Advantage+ Shopping campaigns in 2026: an operator’s guide.

The name on the campaign changed. The risk did not. Advantage+ Shopping, usually shortened to ASC, was the campaign where you handed Meta the catalog, the creative, and a budget, and let it run audience, placement, and bidding end to end. Meta has since folded it into a single Advantage+ sales campaign, and in doing so removed the one setting most brands used to stop it spending acquisition budget on people who were already customers.

This guide covers what changed, what decides whether Advantage+ is actually on, how to control existing-customer spend now, and how to tell whether the campaign is making you money or only reporting that it is. It sits inside the wider shift described in Meta account structure in 2026.

What changed, and what did not

On May 29, 2025, Meta began rolling out a streamlined setup for sales and app campaigns. Instead of choosing between ASC and a manual campaign, you build one sales campaign, and Ads Manager marks it Advantage+ on when its automated settings are in place. Meta’s developer documentation describes Advantage+ sales campaigns as the updated, streamlined versions of Advantage+ Shopping.

• →The campaign type. From Marketing API version 25.0, new Advantage+ Shopping campaigns cannot be created through the API. New builds are Advantage+ sales campaigns.
• →The requirements. A sales campaign counts as Advantage+ when it uses Advantage+ audience, Advantage+ campaign budget, and Advantage+ placements. Change any one of them and the campaign is no longer Advantage+.
• →The existing-customer budget cap. The existing customer budget percentage is not available for new Advantage+ campaigns. Legacy ASC campaigns that use it are paused from API version 26.0, and Meta directs advertisers to migrate them with Duplicate campaign in Ads Manager.
• →Bid strategies. Highest volume is Meta’s recommended strategy, with cost per result goal, bid cap, and ROAS goal also supported. The trade-offs between them are covered in Meta cost cap vs bid cap.

What did not change is how the delivery system spends. It still looks for the cheapest conversions first, and the cheapest conversions are usually people who already know the brand. Removing the percentage cap did not remove that tendency. It removed the easiest way to limit it.

What turns Advantage+ on and off

The state is decided by three settings, and Meta documents exactly which choices switch each one off. Account-level controls do not affect it.

Two audience controls survive without switching Advantage+ off: raising the minimum age up to 25, and excluding a custom audience. The second one matters most, because it is now the main lever for keeping an acquisition campaign on acquisition.

The preconditions that decide success

• →Clean signal. A healthy Conversions API setup with strong event match quality and accurate purchase values. The campaign learns fast and will learn the wrong thing just as fast on bad data.
• →Enough volume. Meta says an ad set usually leaves the learning phase after about 50 results in the week after its last significant edit. A campaign that cannot reach that will keep shifting, with fewer levers to steady it.
• →Creative variety. Meta’s own best practices call for diverse creative. The system chooses between the assets you give it; three tired ones do not improve because an algorithm is picking.
• →First-party data. Meta lists it among its best practices for these campaigns, and the customer audiences in the next section are built from it.

How to keep acquisition budget on new customers

With the percentage cap gone from new campaigns, Meta’s documentation points to three things you can do instead. Build the existing-customer audience from your store’s purchasers first, since each option depends on it.

1. Exclude existing customers. Custom audience exclusions remain available and keep Advantage+ on. This makes the campaign a pure acquisition campaign, and your list and retention channels handle repeat buyers.
2. Split and cap. Meta’s migration guidance replicates the old cap with two ad sets under one campaign budget: one targeting the existing-customer audience with a daily spend limit, and one excluding it. Meta manages a maximum spend limit across the week, Sunday to Saturday, and will not exceed seven times the limit across that week, though a single day can run over. It also recommends using as few spend limits as possible.
3. Report by segment. Meta suggests building audience segments so reporting can break results down into new, engaged, and existing customers. Without that breakdown you cannot see the split in the next section.

A worked split: where the return actually comes from

Here is the arithmetic for an illustrative campaign, not a client result. It spends $30,000 in a month and reports $120,000 of attributed revenue, a 4.0x ROAS. The store earns 40% contribution margin before ad cost, so its breakeven ROAS is 2.5x. Split by customer segment, the same month looks like this.

The blended 4.0x hides the shape. The new-customer half runs at 2.9x against a 2.5x breakeven, which is thin but profitable. Most of the reported profit comes from people who had already bought from the store.

Now ask the question the dashboard cannot answer: how much of the existing-customer revenue would have happened anyway? Suppose half of it would have, as an assumption to test rather than a figure to trust. Then the existing segment drove $30,000 of revenue, $12,000 of contribution, and $3,000 after its $9,000 of spend. Treating every new-customer sale as caused by the ads, which is generous, the campaign’s real profit is $6,000, not $18,000. A holdout is how you find out which is closer, and incrementality testing without a data team shows how to run one.

A decision rule for the budget

• →If new-customer ROAS is above breakeven and store-level MER holds as spend rises, add budget in planned steps.
• →If new-customer ROAS is below breakeven, fix the creative or the offer before adding budget. More spend buys more of the same result.
• →If existing customers take a growing share of spend while new-customer volume stays flat, exclude them or move them into a capped ad set.
• →If reported ROAS rises but store MER stays flat, the campaign is claiming sales that were happening anyway. Run a holdout before you scale.
• →If the campaign gets fewer than about 50 purchases a week, consolidate rather than split. You cannot afford segments yet.

The breakeven ROAS calculator gives you the line to judge against, and reporting beyond Ads Manager covers how to read MER beside platform numbers.

What most Advantage+ advice gets wrong

The common advice is to switch everything on, go broad, and trust the system because Meta says it performs better. Meta does say that. Its help center states that advertisers using Advantage+ sales campaigns saw a 9% improvement in cost per conversion, on average.

Read what that measures. Cost per conversion counts the conversions Meta attributes to its own ads, including repeat buyers who might have ordered anyway. A cheaper cost per conversion and a more profitable campaign are two different claims, and the worked split above shows how far apart they can sit. Trust the automation with delivery. Do not hand it the decision about what counts as a win. That decision belongs to the business.

When Advantage+ is the wrong choice

• →You need an isolated test. A holdout or geo test needs a campaign whose audience you control, and that usually means switching one of the Advantage+ settings off on purpose.
• →Volume is thin. Below the learning threshold, a campaign with fewer controls has fewer ways to recover.
• →The campaign is meant for existing customers. A launch to your own list or a win-back push makes repeat buyers the point, and a blended ROAS is then a fair measure.
• →You need budget held for a specific product or market. Ad set spend limits help, but a separate campaign is clearer when the ring-fence is a business decision.

Switching Advantage+ off is not a failure state. Meta notes that campaigns with Advantage+ off still benefit from broad settings. The mature account runs Advantage+ as the workhorse for scaled acquisition and keeps a small number of deliberately structured campaigns where control earns its place.

What to do this month

1. List every legacy ASC campaign and check whether it uses the existing customer budget percentage. Those are paused from API version 26.0, so duplicate them into Advantage+ sales campaigns in Ads Manager now. Meta notes that an ASC campaign with more than 50 ads in an ad set cannot be migrated, so trim those first.
2. Build or refresh the existing-customer custom audience from store purchasers, then choose between excluding it and splitting it into a capped ad set.
3. Set up the new, engaged, and existing segment breakdown so the split above is something you can read, not estimate.
4. Finish all of this before November. Every structural change needs a week of results to read, and the BFCM 2026 playbook explains why the peak weeks are the wrong time to be relearning.

How much budget Advantage+ should carry depends on what is holding the business back. The ecommerce growth ladder sets out that constraint by revenue band. For the creative supply the campaign depends on, see scaling Meta creative production, and to review an existing setup, the high-spend Meta audit checklist. If you would rather have it reviewed for you, that is part of our Meta ads for Shopify work.