For years, every Meta ad set had a small escape hatch. Open the Placements section, click Show more settings, and you could switch off Audience Network, keep the ad out of Reels, or run it only on Instagram. Plenty of owners never touched it. The ones who did often relied on it.
For most campaigns that box is going away. Meta has started removing manual placement choices at the ad set level for campaigns using the Sales, Leads and App Promotion objectives. If you open an ad set and see a notice that excluding placements or platforms will no longer be available, that is this change reaching your account.
This piece covers exactly what changed and which campaigns it hits, why most accounts will barely notice, and the three controls that are left when you genuinely need to keep your ad out of somewhere. Each of the three works differently, and the most popular one does not do what most people assume.
Sales, Leads and App Campaigns Lose the Placement Checkboxes. Traffic and Awareness Keep Them.
Meta's own help page on the update is short and specific. For campaigns using the Leads, App Promotion and Sales objectives, "you no longer choose placements manually at the ad set level." Campaigns using the Awareness, Traffic and Engagement objectives "aren't affected by this change," and you can still set placements by hand there. Meta adds that the feature "is being rolled out gradually and may not be available to you yet," so two accounts can look different for a while.
One detail is worth knowing if you have been following the coverage. Jon Loomer, whose blog is one of the most reliable sources on Meta advertising, reported on October 27 that Engagement campaigns were included too. Meta's current help page lists Engagement among the objectives that are not affected. Meta's page is the one we are going by, and the honest advice is to check your own ad sets rather than trust anybody's list, including this one.
What goes away is more than the platform checkboxes. Loomer notes that you also lose the ability to isolate mobile or desktop devices in those ad sets. And the "Allow limited spend to excluded placements" option we described in our earlier piece on Meta placements goes with it, since there is nothing left to exclude at the ad set level.
If You Already Ran Advantage+ Placements, Almost Nothing Changes for You
Here is the reassuring part. If your ad sets were already running on Advantage+ placements, which means letting Meta show the ad wherever it is likely to perform, this change does nothing to you at all.
That is what we have recommended for most small accounts. The reasoning is in that earlier piece and we will not repeat all of it here, but the short version is that the cost per result next to each placement is a record of what Meta chose to buy, not a price list. Switching off the placement that looks expensive usually pushes your budget into worse inventory somewhere else.
Loomer makes a point that narrows the real risk even further. Placement problems tend to show up when a campaign is optimizing for something cheap and easy to fake: link clicks, landing page views, video views or reach. When the goal is a purchase or a qualified lead, the placements that produce junk rarely produce the result you are paying for, so Meta's system mostly stops buying them on its own.
When it does go wrong, it goes wrong loudly. Alvaro Berrios, a Meta ads consultant, shared a real example on his channel this month. A client's new webinar campaign, $25 a day, had spent $17.16 on its first day and produced 127 link clicks. Too good to be true, so he broke the results down by platform. 108 of those clicks came from Audience Network, Meta's network of outside apps and websites. Facebook delivered 10 and Instagram 9.
That is the pattern to look for. Not a placement with a higher cost per result, but a placement soaking up spend while producing cheap actions nobody can use. Máté Hunyor, another Meta ads practitioner, showed the tell in his own account: of the people who clicked his ads on Audience Network, only 18% actually reached the landing page. His explanation: people tap the ad by accident while trying to close it in a mobile game, and the click counts anyway.
So before you worry about this change, open your ads in Ads Manager, use the Breakdown menu, and choose Platform or Placement. If no single placement is taking a big share of your spend while delivering nothing real, you have no placement problem to solve.
Account Controls Are Now the Only Real Off Switch for a Placement
If you do need to keep your ads out of somewhere, for a legal reason, a brand safety requirement, or a proven pattern of junk, the strongest tool left is account controls.
They live in your ad account's advertising settings under placement controls. Turn on the option that says your business can only advertise on specific placements, then uncheck what you want to exclude. Meta's list is short:
- Audience Network native, banner and interstitial
- Audience Network rewarded videos
- Facebook Marketplace
- Facebook right column
That is the complete menu. You cannot use account controls to keep an ad out of Reels or Stories, or off Instagram.
The useful improvement is that you can now set these exclusions by campaign objective rather than for the whole account. Loomer's suggestion is a good example of why that matters: you might not want Audience Network excluded everywhere, but in Traffic campaigns, where Meta leans hardest into cheap clicks, excluding it makes sense. Now you can do exactly that.
Two practical notes from Meta's help pages. Changes can take up to 48 hours to reach campaigns that are already running, so do not judge the result the same afternoon. And as we covered in the earlier piece, account-level settings apply even when an ad set is using Advantage+ placements. You keep the hard rule and Meta keeps optimizing everywhere else.
A Value Rule Can Cut a Placement's Bid by 90%. It Cannot Cut It to Zero.
The second tool is the one Meta recommends most, and the one most widely misunderstood. Value rules let you tell Meta that results from certain placements, ages, genders, locations, devices or operating systems are worth more or less to you. Meta then bids up or down in those slices of the auction.
Meta's limits are clear. "You can increase bids by up to 1000% or decrease bids by up to 90%." Berrios found the floor the practical way: he typed a 99% decrease and Ads Manager changed it to 90.
That matters more than it sounds. Madgicx, a Meta ads software company, spelled out the arithmetic in a recent walkthrough: a 90% decrease leaves 10% of the original bid. If the bid would have been $10, it becomes $1. Lower, but not zero, and a cheap enough opportunity can still win at that price. A value rule is a dial, not an off switch. In practice a 90% cut usually starves a placement like Audience Network almost completely, which is why Loomer and Berrios both use it. Just do not promise anybody it will never spend a dollar there.
A few more rules from Meta's documentation that will save you confusion:
Only the first matching rule applies. If two rules overlap, say one that raises bids for a location and another that lowers them for a placement, Meta uses whichever comes first in your rule set's order. The adjustments do not stack.
The placement list is short. Loomer counts seven placements available in value rules: Facebook Feed, Facebook Stories, Facebook Reels, Instagram Feed, Instagram Stories, Instagram Reels and Audience Network. And Audience Network is a single option, not split into its separate types.
They do not work with every bid strategy. Meta says value rules are not available for manual bid strategies such as a ROAS goal or a bid cap.
Your cost per result may go up. Meta says so directly. A value rule asks the system to pay more for what you value, or less for what you do not, and that is not the same as asking for the cheapest results.
Use one rule, aimed at one proven problem, and check the placement breakdown a week later to see whether it did what you expected.
Switch to a Traffic Campaign and You Keep the Checkboxes. You Also Buy Junk Clicks.
There is an obvious workaround, and some owners will reach for it: run the campaign under the Traffic objective, where Meta still lets you pick placements by hand.
Think hard before you do. Traffic campaigns optimize for link clicks or landing page views, which is exactly the kind of goal Loomer identifies as most likely to pull budget into Audience Network in the first place. Berrios's webinar campaign is what that looks like. You would be keeping a control mainly needed by the campaign type that creates the problem.
If what you want is leads or sales, use the Leads or Sales objective and accept Advantage+ placements, with account controls or a value rule as your guardrails. If you genuinely need click traffic, for an article or a retargeting audience, a Traffic campaign with Audience Network excluded at the account level for that objective is a reasonable setup. Just do not move a lead campaign into Traffic to keep a checkbox.
Your Ad's Shapes Now Decide Where It Can Run
Meta's own first recommendation for this change has nothing to do with settings. It is to give each placement creative that fits it, and in practice it is the most powerful of the three.
The new ad creation workflow lets you upload up to 10 images and videos into a single ad and customize each one by placement, with different crops, text or links. Meta states that "at least one media is required for each placement," and that "your ads won't deliver in placements where the media assets aren't supported," with warnings in Ads Manager when a placement needs a different image, aspect ratio or video length.
Read that the other way around and it is a lever. A vertical 9:16 video built for Reels and Stories, a square for the feeds, and a horizontal version for the remaining surfaces gives Meta a good-looking ad everywhere it can show one. A single horizontal image stretched into a vertical slot is how a placement ends up looking like a bad performer when the real problem was the shape. We covered that in detail in why a Story ad is not your feed ad resized.
Loomer is fairly dismissive of this as an alternative to placement control, and he has a point: making Reels look good does not keep your ad out of Reels. But for most small advertisers the goal was never to keep an ad out of Reels. It was to stop paying for placements that were not working, and a properly shaped ad fixes the most common reason a placement does not work.
Fifteen Minutes in the Breakdown Report Shows Whether This Change Costs You Anything
You do not need to rebuild anything. Spend fifteen minutes on this:
- Open one Sales or Leads ad set and look at the Placements section. If you see the notice about placements changing, the update has reached you.
- Break down the last 30 days by platform and by placement. Look for any placement taking a meaningful share of spend while producing cheap clicks and few real results.
- Check what each campaign is optimizing for. If it is link clicks or landing page views and you actually want leads, fixing the goal does more than any placement setting.
- If you have a hard rule, such as a compliance requirement or a proven Audience Network problem, set it in account controls, by objective, and give it 48 hours.
- If you have a soft preference, use one placement value rule and check the breakdown again in a week.
- Make sure every ad has a vertical, a square and a horizontal version. It is the cheapest fix on this list.
Meta has been removing dials for years, and this is one more. For most accounts it changes less than the alarm suggests, because the dial was rarely helping. If you would rather have someone go through the breakdowns and set the guardrails for you, that is part of what we do in Facebook and Instagram ads management. And if you would rather do it yourself, the breakdown report will tell you within a few minutes whether you have anything to fix.
