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Advantage+ Shopping campaigns rose from 27% of retail and ecommerce ad spend in Q4 2023 to 34% in Q4 2024 (Tinuiti Digital Ads Benchmark Report Q4 2024), and Meta is deprecating the legacy ASC API in October 2025 to push the rest of the market onto it (PPC Land, 2025). The platform's direction of travel is unambiguous. The question is whether full migration is the right move for every account.
Independent testing argues against full migration. BMG360's 2024 study across five apparel, fitness, cosmetics, and telemedicine brands found traditional campaign types matched or outperformed Advantage+ Shopping in four of the five tests, with three brands seeing higher cost-per-acquisition under ASC (BMG360, 2024). Wicked Reports' June 2025 audit of roughly 55,000 campaigns documented Meta's ASC normalised CAC effectively doubling between May 2024 and May 2025, despite rising adoption.
The structure that actually wins runs both. Most teams scaling above $50k a month operate Advantage+ for high-volume mid-funnel conversions and keep manual campaigns for testing, retargeting, and niche segments (bir.ch, 2025). Ad Set Budget Optimisation (ABO) prospecting averages 94% ROAS versus 81% for Campaign Budget Optimisation in benchmarked accounts (Webtopia, 2024), so manual is not just a testing surface, it is a measurable performance lane.
A practical heuristic: if your account spends below the 50/week conversion floor that Advantage+ needs to learn, manual is your default and ASC is the experiment. Above the floor, run both side by side with weekly conversion attribution as the truth source. Meta's new Incremental Attribution feature, rolled out April 2025, showed an average 20%+ lift in incremental conversions across 45 advertisers in 11 verticals (Meta data via Madgicx, 2025), so use it to disagree with the platform's default attribution before you migrate.