If you're running Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns at $50K+/month, there's a good chance you haven't checked the settings in 30 days.
ASC automates targeting, placement, and creative rotation. The operator's job shifts from managing audiences and bids to feeding the system correctly and monitoring the outputs.
But automation doesn't mean you can ignore it. ASC runs on bad inputs just as efficiently as it runs on good ones - it just produces bad outputs.
Four things need active monitoring every week, and none of them are automated.
Here's what to check.
When you ask brands about email marketing, most of them think about sending new, one off campaigns. That’s what most brands have in store for Memorial Day: a few sends, a discount, and maybe a last chance reminder on the final day.
But the reality is, these one off email campaigns aren’t the ones that actually make you the most money! If you’re a DTC brand that wants to use email to drive way more revenue on autopilot, you need to be focused on completely different flows.
The brands that win Memorial Day on email are the ones that already have the right automated email flows running before the sale starts. Abandoned checkout. Abandoned cart. Browse abandonment. Back in stock. Price drop. Welcome. Winback. Post purchase.
These are the emails that hit when shopper intent is highest, which is exactly why they drive such a big share of email revenue. This is also where most brands are behind.
Their teams are spending hours building one off campaigns while their highest value email flows are outdated, underbuilt, or missing entirely. So they head into one of the biggest sales moments of the quarter without the part of the program that actually converts best.
That’s why I keep telling brands to look at Instant.
Instant allows Shopify brands to launch the email flows that matter most and personalize them to each shopper based on the exact actions they take on your site.
The result is a much stronger email program heading into Memorial Day, with more revenue coming from the moments that already exist inside your traffic.
You can set custom sales rules for your AI-powered email flows in minutes, and craft multi-step campaigns to cover the full sale in a combined strategy rather than a set of one-off sends.
And the timing here matters.
Brands that get this live in the next two weeks give themselves a real shot at pulling more 50% revenue out of their Memorial Day sales without having to spend more on paid channels.
If your Memorial Day email plan is still mostly batch sends, you are definitely leaving revenue on the table.
Book a demo with Instant by May 7th to get 50% off your first 60 days of AI-powered email flows and campaigns.
Lever 1 - The Existing Customer Cap Is Probably Wrong
The setting you likely haven't set or haven't looked at since launch is the existing customer budget cap.
The Problem:
Without it, ASC over-indexes on existing customers because they're easier to convert. This produces inflated ROAS numbers while quietly starving prospecting of the budget it needs to find new buyers.
- The reported ROAS looks strong.
- New customer acquisition is declining.
- You don't notice until you try to scale and there's nobody left to retarget.
The Audit:
Upload your customer email list as a Custom Audience, assign it as "Existing Customers" in the ASC campaign settings, and set the cap to 10-25% of budget. This forces the algorithm to allocate the majority of spend toward prospecting while allowing a controlled portion for existing customer re-engagement.
Next, pull your active ASC campaigns.
- Is an existing customer audience defined?
- Is the cap set?
If not, pull the new vs. returning customer split in Shopify and compare it to what a prospecting-first campaign would produce.
If returning customers represent more than 40% of ASC conversions, the cap is missing or set too high.
Lever 2 - The Creative Volume Problem
ASC can test up to 150 creative combinations. It needs raw material to work with.
The Problem:
You launch with 3-5 creatives and leave it there. At $100K+/month in Meta spend, running 5 creatives in ASC means the algorithm exhausts its testing options within the first two weeks, starts concentrating budget on a small number of assets, and performance plateaus.
The campaign looks like it's working, but it's running on a creative ceiling that is invisible in the reporting.
The algorithm needs 8-15 genuinely different creative concepts - not variations of the same hook with different text overlays. Different formats (product shot, UGC, lifestyle, carousel), different angles (problem-led, social proof, feature-forward), different tones.
As Monday's newsletter covered, the Adaptive Ranking Model update deepens this - a more accurate targeting system amplifies the performance gap between operators feeding the algorithm creative variety and those feeding it creative monotony.
The Audit:
Pull your active ASC campaign and check:
- How many creatives are running?
- How many are receiving meaningful spend?
If 80% of spend is concentrating on 2-3 assets, the algorithm has run out of options. Add 5-8 new concepts before raising budget.
Nord Media helps DTC brands between $1M – $100M+ by driving profitable growth utilizing Meta, Google and creative strategy. We implement systems and strategies that aim to drive growth for you brand without sacrificing your profit.
If you want to understand what we could for your brand let's chat👉 book a call with me.
Lever 3 - Budget Changes Resets the Learning Phase
Meta's learning phase requires 50 purchase events per week per campaign to exit and stabilize.
The Problem:
Scaling the budget too aggressively resets the learning phase.
A budget increase of more than 20% in a single adjustment disrupts the accumulated conversion data and forces the algorithm to re-enter learning. CPA spikes. You interpret it as performance decay and adjust again. The cycle repeats.
The Audit:
Look at your ASC campaign change history and check:
- Have budgets been adjusted more than once in the last 7 days?
- Has budget been increased by more than 20% in a single edit?
If yes to either, the campaign is likely in a re-learning cycle that is inflating apparent CPA.
Increase ASC budget by no more than 20% at a time, and wait 3-4 days between adjustments before assessing performance.
If you need to scale faster, duplicate the campaign at the higher budget rather than adjusting the existing one - this preserves the original campaign's accumulated learning while testing the higher spend level in a parallel structure.
Lever 4 - The New Customer CAC Reporting Gap
The campaign's reported CPA blends new and existing customer conversions into a single number.
The Problem:
Existing customers convert at a much lower cost than new customers - they already know the brand, have already bought, and are far more likely to convert on any given impression.
When ASC acquires a mix of new and existing customers and reports a single blended CPA, the number looks better than the new customer acquisition cost actually is.
If you're optimizing budget allocation and bid strategy against ASC's reported CPA, you're optimizing against a blended metric that overstates efficiency. The number you should be working from is new customer acquisition cost (NCAC) - what it costs to bring in a buyer who has never purchased before.
The Audit:
- In ASC reporting, add the new vs. returning customer breakdown column.
- Cross-reference with Shopify - pull new vs. returning customer revenue for the same period and calculate what share of ASC's conversions came from first-time buyers.
If you're running ASC without a tight existing customer cap, the true NCAC is meaningfully higher than the blended CPA the campaign reports.
If you're making budget decisions based on a $50 blended CPA when your real new customer cost is $80, you're optimizing against the wrong target.
Final Thoughts
ASC delivers better results than standard campaigns for ecommerce operators at scale. Getting 15-25% CPA improvement requires feeding the algorithm correct inputs and monitoring the four outputs that break silently.
This week, pull your active ASC campaigns and check all four levers.
The audit takes 20 minutes.
ASC automates the targeting. It doesn't automate the judgment.
If you want a growth partner who is invested in helping you build a profitable business, someone who is going to push you to make changes that focus on profitable growth. Book a call - let’s chat.
