Facebook and Instagram Ads Updates for 2025: What Marketers Need to Know

Are you struggling to keep up with the latest Meta advertising changes? Wondering how AI is reshaping the ads landscape?

In this article, we'll explore important Facebook and Instagram ad updates for marketers.

Why Meta's AI-Powered Ads Features Matter for Digital Marketing

As Meta continues to evolve its social advertising platform, AI and machine learning have become central to how ads are created, delivered, and optimized. “AI has taken over the ad platforms as well as everything else about marketing,” says Tara Zirker, founder of the Successful Ads Club and a Facebook ads expert.

For marketers who haven't recently embraced advertising on Meta platforms, particularly those who stepped back after the iOS updates that affected social media platforms, now is the time to reconsider. 

The potential reach is enormous, with over 3 billion monthly active users on Facebook and nearly 3 billion on Instagram. More importantly, Meta's advertising remains one of the most cost-effective options available for reaching a target audience with paid social media marketing.

“Facebook is one of the best bang for your buck in terms of reaching leads and converting those leads into sales,” Zirker explains. “Looking at Facebook's own data, you see about $20 cost per action overall on the platform, $8 cost per lead, and less than $1 per click when targeting US markets. When you compare that against other platforms, it's still an incredible bargain.”

Zirker emphasizes that ads can significantly enhance your organic efforts.

By applying advertising dollars to warm audiences, you can achieve much stronger reach and conversions than with organic content alone. This is noteworthy, given the declining organic reach across social platforms.

#1: Meta's Advantage Plus Features

Meta has introduced a suite of Advantage Plus features representing a significant shift toward AI-driven advertising. These features fall into several categories, each designed to automate and optimize different aspects of your advertising campaigns.

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

Advantage Plus Shopping represents Meta's fully automated solution for eCommerce businesses. This feature uses a dedicated algorithm that is separate from other ad products. The system requires minimal input from advertisers–simply upload your creative assets and select your catalog. The AI handles audience targeting, placement optimization, and delivery from there.

When implementing Advantage Plus Shopping, Zirker recommends starting with 10-30% of your budget and giving campaigns a minimum of seven to ten days to optimize. This feature works across various price points, even for products priced at several hundred dollars. However, it performs best for accounts with substantial historical data the AI can learn from.

Advantage+ Placements

One of the most significant changes in Meta's advertising approach involves placement optimization. Zirker strongly advises against manually selecting placements, a practice she sees many advertisers still following.

“Advantage Plus Placements actually does a phenomenal job, and usually, you will get a better cost per result,” she explains.

Many advertisers worry about limiting their ads to specific platforms, particularly Instagram. However, Zirker's analysis of numerous accounts through her membership program reveals that even with unrestricted placements, about 60-80% of the advertising budget typically goes to Instagram, where the audience is most responsive. The algorithm effectively identifies where your ads perform best.

Looking at data across many accounts, Zirker has found that Facebook audiences can sometimes be even more valuable than Instagram audiences for certain businesses. This demonstrates the importance of letting the algorithm optimize across all available placements rather than restricting them based on assumptions.

Advantage+ Creative

Meta has developed sophisticated Advantage Plus Creative tools to enhance ad creative automatically.

The system can now adjust image brightness, generate animations, add music, and expand images to fit different placements. One particularly powerful feature is the ability to take a basic product image and automatically generate various background settings for testing.

#2: AI-Enhanced Creative Features and Best Practices

Meta's creative AI capabilities have evolved significantly, offering advertisers powerful tools to enhance their ad content. According to Zirker, creative optimization should consume about 80% of your advertising effort, as it's becoming the primary differentiator in campaign success. “That is where your edge is going to be. That's your competitive advantage,” she emphasizes.

Through analysis of numerous accounts, Zirker has found that static ads still drive 60-70% of conversions. However, this doesn't mean video content should be ignored. Marketers need to test both media types to understand how Meta's AI can enhance them to improve ad performance.

When you enable these enhancements, Meta will show you preview examples of possible variations and suggest using top-performing ads from previous campaigns. However, you won't always know exactly which enhancements will be applied to individual ads.

#3: Audience Targeting Evolution

Meta's approach to audience targeting has undergone a dramatic transformation. Over the past year, the platform removed hundreds of thousands of targeting options.

This shift reflects Meta's push toward broader, AI-driven audience selection. Zirker breaks down the current targeting landscape into three distinct approaches, each with unique characteristics and performance patterns.

Broad Audience Targeting

Despite initial skepticism from many advertisers, broad audiences have emerged as one of the most effective targeting approaches, showing success in 70-80% of cases.

Zirker shares a compelling example from her own business: “We're targeting a very niche B2B audience, people who are spending less than five thousand dollars per month on their ads, and we use broad audience targeting very effectively. People will be shocked by that.”

When using broad audience demographics, Zirker recommends setting only age ranges and occasionally gender and letting Meta's algorithm handle the rest.

Through extensive testing across various industries – from yoga studios to accountants to niche e-commerce categories – broad targeting consistently delivers strong results when given enough data to optimize.

Advantage Plus Audience Targeting

Advantage Plus Audiences represents Meta's newest targeting solution. It allows advertisers to provide basic demographic suggestions while letting the AI handle most targeting decisions. Through analysis of multiple accounts, Zirker has observed an interesting pattern: these audiences often excel at generating leads but may underperform in final conversion rates.

“Advantage Plus Audiences often perform better when getting a lead in the door but don't as often perform as well on the conversion on the backend,” Zirker explains. This pattern appears in about 50% of accounts, making it crucial for advertisers to monitor both lead generation and final conversion metrics when using this feature.

Manual Targeting

While Meta pushes toward more automated targeting, traditional manual targeting maintains a 60% success rate.

Zirker advises maintaining some manual targeting tests for comparison purposes, particularly in specific niche markets where detailed targeting might still provide value.

#4: The Impact of Account History and Data

One crucial factor in the success of Meta's AI features is the amount of historical data available in your account. Through analysis of numerous accounts through her membership program, Zirker has observed that accounts with more extensive advertising history and data points typically see better performance with AI-driven features.

This is particularly evident in Advantage Plus Audiences, where accounts with substantial historical data often see significantly better results than newer accounts or those with limited data.

“The accounts that are crushing it with Advantage Plus Audiences generally have spent a lot more money on Facebook, have a very specific target they're going for, and have just more data that they've been able to give Facebook over time,” Zirker explains.

#5: Facebook and Instagram Ads Strategy Implementation

Success with Meta's AI features requires a systematic approach to testing and implementation. Through her experience managing numerous accounts, Zirker has developed specific guidelines for maximizing the effectiveness of these tools.

Budget and Scale

When testing new AI features, proper budgeting becomes crucial. Zirker recommends having enough budget for at least 200 conversions per day during your testing period. For example, if your cost per lead is $10, you should plan for a daily testing budget of $2,000. This might seem substantial, but it's necessary to provide enough data for Meta's AI to optimize effectively.

Within this testing budget, allocate 10-30% specifically for new features or approaches. This amount of ad spend allows you to maintain your core performing campaigns while gathering enough data on new initiatives. For Advantage Plus Shopping campaigns, you might initially see negative ROI in the early hours, but profitable campaigns often emerge by the end of the 24-hour cycle.

The 24-Hour Testing Cycle

Success with Meta's AI features requires understanding the platform's natural optimization cycle. Zirker recommends a specific testing schedule based on the platform's 24-hour pattern:

Review your initial ad performance 4-6 hours after launch and pause any ads showing no conversions.

At the 8-9 hour mark, pause any unprofitable ad sets, though you can keep those that are close to profitability.

By the 12-hour point, pause any ad sets that aren't definitively profitable.

Make a final check at 14-16 hours to pause any ad sets that have dipped below profitability.

This cycle should be reset at midnight because Facebook's algorithm essentially runs on a 24-hour cycle. “If something failed today, it might be a huge success tomorrow, and vice versa,” Zirker explains.

She recommends running this 24-hour cycle for 4-5 days to gather enough data for making longer-term decisions about your ad sets.

Through this testing process, you'll typically find that about 15 out of 20 initial ad sets are effective, and five can be permanently scrapped. Once you identify your winners, create new ad sets to replace the unsuccessful ones and continue the testing cycle.

Automation Tools and Campaign Management

While Meta offers native automation features, third-party tools can provide additional control and optimization capabilities.

Zirker specifically recommends RevealBot, which offers more frequent update intervals than Meta's native tools. “Facebook checks on performance and triggers automation every 30 minutes, while Revealbot checks in every 15 minutes,” she explains. “When you're running a high-budget campaign at scale, those 15 minutes can make a very big difference.”

Meta is also beta-testing new AI features for campaign management. These features can automatically turn off underperforming ads and adjust budgets based on performance.

However, Zirker cautions about giving these automated systems too much control. In her testing, she found that the AI sometimes turned off ads prematurely, before they had a chance to recover or before new creative variations could be tested.

The Lookalike Mashup Strategy

One particularly effective strategy Zirker has developed is what she calls “lookalike mashups.” This approach helps combat the declining effectiveness of traditional lookalike audiences.

The process involves creating multiple lookalike audiences at different percentage levels (1%, 3%, 5%, 7%, and 10%) from your highest-value customer lists and combining them into a single ad set.

When implementing this strategy, use your best data sources, such as buyer lists or highly qualified leads.

The combined approach often triggers Meta's algorithm to perform better than individual lookalike audiences would on their own. Zirker has found this particularly effective for reviving lookalike audience performance across various industries and account types.

Monitoring Lead Quality and Conversion Rates

One of the most critical aspects of using Meta's AI features is maintaining careful oversight of lead quality and conversion rates. Through analysis of numerous accounts, Zirker has observed that while AI-driven features might sometimes generate more leads, the quality of these leads can vary significantly.

This is particularly important with Advantage Plus Audiences, where you might see excellent lead generation numbers but lower final conversion rates. Zirker recommends implementing thorough lead tracking and maintaining comparison metrics between different audience types and targeting approaches.

#6: Future Trends and Recommendations

Looking ahead, Zirker predicts Meta will continue moving toward more automated, AI-driven solutions.

“Everything is going to move toward Advantage Plus Audiences,” she explains. “In six months, the majority of accounts might be seeing the most success with Advantage Plus Audiences, and Facebook might start sunsetting some of the older audience features.”

To prepare for this evolution, advertisers should:

Start building historical data now by testing AI features across their accounts. The more data Meta's AI has to work with, the better it performs. Focus most of your effort on creative development, as this becomes increasingly important as targeting becomes more automated. Develop robust systems for monitoring lead generation and final conversion metrics, as these insights become crucial for optimizing AI-driven campaigns.

Keep testing new features as they emerge, but maintain a balanced approach. As Zirker notes, “What works in one account might not work in another. You have to be willing to test and adjust based on your specific results.”

Remember that Meta's AI features are continuously evolving. What might not work well today could become highly effective in a few months. Regular testing and retesting of features, combined with careful monitoring of results, will be vital to staying ahead in this rapidly changing landscape.

Other Notes From This Episode

• Connect with Michael Stelzner @Stelzner on Instagram and @Mike_Stelzner on X.
• Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.

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