Should You Create a Tailored Leads Campaign Over the Manual Setup?

If you’ve selected the Leads objective in Meta Ads Manager recently, you may have seen an immediate prompt for a Tailored Leads Campaign. It looks like this…

Meta has been testing and rolling out Tailored Leads since November of 2022, if not earlier. And if you’ve experimented with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, you’ve certainly spotted similarities.

Is there a clear benefit to using Tailored Leads Campaigns? Do Tailored Leads provide unique features and optimizations compared to manual leads campaigns, similar to the way Advantage+ Shopping does compared to manual sales campaigns?

Let’s explore…

Defining Tailored Leads

Let’s go back to that initial definition of a Tailored Leads Campaign:

Create your campaign in fewer steps using the tailored leads campaign. It’s preset with built-in best practices to help you get more leads at the best value.

So far, nothing jumps out as a unique benefit. Meta defines it as “preset with built-in best practices.” That doesn’t inspire excitement. It doesn’t sound unique.

Let’s go through the setup process…

Campaign Setup

First, you won’t be able to utilize A/B testing or Advantage Campaign Budget directly from campaign creation. Those options aren’t there.

The campaign and ad set are completed in one shorter step. This is a streamlined process.

One big difference is that the Tailored Leads Campaign only includes four conversion location options: Instant Forms, Messenger, Instagram, and Calls.

It’s missing Website, Instant Forms and Messenger (combined), and App. Here’s the conversion location section when setting this up manually…

This is a big deal, especially if you like to collect leads from your website. You won’t be using Tailored Leads.

There also isn’t an option to use manual bidding with Tailored Leads. This is stripped down.

Presets

Some of the missing features aren’t actually missing. You just won’t be able to change them, so Meta put them out of view. There are several presets that you aren’t able to customize.

Now we see that the bid strategy is set at Highest Volume. You won’t be able to change that.

Advantage+ Placements is automatically on, and you won’t be able to remove placements if you prefer.

Finally, you’ll be optimizing for Leads, which sorta explains why the Website conversion location is missing. When you utilize the website conversion location, you then go through the steps of selecting your pixel and the optimization event of your choice.

Added Features?

Advantage+ Shopping also streamlines the campaign creation process by locking in presets. But what makes it especially unique is that it offers features related to defining your current customers and some added machine learning to drive sales.

Unless I’m missing something, I see none of that here. Tailored Leads Campaigns simply appear to be a Boost button for leads in Ads Manager. It simplifies things for newer advertisers to prevent them from modifying settings that will make their results worse.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think Tailored Leads Campaigns offer anything that is unique, special, or powerful. All indications are that you could easily recreate a Tailored Leads Campaign by creating a manual leads campaign that utilizes the same settings.

You could not say the same of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. You can’t completely recreate it with a manual campaign (mainly due to the current customer features and machine learning).

Should You Use It?

Sure, knock yourself out. I’d love to be proven wrong and hear that results from Tailored Leads Campaigns are incredible and can’t be duplicated with manual campaigns. But I have serious doubts.

If you are overwhelmed and are unsure about the best way to set up your campaigns, Tailored Leads is a good starting point.