements (per ad, in bulk, and permanently)
- How-toDo Advantage+ creative enhancements improve performance? What Meta has published, what practitioners report, and how to test it yourself
- ChecklistLaunch every Meta ad paused: the pre-flight QA checklist for bulk batches