Meta's Advantage+ creative enhancements can improve ad performance, but only when you know which ones to turn on, which to turn off, and which need a human filter before Meta's AI touches your creative. Turning everything on blindly hands Meta control it has not earned. Turning everything off leaves real performance gains on the table. Here is the practical breakdown for every enhancement, by creative format.

What Are Meta Advantage+ Creative Enhancements?

Advantage+ creative enhancements are AI-powered modifications Meta applies to your ad creative at delivery time. They are designed to adapt your image or video to different placements, audiences, and contexts automatically, without you creating separate assets for each variation.

They live at the ad level in Ads Manager under the creative setup section and are split into two groups: enhancements Meta has turned on by default (it thinks these will help) and enhancements it has left off for review (it is less certain, or the risk is higher).

The rule of thumb: default-on enhancements are generally safer to leave running. Review-required enhancements need a human judgment call before you enable them.

Image Ad Enhancements: What to Turn On and What to Turn Off

Visual Touch-Ups

What it does: Automatically crops and expands your image to fit more placements including new formats like Threads ads that require slightly different aspect ratios than standard square, vertical, or horizontal.

Recommendation: Leave on. Meta handles this well for most images. The exception is heavily text-dense images where cropping could cut off key information. If your image has critical content at the edges, review the examples Meta shows before leaving this active.

Flex Media

What it does: Allows Meta to use your vertical image on placements that would normally show square, or vice versa, when it predicts the alternate format will perform better for that specific impression.

Recommendation: Leave on. A vertical image taking up more screen real estate on a feed placement is almost always better than a square. Give Meta the flexibility to use whichever asset grabs more attention for each specific delivery context.

Enhanced CTA

What it does: Pairs key phrases from your ad copy with alternative call-to-action button text that Meta generates and cycles through automatically. Instead of a standard "Learn More," you might see "See for yourself," "Take a closer look," or "Curious? Check it out."

Recommendation: Turn on, but review the options first. This is one of the enhancements where Meta shows you exactly what it plans to use and lets you deselect anything that does not fit your brand voice. Spend two minutes in the customize panel and remove anything off-brand. The ones that remain are worth testing.

Music

What it does: Adds background music to your image ad. Meta selects it automatically based on your media, or you can manually browse and choose.

Recommendation: Customize or turn off. Meta's auto-selected music frequently misses the brand tone. Most people scroll with sound off anyway, so this is a low-impact enhancement. If you turn it on, manually select something that fits your brand rather than trusting the default. If you are short on time, skip it.

Ad Animation

What it does: Adds subtle movement to a static image to make it behave more like a video in the feed.

Recommendation: Depends on your creative. For text-heavy images, turn it off. Movement makes text harder to read at a glance. For product images or visual lifestyle shots with minimal text, animation can increase scroll-stopping power without extra production cost. It is essentially a free video asset if the creative suits it.

Add Overlays

What it does: Adds a text overlay from your ad copy on top of your image creative.

Recommendation: Off if your image already has text. On if it does not. Layering text overlays onto a text-heavy image creates visual clutter. For clean product images or service-based visuals with no existing text, overlays can meaningfully improve performance. Meta is testing a more sophisticated version called Enhanced Media Text (currently in beta) that may eventually replace this option.

Enhanced Media Text

What it does: Replaces existing text within your image with AI-generated alternatives designed to improve engagement.

Recommendation: Use with caution. If your image contains testimonials, specific offer language, or brand-specific messaging, turning this on risks distorting your intended meaning. For simple benefit statements or generic text overlays, it is worth testing. Currently in beta, so quality varies.

Text Improvements

What it does: Allows Meta to redistribute your headline, primary text, and description across different positions depending on the placement and individual user, rather than keeping them fixed.

Recommendation: Leave on. Meta has gotten genuinely good at this. Primary text appears above the image on Facebook mobile and below on Instagram. Giving Meta flexibility to reorder and remix your copy for each placement context typically improves coherence across your full delivery mix.

Video Ad Enhancements: What to Turn On and What to Turn Off

Video enhancements are fewer than image enhancements because there is less Meta can safely modify in a video without breaking the creative. The most important ones:

Visual Touch-Ups (Video)

What it does: Adjusts the aspect ratio of your video to fit different placements.

Recommendation: Leave on. Same logic as images. Design your videos with the key information centered so crops from the edges do not remove anything critical. Meta adapts the container, not the content.

Add Video Effects

What it does: Applies color correction and visual sharpening to make your video more vibrant and engaging.

Recommendation: Depends on your existing edit. If your video is already color-graded by a professional editor, leave this off. If your video is raw footage or feels visually flat, turning this on costs nothing and may improve visual impact. Review the before and after before committing.

Text Improvements (Video)

What it does: Same as the image version. Meta redistributes your copy across primary text, headline, and description positions.

Recommendation: Leave on. Same reasoning applies across both formats.

The Enhancement Decision Framework

Why Clean Tracking Data Makes Creative Decisions More Trustworthy

Here is the part most creative guides skip. Meta's creative enhancements are only as smart as the conversion data feeding them. When Meta decides which version of your CTA to serve, which music fits your audience, or when to apply animation, it is drawing on your conversion signals to predict what will perform.

If your pixel is missing 20% to 40% of purchase events due to ad blockers, Safari ITP, or iOS restrictions, Meta's creative optimization is working from an incomplete picture. It may suppress a variant that is actually winning because it never saw the conversion. It may scale a variant that appears to perform better simply because its audience happened to browse on Chrome without an ad blocker.

Server-side tracking through a platform like Aimerce ensures that the conversion signals Meta uses to evaluate creative performance are as complete and accurate as possible. When Meta's algorithm has clean first-party data from every purchase, its creative enhancement decisions are based on reality rather than the fraction of reality that browser pixels capture.

Better data does not guarantee better creative decisions. But incomplete data guarantees worse ones.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I turn on all Meta Advantage+ creative enhancements? No. Some enhancements work well for most creatives, like visual touch-ups, flex media, and text improvements. Others depend entirely on your specific ad, like music, animation, and enhanced media text. The safest approach is to leave default-on enhancements running unless you have a specific reason to disable them, and review each off-by-default enhancement before enabling it.

Does turning on Advantage+ creative enhancements improve ROAS? They can contribute to performance improvements when the right enhancements are applied to suitable creative. Meta reports CTR and conversion rate lifts for specific enhancements in its own testing. However, enhancements applied to the wrong creative type can hurt performance. Evaluate each one against your specific ad rather than treating them as a universal on or off setting.

What is the Enhanced CTA enhancement in Meta Ads? Enhanced CTA replaces your standard call-to-action button text with AI-generated alternatives that Meta cycles through to find the highest-performing option. Examples include "See for yourself," "Take a closer look," and "Curious? Check it out." You can review and customize which options Meta uses before enabling it, which makes it one of the safer enhancements to turn on.

Should I use Meta's AI music for image ads? Only if you manually select music that fits your brand. Meta's automatically selected music frequently does not match brand tone or offer context. Most users scroll with sound off, making music a low-priority enhancement. If you enable it, spend a few minutes browsing the library and selecting something intentional rather than accepting the default.

Why does clean conversion tracking matter for Meta creative enhancements? Meta's creative enhancement decisions are based on conversion signals. If your tracking is missing purchase events due to ad blockers or iOS restrictions, Meta optimizes creative variants on incomplete data. Server-side tracking ensures the conversion signals informing Meta's creative decisions reflect actual purchase behavior rather than the subset of conversions browser pixels manage to capture.

What is the difference between Add Overlays and Enhanced Media Text? Add Overlays adds new text from your ad copy on top of your image. Enhanced Media Text (currently in beta) replaces existing text already within your image with AI-generated alternatives. For images with existing text like testimonials or offer copy, Enhanced Media Text carries more risk. For images without text, Add Overlays can meaningfully improve performance.

Beyond Binary

Meta's Advantage+ creative enhancements are not a binary yes or no decision. They are a menu of tools, each with a specific use case, a specific risk profile, and a specific type of creative it suits best.

The practical approach: leave the safe defaults running, review and customize the enhancements that carry brand risk, and turn off the ones that conflict with your creative intent. Then make sure the conversion data Meta uses to evaluate those enhancements is as clean and complete as possible.

Creative quality and data quality are both inputs to the same output: campaigns that find the right people and convert them efficiently.