The Meta Ads playbook from three years ago is essentially useless today. The platform has changed more in the last three years than in the previous five. Advantage+ campaigns, AI-generated creative variations, the post-iOS 14 attribution environment, and the shift to Reels as the dominant placement have collectively rewritten the rules. Here is what is actually working in our accounts right now.
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns
For e-commerce clients, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are outperforming our best manual campaign structures by 15-30% on ROAS in the majority of accounts. The catch: ASC gives you less control, which makes creative quality more important than ever. With manual targeting you could compensate for mediocre creative by finding the right audience. With ASC, the algorithm finds the audience β your job is to give it creative it can work with.
Creative Is the New Targeting
In 2026, creative is the targeting. Meta's algorithm reads your creative, identifies who responds to it, and finds more of those people. A video that speaks directly to a specific pain point will self-select its audience better than any interest targeting combination. We now spend 60% of our Meta strategy time on creative and 40% on campaign structure β a near-reversal of our 2021 approach.
The Attribution Problem
Post-iOS 14, Meta's reported ROAS is not to be trusted at face value. Modeled conversions fill some of the gap, but we strongly recommend running incrementality testing alongside β holdout groups that measure the actual causal impact of your spend. In our experience, the true incrementality of Meta Ads is 60-80% of what the platform reports. Still positive, usually strongly so, but not the numbers in the dashboard.
