Meta now lets every advertiser tell Ads Manager to find new customers

On October 6, at Advertising Week in New York, Meta said Customer Lifecycle Strategy is now open to every advertiser. If you run a Sales campaign to find people who have never bought from you, Ads Manager will recommend how to keep existing customers out. You no longer have to build those exclusions from scratch.

Social Media Today covered the same briefing the same day. Meta also said Advantage+ creative can now turn still photos you already have into video ads, and that this is generally available. Meta's newsroom says more than 60% of the time people spend on Facebook and Instagram is with video.

Those two changes are the ones a small shop can actually use this week. The rest of the briefing is tests, rollouts, and tools that may not be in your account yet.

Tell Ads Manager you want new customers

Customer Lifecycle Strategy sits in the ad set of a Sales campaign. Meta's help page is titled Create a campaign to acquire new customers.

Open Ads Manager. Create a campaign with the Sales objective. Open the ad set and find Customer lifecycle strategy. You get two choices. Get conversions from all audiences aims for a lower cost per result and can include people who already buy from you. Acquire new customers shrinks the pool to people Meta thinks have never purchased. Meta says that second path can raise your cost per result because the audience is smaller.

Meta also says you should judge that campaign with new customer cost per acquisition from your own measurement tools, not only the overall campaign cost per result. If you only watch blended cost, a campaign that is doing its job on new buyers can look worse than a campaign that keeps hitting last month's customers.

Before you start, you need a custom audience of existing customers. Meta's help page suggests a customer list or a website custom audience based on the purchase event. Without that list, the switch has nothing solid to exclude.

When you pick Acquire new customers, you can exclude existing customers and also exclude engaged audiences. Choose those custom audiences from the menu or create a new one. Audience labels can keep those lists organized. Meta is testing a simpler version that excludes a whole group of existing customers with one Audience Label. That simpler version is still a test.

Campaigns about social issues, elections, or politics do not have this feature. Pharmaceutical campaigns do not either. Meta's help page states both limits.

This matters if you have been paying to show ads to people who already shop with you. A shop that retargets everyone by default can spend the new-customer budget on last month's buyers. Labeling a campaign as acquisition and attaching a real buyer list is the practical fix Meta just made easier.

Meta's newsroom also says AI-enabled audience discovery will let you describe an ideal customer in plain language. That will show up in Detailed Targeting by the end of the year. It is not the live switch. Do not wait on it. Customer Lifecycle Strategy is the one Meta says is open now.

Turn still photos into video without a shoot

Advantage+ creative can generate video from existing static assets. Meta called that generally available in the October 6 briefing. Social Media Today quoted the same line.

You still need photos you have the right to use. A product shot, a storefront, a simple picture of the work. The tool is not a stand-in for a real video if you already have one that sells. It is a way to test a moving ad without booking a crew first.

Ads Creative Studio, a workspace Meta introduced this summer, is rolling out to more advertisers. Inside that studio, Meta says you can generate new video concepts and variations. You can change the opening hook, adjust audio and clip length, add captions, or change the end scene. Treat that as extra kit if you see it. Many small accounts will only see the Advantage+ still-to-video option first.

If you sell from a catalog, Meta says you can turn product images into product video. Eligible beta advertisers can do that in Advantage+ creative video generation in Ads Manager and in a product video creator in Commerce Manager. If you are not in the beta, you will not see it.

This fall Meta also says it will scale smart product recommendations that look at an ad's image, text, and landing page, then suggest other products from the same collection. That is a later rollout. Do not rebuild a catalog around a date Meta has not named beyond this fall.

What to do this week

Log into Ads Manager and look at one live Sales campaign. If the job of that campaign is new buyers, set Customer lifecycle strategy to Acquire new customers. Attach the custom audience of people who already purchased. If you do not have that list, upload a customer list or build a website custom audience on the purchase event before you spend more.

Watch cost per result after you switch. Meta warns it may go up. Keep a column for new customer cost, even if that lives in a spreadsheet you update by hand.

Pick a few still photos you already use in ads. Run them through Advantage+ creative video generation if the option is there. Keep the first test small. Compare clicks and cost against the still versions. If the generated video looks wrong or invents a claim, do not run it.

Leave the Meta AI business assistant tests alone unless you already use that assistant. Meta is testing campaign creation by chat, budget changes by chat, and import of brand guidelines. Those are tests. Approvals still sit with you. Meta says advertisers who take the assistant's recommendations typically see 5% more conversions at the same cost per conversion. That figure is Meta's, from its own newsroom, not an independent study.

This week is the exclusion list and one still-to-video test. The rest can wait until you see the menus in your own account.