Over the past year Meta has quietly moved Advantage+ from an opt-in to the starting point for most new campaigns. Open the campaign builder today and the automated setup is what greets you. For a lot of advertisers that is genuinely useful. It strips out busywork and lets Meta’s system do what it is good at.

The catch is what it hides. Placement, budget split, audience expansion and creative selection all move behind the automation. None of that is wrong on its own, but it means fewer people are actually watching where the money goes. In audit after audit we open accounts where Advantage+ has been running for months and nobody can say which placements or audiences are carrying the results.

Automation is not the enemy. Automation with nobody reading the output is. The accounts that do well on Advantage+ are the ones that still check the exclusions, still feed it clean conversion data, and still look at the breakdowns every few weeks. That is exactly the read an independent audit gives you.