In August 2026, advertisers began to see a notice in Meta Ads Manager saying that excluding placements, platforms, devices and operating systems would no longer be available for their ad sets. Social Media Today reported it on 20 August, from a screenshot shared by the advertising consultant Jon Loomer. Meta has not published an announcement or a timeline, and its help pages still describe manual placements, so the details below come from advertisers who have seen the notice and the trade press that covered it.
What seems to be changing
Until now, an advertiser could choose manual placements and switch off the ones they did not want: Facebook search results, say, or ads between Reels, or the Audience Network of other apps. The notice says that option is going. The reports disagree on how far it reaches.
- Jon Loomer reported that it applies to campaigns with the sales and leads objectives, and that other objectives keep full placement control.
- Another report described special ad categories and health and wellness advertisers as left out, and the change as a test that Meta plans to expand.
- Social Media Today's first report read it as applying to ad sets generally.
Until Meta says more, the safe assumption is that sales and leads campaigns will lose the ability to exclude placements first, and that others may follow.
How we got here
This is the latest step in a long move toward letting Meta choose. Advantage+ placements, which let the system spread an ad across every placement, has been the recommended setting for years, and Meta says it improves the cost per acquisition by 11.7 percent on average. In October 2025, Meta added an option for sales and leads campaigns to let up to 5 percent of spend go to each excluded placement, switched on by default in Ads Manager. Meta has also been retiring placements outright: its July 2026 API update removed the Instagram Explore feed placement, and Messenger Stories is being dropped from October 2026.
The controls that remain
Losing exclusions does not mean losing all control. Three tools are still there, and they are worth setting up before the notice reaches a client's account.
- Value rules: raise or lower the bid for a placement, a device or an operating system, from 1,000 percent more to 90 percent less. A placement can be made expensive for the system but not switched off entirely, and only a handful of placements are eligible so far.
- Account-level placement controls: in the ad account's advertising settings, a business can block a short list of placements for every campaign, including the Audience Network, Facebook Marketplace and the Facebook right column. This is a hard block, unlike the ad set exclusions it partly replaces.
- Brand safety tools: block lists, inventory filters with full, standard and limited settings, and publisher lists, which control the content an ad can appear next to across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and the Audience Network.
Creative has to work everywhere
The practical effect of losing exclusions is that every ad in a sales or leads campaign may run in every placement: feeds, Stories, Reels, in-stream video, search results and others. An ad that only works as a square feed post will be cropped, letterboxed or shown with its words under the app's buttons somewhere else.
- Brief every ad in two masters, a 4:5 for the feeds and a 9:16 for Stories and Reels, and upload both so Meta can use the right one.
- Keep the words and logo inside the safe zones of the 9:16 version, since that is where the app's own buttons sit.
- Check the placement breakdown in reporting, not just the campaign total, so a placement that costs too much can be dealt with through a value rule.
- Tell clients before it happens. A brand that has always excluded a placement for a reason will want to know why its ads now appear there.
A note for regulated and sensitive clients
Some clients exclude placements for reasons that are not about cost: a bank that does not want ads next to certain content, or a brand with strict guidelines about where it appears. For them, account-level controls and brand safety settings are the tools that still block rather than discourage. Set them up at account level, record the choice in the campaign notes, and review them whenever Meta changes its placement options.
The ad mockup generator on this site shows one piece of creative in every Meta placement at once, with the safe zones, which is the quickest way to see where an ad will break before Meta decides where to run it.
