Meta Ads Manager Updates That Dominated 2022

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We have already seen quite a few Instagram and Facebook updates throughout 2022, and one thing we know for sure about Meta features – change is the only constant. In the world of marketing and global technology, change is something natural. It provokes us to step out of our comfort zone as advertisers and adapt to the changing marketing landscape.

Marketers are heading into 2023 with more automation, powerful new capabilities and seamless experiences across Meta platforms. Keep reading to find out what changed.

     1. Change to Meta Ads Manager Objectives
When choosing your campaign objective, think carefully about the one that best suits your business goals.


Campaign Objectives Before

 Campaign Objectives Now

We can now choose from six simplified campaign objectives: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, and Sales. Previously, we only had Awareness, Consideration and Conversion. 

Some previous objectives will now be available as a feature or optimization setting when creating your ad set.

  1. Detailed Targeting Options

Meta strives to personalize the platform and make it more user-friendly by removing some Detailed Targeting options related to politically or culturally polarizing topics. These include sexual orientation, race, religion, health, ethnicity and political affiliation. You can still target by interests and behaviour without the risk of touching on sensitive topics like the ones listed above.

  1. Advantage functions

In August, Meta launched several new tools to help you quickly create more automated ads:

  • Advantage+ creatives automatically adjust ad creative for each person who views your ad. The platform shows them the version to which they will most likely respond, delivering better ad performance.
  • Advantage audience creates a personalized audience based on your Page details.
  • Advantage+ App Campaigns also had several new updates to increase the performance of app install campaigns. These updates include more creative flexibility, 7-day-click attribution capabilities to improve campaigns with longer attribution windows and more granular reporting insights.
  • Advantage Campaign Budget is the well-known Campaign Budget Optimization option under a new name. It offers a way of optimizing the distribution of a campaign budget across your campaign’s ad sets.
  1. Tailored Sales Campaign creation

You’ve likely come across this campaign type in the past few months. Here is some update from Meta about how it functions.

  • It offers a more straightforward setup.
  • It is a tailored solution that will drive results for your business.
  • It uses Meta’s best practices as pre-set functions.

The pre-set functions include:

  • Campaign objective: Sales
  • Bidding strategy: Lowest price
  • Dynamic Creative: On*
  • Placements: Automatic
  • Ad optimization: Conversions
  • Attribution window: 7-day-click or 1-day-view

You can customize the following options:

  • Location
  • Budget and ad schedule
  • Audience

*Dynamic creative uses images, videos, text, and audio and combines them in new ways to improve the effectiveness of your ad.

If you want more control using standard settings, go ahead with the second option – Manual Sales Campaign, which will redirect you to the familiar Conversions campaign settings.

  1. Meta announced new updates to its call ads intended for businesses to find more quality leads and reach potential customers to grow their business.
  • Call ads in Sales Objective
  • 60s call ad in Lead generation, Traffic and Sales Objectives. Ads are optimized to reach people most likely to engage in an extended conversation. 
  1. Instagram Ads

In recent months, users started to engage even more with videos, with TikTok becoming the leading platform. Meta has already launched Reels globally and has a dedicated section for them. But what has changed in the way we advertise and utilise videos on Instagram? Here are a few updates:

  • Removing Instagram In-Stream Video Ad Placements and replacing them with Reels
  • Adding free, high-quality audio for Carousel Ads in Instagram Reels
  • Instagram Ads showing on Explore and Profile Feeds sections 
  • Introducing Augmented Reality Ads which are currently in an open beta

What to expect in 2023?

Metaverse will continue to unlock new opportunities for advertisers and businesses. Here are a few updates we could expect in the upcoming year.

  1. More emphasis on Advantage features since Facebook is looking to automate ad setup features and thus facilitate businesses.
  2. Data privacy is becoming more crucial. Android is likely to follow iOS 14.5 with more control over data privacy which will prevent data collection from Facebook Pixel. In the eyes of data regulations, CAPI (Facebook’s Conversions API) offers a promising alternative and should be implemented as soon as possible by businesses to continue to optimize advertising on Meta.
  3. Further investments are to be made in the Metaverse with a more specific emphasis on video and virtual reality technologies. Although Meta’s push to develop virtual and augmented reality technology has had a bumpy year so far, we are still to see what 2023 will offer.

Our agency manages results-driven digital campaigns, and we are here to guide you through platform updates and manage your digital campaigns in the best way possible. If you have any questions or would like to schedule an online meeting, don’t hesitate to contact us.