A client of ours was running a straightforward promotion. Thirty percent off, stated plainly in the image, stated again in the copy. Clean offer, clean ad, approved and launched.
Then somebody spotted the live ad in the feed. The button under it said "get 50% off now."
Nobody at the business wrote that. Nobody approved it. There was no 50% off sale, and had a customer clicked through expecting one, the business would have been the one holding the bag. Meta's AI had generated the button text, decided it would probably perform better than "learn more," and served it. As far as the platform was concerned, this was the feature working exactly as designed.
That story is unusual only in how visible it was. The same class of thing is happening quietly in most small-business ad accounts right now, and the reason almost nobody catches it is that Meta does not present it as an edit. It presents it as an improvement, and it turns it on before you arrive.
Meta Decided Before You Did
Meta's own help documentation has a page titled "Review default-on creative features in Meta Ads Manager." The wording is worth reading slowly, because Meta is being completely straight with you here: "some creative features may be enabled by default, if we predict they will help improve performance." Throughout the build, the page says, these features are labeled "On by default."
Most owners have never opened that page, and the reason is understandable. You go to Ads Manager to launch an ad, not to audit a settings tree. But that page lists seven separate categories of things Meta may change without being asked, and only one of them is what people mean when they say "Advantage+ creative":
Creative setup. Advantage+ creative enhancements. Advantage+ creative translations. Interactive experiences. Related media. Format display options. Personalized destinations.
Read that list again and notice what it spans. It is not a bundle of filters. It reaches your picture, your words, the shape of the ad, and where the click ends up.
Here is the part that explains why nobody ever learns the "right" settings. Meta does not apply one fixed default list to every ad. It looks at the specific asset you uploaded and pre-sorts the options for you. Ben Heath, who walks this in the live interface, describes the pattern plainly: Meta analyzes the image you entered, works out "we've gone ahead and applied these, we're not sure about these other ones and you should review," and that split will vary depending on your image.
So the defaults on the ad you built last Tuesday are not the defaults on the ad you are building today. There is no setting you can learn once and stop thinking about, which is exactly the condition under which people stop looking.
None of this is a conspiracy. It is whose interest the defaults serve. Meta is optimizing for the outcome across millions of advertisers, and on that average the machine's edit probably does beat the median uploaded image. You are not the average. You are one business, with one offer, and a promotion that is either 30% off or it is not.
It Can Change the Picture
The visual enhancements are the ones people notice first, usually because a customer or a spouse says "why does your ad look like that."
Auto-crop and expansion is the big one. Meta will re-frame your image to fit placements you did not build for, and the range of shapes it has to fill has grown well past square, vertical and horizontal. On paper this is helpful. In practice it is where the two most credible operators we found flatly disagree, and the disagreement is more useful than either verdict.
Heath leaves it on most of the time and trusts Meta to expand sensibly. Derek Videll turns it off, because on a 4:5 image, the format he recommends for taking up more feed real estate, he has watched it re-crop back to a square and slice the text off: "90% of the time it does a good job. The problem is that 10% of the time where you see your ad on your screen and it is just cut off in a weird way."
They are both right, and the thing that reconciles them is not a setting. It is what kind of asset you handed over. If your creative was designed - type set to a grid, offer baked into the image, the crop composed on purpose - then an automated re-frame has nothing to work with except your margins, and it will eventually eat something load-bearing. That is the whole argument for a static built deliberately to do one job. If your creative was captured - a photo of the work, a shot of the product, air around the subject and no text - then let Meta expand it, because there is nothing to break.
Animation follows the same logic. Meta can add movement to a still image, which is genuinely useful on a clean product shot and actively harmful on anything text-heavy, where you need the type to hold still long enough to be read.
Then there is the one that surprises people. Related media lets Meta pull assets it did not get from you for this ad. Meta's documentation says it can recommend existing creative from other ad sets in your account, from your website, "or even thumbnail images of your video content (including both manually selected and auto-generated thumbnails)," and that it may be enabled by default. An auto-generated thumbnail is a frame a machine picked out of your video. It is now, potentially, a standalone image ad for your business.
Videll's advice on this one is blunt and correct: clear it to zero, or you may find yourself running an ad you never made.
It Can Change the Words
The text enhancements are where the stakes stop being aesthetic.
Text improvements moves your copy between slots. Your headline can appear as primary text, your primary text as the description. Heath is comfortable with it, and his reasoning is sound: primary text sits above the image on the Facebook feed and below it on Instagram, so letting Meta reorder helps the copy make sense in both. Videll says never, and his reasoning is also sound: the description field holds about five words and the headline about ten, so a swap that moves a paragraph into a ten-word slot produces nonsense.
Enhanced CTA generates button copy from phrases it finds across your ad and your site, replacing the familiar "learn more" with something more specific. It is a real pattern interrupt, and it is also the feature that produced the 50%-off button on a 30%-off sale. Meta lets you inspect the generated phrases before you run, which makes this one of the few enhancements you can genuinely supervise. Almost nobody clicks through to look.
Enhanced media text goes further and rewrites the words rendered inside your image. Videll watched a client's "Fall Sale" become "Save Big," with a handful of stranger options alongside it, and no way to approve individual variants: "you can't choose which ones you want it to use, you're really just giving it full control to swap out your text to no end."
For a business with testimonials or a price or a guarantee sitting in the image, that is not a style question. A generated line can distort the meaning of a real customer quote or state terms you are not offering, and it is your business name on the post. The generosity of these tools runs in one direction. The liability runs in the other.
Not everything here deserves suspicion, incidentally. The enhancement that surfaces your most relevant comment beneath the ad is one of the few that is almost always worth leaving on, because the comments under your ad are already part of the ad whether you manage them or not. Better to have the good one on top.
It Can Change Where the Click Lands
This is the category almost nobody checks, and it is the one with the most money attached.
On a Sales campaign pointed at your website, Meta's documentation describes two things: a Main destination, which is the URL you chose, and Personalized destinations, which exist "to send people to the experience most likely to result in a conversion after they click on your ad." That can include your Shop, an optimized website destination, browser add-ons, or product browsing. And, in Meta's own words, "some of these features may be turned on by default."
Sit with the implication. You spent weeks on a landing page. You wrote the headline to match the ad, put the proof in the right place, cut the form down to the fields you actually need. Then some portion of the traffic you are paying for gets routed to a different experience entirely, because a model predicted that experience converts better.
Sometimes it will be right. But if your page is the whole funnel - and for a service business it usually is - then the destination is not a detail you delegate. It is the difference between a cheap lead and a customer, and it should be a decision you make on purpose rather than one you inherit.
You Cannot Tell Which Version Earned the Result
Here is the part that turns an annoyance into a real measurement problem, and it is the reason this cannot be settled by "just test it."
Two things are true at once. First, your original still runs. As Jon Loomer puts it, a version "that has not been touched" continues to be distributed alongside the enhanced ones. Second, the enhancements are not applied to the ad, they are applied per person: Meta serves an edited version only to individuals it believes will respond better to it.
So your one ad is quietly several ads, mixed across your audience in proportions you did not choose and cannot see.
And then the numbers come back as a single blended row. Aleksandar Hadzhiyski, working through the same settings independently, lands on the complaint that matters: Meta "does not tell you which ads work better, do the ads with enhancements work better or the ones without," and so "you can't really make data-driven decisions." Loomer's summary is shorter. The transparency, he says, is bad.
This is why the usual advice to test your way to an answer does not rescue you here. You cannot A/B test something you cannot separate in reporting. Which leaves judgment, applied before launch, as the only real lever you have.
The Switch That Overrides Your Switches
Now the trap that catches people who did everything right.
There is an account-level setting at Advertising settings, under Creating ads, called Creative features, and inside it a checkbox: Test new creative features. Meta's description is that if you opt in, "Advantage+ creative enhancements and other creative features in testing may be applied to eligible campaigns."
May be applied. Which means the choices you made ad by ad are being treated as preferences rather than instructions. Videll spent real time chasing this on client accounts before finding it, watching enhancements he had switched off come back: "they kept turning them back on."
Two details make it worse in practice. Meta notes that "only eligible advertisers can opt in," so the checkbox is not in every account, and its absence in yours is not proof of anything about the account next door. And the tidy Review defaults tab, the one place designed to show you what is on, carries a limitation Meta states outright: "features manually opted-in will not show on this surface."
Add the smaller reset behaviors and the picture is complete. Duplicate a campaign and music switches itself back on. Meta's whole posture here follows from the fact that your creative is now your targeting: if the ad is the aiming mechanism, the platform has every incentive to keep adjusting the ad.
What to Actually Do About It
Turning everything off is a reflex, not a strategy, and it costs you the handful of these that genuinely help. Sort them instead by one question: was this asset designed or captured?
Designed creative - offer in the image, type set, crop composed. Turn off auto-crop and expansion, overlays, media text rewriting, and text improvements. You already solved the problems these features exist to solve, and every automated edit can only subtract.
Captured creative - a photo of the work, the product, the team, with room around the subject and no text. Leave expansion and animation on. There is nothing to break and real reach to gain.
Anything that touches an offer, a price, a claim or a testimonial stays off regardless. That is not a performance call, it is a liability call.
Relevant comments stays on. Related media gets cleared, unless you have looked at every suggested asset and want it.
Destinations are yours. Check the personalized destinations block on any Sales campaign and decide deliberately.
Then do the ten-minute pass that most accounts have never had: open Advertising settings, then Creative features, and see whether Test new creative features is checked. Open one live ad and walk its Review defaults tab. Check the ads you duplicated most recently, because those are where the resets hide.
And build for the crop. Heath's own production rule is the most useful habit in all of this: keep captions near the middle, and never put the important information right at the top or the very bottom. Creative that survives a re-frame makes half of these settings moot, which is a better outcome than winning an argument with the defaults every time you launch.
None of this requires you to become a media buyer. It is closer to knowing how to check the oil. But it does require you to look, because the platform is not going to volunteer that it rewrote your ad, and the first person to notice should not be your customer.
We do this all day long, and keeping Meta's defaults from quietly editing our clients' work is part of the job. If you would rather have someone watching the toggles so you can run your business, that is what we do. If you would rather learn it yourself, everything above is the whole method. Either way, go and look at what your ads actually say.
