Meta published a series of blog posts on holiday campaign planning, outlining how shopping journeys have evolved and how marketers should update their approaches to match new discovery and purchase behaviors.
The premise is that shoppers now find products across many surfaces. Meta's figures:
"86% of global holiday shoppers use social media for inspiration across Reels, Stories and Feed with 58% of Gen Z discovering gifts through Reels and Stories. 64% of those who discover products on Instagram are likely to purchase. The more formats you provide, the more ways Meta Advantage+ can match the right creative to the right person throughout the season."
That last sentence is the actual emphasis of the series: marketers should lean into Meta's AI-powered Advantage+ campaigns.
Meta divides the holiday shopping journey into four distinct phases:
To align with this, Meta says marketers should begin campaigns as early as possible so the learning phase can run and its systems can develop an understanding of audience response.
Activate Advantage+ early. Meta says its advanced Advantage+ campaigns can align with evolving discovery patterns by automatically drip-feeding ads to potential buyers between October and December. "The system reads intent signals in real time and places your ad on the surface most likely to drive the next action for that specific person at that specific moment."
Turn on Advantage+ placements. Meta says Advantage+ can save advertisers money by using Meta's full inventory, "including high-performing placements where competition and cost are lower." Advertisers should switch these on for holiday campaigns as soon as possible so the learning period begins and campaigns are running at peak efficiency by Black Friday.
Use Conversion Lift. Finally, Meta recommends Conversion Lift analysis to better measure the path to purchase and accurately attribute sales driven by Meta campaigns.
There are genuinely useful planning tips here. But the series is also material a platform produced to increase adoption of its own automation products, and it should be read with that in mind.
"Start early" and "delegate to automation early" are different recommendations. Warming up the learning phase in advance is sound. It does not automatically follow that the entire budget should go to Advantage+ to do it. How you split between controllable and automated campaigns is a separate decision.
"Lower cost placements" are cheap for a reason. It is true that Advantage+ placements lower CPMs by drawing on full inventory. But low-competition surfaces are frequently low-performance surfaces. Build the reporting structure that lets you examine placement-level performance after the fact.
Conversion Lift is good advice. It points toward incrementality rather than platform-attributed conversions — which is effectively an argument for not taking Meta's own reported conversion numbers at face value.
The front end of shopping discovery is also shifting, as covered in AI Became the First Step in Shopping. Another layer is forming in front of Meta's four phases.
Working backward from an October discovery phase, creative lead times and the learning phase mean setup should be complete during September. The recommendation to prepare multiple formats holds regardless of whether you use automation products — Reels, Stories and Feed differ in both specs and consumption context.
If you do use placement automation, secure your diagnostic path in advance. As Performance Max Adds Local Customer Optimization illustrates, automation products trade control for performance, which makes after-the-fact diagnosability the thing worth protecting.
Discovery (October to early November), deals (Black Friday and Cyber Monday), gifting (throughout December), and fresh start (late December into the new year). Meta recommends starting campaigns as early as possible so the learning phase runs before the peak.
Meta attributes savings to using full inventory, including 'high-performing placements where competition and cost are lower.' CPMs do fall, but low-competition surfaces are often low-performance surfaces. Set up placement-level reporting so you can examine the tradeoff afterward.
Working backward from an October discovery phase, creative lead times plus the learning phase mean setup should be complete during September. Prepare multiple formats, since Reels, Stories and Feed differ in both specs and consumption context.
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