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Meta ends manual placements for four objectives
Meta's help page now says that for Engagement, Leads, App promotion and Sales campaigns, you no longer choose placements manually at the ad set level.
Jerry Quin2 min read1 source
Illustration: The Keywordless.
The short answer
What changed
Meta's help page now says that for Engagement, Leads, App promotion and Sales campaigns, "you no longer choose placements manually at the ad set level."
Who has it
Campaigns using those four objectives. Meta says Awareness and Traffic aren't affected. The page also says the change "is being rolled out gradually and may not be available to you yet," so not every account has lost manual placements.
What I'd do this week
Find the ad sets in those four objectives that still run manual placements, and move any must-avoid placements into account-level exclusions before the change reaches you.
What Meta changed
For the four objectives, placement choice moves out of the ad set. Meta's page says "Campaigns using the Awareness or Traffic objectives aren't affected by this change. You can still set placements manually for those objectives."
Meta hasn't printed a date for when the change started, and the gradual rollout means you may still see the old settings for now.
The 10% figure, in Meta's words
Meta says that "in an experiment, ad sets using Advantage+ placements delivered an 10% lower cost per result on average compared to ad sets using manual placement settings." The note on that line says the experiment ran Aug 25-31, 2026 on 86K ad sets, and ends with "Results may vary."
That's one week of Meta's own test, averaged across ad sets. I'd treat it as Meta's case for the change, not as a forecast for your account.
The controls you still have
Meta lists three ways to steer delivery:
- Customize media for each placement in the ad creative.
- Raise or lower bids for placements with placement value rules.
- Set account-level placement exclusions by objective in Account controls.
The exclusions are the one I'd set up first. Meta says they're "available for all objectives," and they apply at the ad account level, so they affect every campaign in the account. If a client has a placement they legally or contractually can't run on, that's now where it lives.
Creative matters more, too. Meta says ads won't deliver in placements where the media isn't supported, and each placement needs at least one supported asset. If your ad sets only have one aspect ratio, add more before the setting goes away.
Jerry Quin
Jerry Quin is the pen name of a paid media practitioner who has managed Google Ads accounts at an agency for 10 years. He writes about Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, ChatGPT Ads, and the rest of paid media and digital marketing, from what's rolling out to what he'd actually do about it.