Auditing your Advantage+ Shopping campaigns before they quietly waste your budget
Advantage+ Shopping campaigns are Meta's version of Performance Max: powerful when structured correctly, capable of spending inefficiently when left to their own devices. A systematic audit checklist for accounts that have been running ASC for three months or more.
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) were positioned by Meta as a simplification: one campaign, automated targeting, optimised delivery, fewer decisions. For many ecommerce accounts they are a meaningful upgrade on the previous manual structure. For some, they are a black box that is slowly absorbing budget while reporting ROAS numbers that look fine on the surface but do not survive a closer read.
The audit I run on new accounts after ASC has been live for at least a quarter focuses on three layers: the spend composition, the creative signal and the audience assumptions the algorithm is making. Each can be interrogated. None of them require turning the campaign off.
Spend composition: what ASC is actually spending on
The first diagnostic is the audience breakdown. In the ASC reporting view, Meta shows you the split between existing customers and new customers. This number matters more than the headline ROAS because existing customers convert at a structurally different rate from new ones, and if ASC is predominantly retargeting your existing audience, the ROAS figure is flattering your prospecting efficiency.
A healthy ASC for a growth-stage ecommerce brand should be spending at least sixty percent on new customers. Below forty percent and the campaign is functioning primarily as a retention vehicle with prospecting economics built in.
| New customer spend % | Interpretation | Recommended action |
|---|---|---|
| 70%+ | Strong prospecting weight | Monitor; ensure creative freshness |
| 50-69% | Balanced; acceptable for most brands | Review if new customer CPA is in target |
| 40-49% | Leaning retargeting-heavy | Check existing customer cap in settings |
| Below 40% | Effectively a retention campaign | Increase new customer acquisition bid or cap existing |
The existing customer budget cap
Meta gives you a lever for this: the existing customer budget cap within ASC settings. This sets a ceiling on what the campaign will spend against people who have previously purchased or are on your customer list. If you want the campaign to find new customers, this setting does most of the work.
Most accounts have this set too high, or at the Meta default, which leans toward efficiency over growth. For acquisition-focused brands, I typically set the existing customer cap at twenty to twenty-five percent of total ASC budget, leaving the algorithm to find the best prospecting allocation for the rest.
Before any other ASC intervention, look at the new vs existing customer split in the campaign breakdown. If you do not like the number, adjust the existing customer budget cap. It is the single most impactful lever and the most commonly misconfigured one.
Creative signal health
ASC does not run without creative. It runs with whatever creative you give it, and it will keep serving the assets that drive the most conversions by its own metric until those assets fatigue. The diagnostic here is frequency.
High frequency against your warm audience combined with declining ROAS is the creative fatigue signature. Pull the frequency data by asset, not just by campaign. Identify which specific images or videos are serving the most impressions and check when they were added. If your highest-frequency asset was uploaded more than six weeks ago and you have not refreshed it, that is your immediate action.
Creative is the targeting. In a world of automated placement and broad match audiences, the asset itself determines who the algorithm finds.
Meta Blueprint creative guidance, 2025
Catalogue completeness and pixel signal
ASC campaigns using a product catalogue have an additional dependency: the catalogue quality and the Pixel signal that powers dynamic delivery. Run through these checks.
Catalogue coverage: are all your active products in the catalogue, with accurate prices, stock status and deep-link URLs? Missing products mean ASC cannot dynamically serve them, so the campaign defaults to your highest-performing SKUs and under-represents the rest of your range.
Pixel quality: how many events does your Pixel log per week, and what is the ratio of purchases to page views? A low purchase-to-view ratio usually means the Pixel is misconfigured or the product pages have a quality problem. ASC uses Pixel signal to optimise placements; degraded signal produces degraded optimisation.
The measurement trap
ASC reports ROAS using Meta's attribution model, which uses view-through and click-through data. This number overstates revenue contribution for most brands, sometimes significantly, because it counts purchase intent that existed before the ad was shown.
The only honest evaluation of ASC is either a Meta-administered lift test or a geo holdout test run independently. Comparing ASC ROAS to your blended account ROAS is not a valid comparison. Comparing it to what revenue you would have made without the campaign is.
If you have been running ASC for six months without a lift test, schedule one. The result will either confirm the campaign is working, in which case you have defensible evidence to maintain or increase spend, or it will tell you something the ROAS number was hiding.