Meta Advantage+ creative enhancements: leave them on or switch them off?

Meta's Advantage+ creative enhancements (auto crop, brightness and filter tweaks, text changes) are on by default in a lot of accounts now, and my worry is that they change the ad you actually tested. Say a dental clinic approves a clean before-and-after frame, and Meta quietly re-crops it to 4:5 and adds a filter. The hook that won in testing might not be the one running anymore.

So I'd switch the enhancements off for any ad that's already performing, and only let them touch new test ads, where you don't know yet what works. Some people argue the auto-tweaks lift delivery enough to be worth giving up control. Honestly, it depends how much you care about knowing which variant really won.

I'd flip that. A test is exactly when you need the approved ad to be the one that actually runs, because otherwise the winner tells you about Meta's crop, not your hook. Keep enhancements off while you test, then run them as their own comparison on the winning ad.

Iris, I agree the test should use the approved creative, but "keep them off, then compare later" doesn't fully solve it. Enhancements are applied per asset, so Meta can crop or filter one variant and leave the other alone. Say your dental clinic tests a before-and-after frame against a testimonial frame, and only the first one gets re-cropped to 4:5. You've tested the crop as much as the hook. Turning enhancements off for both arms fixes that, but then you're comparing creatives Meta won't actually serve in that form once they're back on.

So make sure every variant in the test gets the same treatment, and that the one you scale is the same version you tested. If you want to know what enhancements do, run that as its own test with the winner held constant, rather than as a follow-up you assume is clean.

Export each variant at the placement ratios yourself, like 4:5 and 9:16, so Meta has nothing to crop. That takes the crop difference out of the comparison and leaves only the filter and text tweaks to control for.