Meta wants your Facebook and Instagram ads to run on every placement it has, and its documentation says so plainly: it recommends Advantage+ placements and publishes a page of alternatives to excluding placements. In August 2026 a Meta ads consultant published a notice some advertisers were seeing in Ads Manager: excluding placements in ad sets will no longer be available. Whatever happens to that setting in your account, the levers Meta documents stay the same: account-level controls, value rules, creative built for each format and a conversion signal you trust. Our Meta Ads management service covers the planning, creative production, testing and optimization of these campaigns.
What Meta says about Advantage+ placements
Meta recommends Advantage+ placements and argues that manual selection costs more. Its page of alternatives to excluding placements says the more placements you select, the more chances you have to reach your audience. In a holiday post dated August 11, 2026, Meta adds that advertisers who pick surfaces by hand all bid on the same ones, which pushes up CPMs in Q4.
Meta's Help Center page on Advantage+ placements adds a figure: in an experiment, ad sets using Advantage+ placements delivered an 11.7% lower cost per action on average than ad sets using manual placements. That is Meta's own experiment, with no conditions or date on the page, so read it as Meta's position, not an independent finding.
Meta's delivery documentation, written for the highest volume bid strategy, explains why an expensive-looking placement may not be a bad one. The system aims for the most optimization events at the lowest average cost overall, not within each placement. In Meta's worked example, switching off a pricier placement leaves fewer results and a worse overall cost.
The catch is what counts as a result. The system optimizes toward the outcome your ad set is set up to count, which Meta calls an optimization event. If that is any form submission, it will find more of them cheaply, whether or not they become customers. That is our reading, not a statement from Meta.
Exclusions that still exist in Meta's documentation
Meta's Help Center still lists several controls over where, or next to what, your ads run. Try these before a bid cut.
- Account controls: in Advertising settings, Placement controls lets you exclude placements for every campaign in the ad account, including Audience Network, Facebook Marketplace and the Facebook right column. Meta says these controls apply even with Advantage+ placements, can take up to 48 hours to reach existing campaigns, do not apply to ads about housing, employment, financial products, social issues, elections or politics, and are still being introduced gradually.
- Inventory filter: adjusts how sensitive the content is that your Feed or in-content ads appear next to.
- Block lists: prevent your ads from being delivered to specific publishers on certain placements.
- Format fit: if a placement truly does not support your ad format, Meta excludes it automatically.
Meta states it cannot guarantee all content and publishers will match your brand safety standards, so review where your ads ran. These help pages are undated and may change.
What value rules do, according to Meta
Value rules let you tell Meta how much a segment is worth to you by raising or lowering your bid for it. Meta's Business Help Center page on value rules says you can increase bids by up to 1000% or decrease them by up to 90%, using criteria such as age, gender, location, operating system, device platform and select placements.
- Rules apply inside each ad set, and Meta applies only the first rule that matches a person.
- Value rules are not available for manual bid strategies such as ROAS goal or bid cap.
- Meta warns that overall cost per result may increase.
Because a bid can be cut by at most 90%, a value rule suppresses a placement but does not switch it off. That is our reading of the 90% figure. Meta's page does not say value rules replace placement exclusion, so use a bid cut sparingly and expect costs to move.
What advertisers saw in August, and what Meta has not confirmed
On August 20, 2026, Meta ads consultant Jon Loomer published a notice that some advertisers were seeing in the Placements section of their ad sets: "Excluding placements, platforms, devices and operating systems will no longer be available for your ad sets." No date was given for the change. His understanding, which he says is not official, is that it is a test for now, with plans to expand more broadly, limited to Sales and Leads campaigns and excluding sensitive verticals.
As of October 2, 2026, we found no announcement from Meta, and its Help Center page on choosing placements still explains how to uncheck placements in a Sales or Leads ad set. PPC Land, bylined Luis Rijo, repeated the reports on August 26 and 27, 2026, drawing on a LinkedIn post whose author wrote that he had not seen the change himself. Open one of your own ad sets and look at the Placements section: that is the only reliable answer for your account.
Creative by format is your biggest remaining lever
When you cannot pick placements, you control how the ad looks in each one. Meta's placement asset customization lets you use different crops, edited videos and different text per placement, so your ad can run in as many places as possible. Its examples are a vertical ratio for stories, a video of 1 to 15 seconds for Facebook Stories, and short copy for Instagram Stories. Meta is moving this to a newer media customization workflow, so menu names may differ in your account.
Build a small creative set per format instead of stretching one asset everywhere, and rotate it before it wears out. Our post on ad fatigue covers the warning signs.
Make the conversion signal match real revenue
Choose the optimization event closest to revenue that you can report reliably. A booked call or qualified lead is a better signal than any form fill, because the system chases whatever you count.
Meta ads usually reach people before they are searching for what you sell, so the page after the click has to do more of the work. If visitors do not convert, start with website visitors, zero leads.
Read results by placement, and test for lift
Ads Manager can show results by placement, so you can see where your spend went even when you cannot dictate it. Use the Breakdown menu to view platform, placement, or placement and device. Meta labels these values as estimated, so look for patterns across weeks, not days.
Match Meta's numbers against your own lead and sales records, which is the work of analytics and reporting. Meta's August 13, 2026 post also recommends Conversion Lift studies, where a random holdout group does not see your ads, and says holiday-season results can be reliable in 2 to 3 weeks. That is Meta promoting its own tool, so treat it as a best case, and check that a lift study is available in your account before you plan around one.
What to do this week
- Open a Sales or Leads ad set, check whether the Placements section still lets you uncheck placements, and note the date.
- Set account controls, an inventory filter and block lists if brand suitability matters.
- Build a creative set per format with customized crops and text.
- Check which event each ad set optimizes for and move it closer to revenue.
- Save a 30-day breakdown by placement as a baseline.
- Meta's own holiday advice, published August 11, was to have Advantage+ placements running before October so that October and early November act as a learning period. Placement settings are one part of a wider paid advertising plan, so settle budget and measurement first.