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If you run Sales or Leads campaigns on Meta, you can no longer exclude placements, platforms, devices or operating systems at the ad set level.
It started as a notice in a handful of accounts back in August.
No press release. No rollout date. Meta's help pages were still describing manual placement selection the same week the notice appeared.
Meta has been taking back controls for years, and the operators who come out ahead are the ones who put their energy into the controls Meta can't remove.
For a long time, I judged an ESP by its feature list… but for Q4, it’s backwards. Let me explain:
A feature list is what you compare in a demo. Operations are what you live with once peak starts.
Four things decide how that stretch goes:
1. Creative that stays current, with designs synced in from Figma or Canva and a countdown timer built into the email builder
2. Segments that update in real time and sync to your Meta and Google audiences
3. Reporting you can read while a send is still going out, with email, SMS, and push in one place
4. A person who answers when something breaks, at any hour of the sale
Omnisend is the platform where all four sit in one account.
If you're reviewing your email and SMS setup before BFCM.
What You Can Still Do
You still have a few ways to steer where your ads run. They take more work, and none of them can fully switch a placement off for a single ad set the way the old exclusion did.
Account-level placement exclusions still work, set per objective in your advertising settings.
The catch is that they apply to all campaigns with that objective, so you lose the precision of doing it ad set by ad set.
Value Rules let you lower the bid on a placement, but the cut caps at 90%. That suppresses a placement without blocking it.
You can also customize creative per placement, so the asset that shows up in Reels is actually built for Reels.
Open one of your Sales ad sets this week and look at what’s left in the placement section.
Then check your account-level settings, because that’s where your remaining exclusions live now.
The Pattern This Fits
Meta has been pulling manual controls out of Ads Manager since at least January 2025.
It started with detailed targeting exclusions, which Meta removed, citing its own figure of 22% better performance.
Advantage+ became the default for sales campaigns later that year.
Then came “limited spend on excluded placements,” a checkbox that’s on by default and lets Meta spend up to 5% of budget on each placement you excluded.
Now the placement and device exclusions themselves are gone from the ad set.
Each change came with the same explanation: the system optimizes better than your exclusions do.
Each one also had the same effect on the job. Media buying skill keeps moving away from pulling levers inside Ads Manager and toward the inputs the system can’t produce on its own.
Last week we looked at Meta’s new assistant (the one that wants to make your campaign decisions)
This week the manual overrides are going out the door.
I don’t read that as a conspiracy though… it’s a product strategy, and it tells you where your hours are best spent.
If your team is still building a workaround for each removal, write down how much time that takes. That’s time spent on controls with an expiry date.
The Levers That Stay Yours
Across the accounts I manage, this is where control actually sits now.
Creative breadth. The angle decides who stops scrolling, which makes creative your targeting. Ten versions of one idea buy you one audience.
Landing experience. What happens after the click decides what that click turns into, and it feeds the post-click signals the system learns from.
Cost controls. Cost caps and bid caps are still the honest way to tell Meta what a result is worth to you.
Signal quality. Your pixel and Conversions API setup decide what the machine learns from. Bad data in, means wrong decisions out.
Offer architecture. The offer decides who converts in the first place. A threshold bundle and a straight discount bring in different buyers.
Meta can’t switch any of these off, because they live in your creative, your site, your data and your margin.
Grade your account on all five, honestly. I’d guess yours leans hard on one or two.
Test It Before November Prices
Three things for this week.
1. List the placement exclusions that were doing real work in your Sales and Leads campaigns, and write down why each one existed.
2. Decide where that reasoning goes now: an account-level exclusion, a Value Rule, placement-specific creative, or a fix to the creative itself.
3. Score the five levers and pick the weakest one to fix before Black Friday.
If an exclusion was carrying real weight, find out what performance looks like without it now, while you’re paying October CPMs. Learning that in the middle of November costs a lot more.
Meta can only take back the controls it handed out. Build your edge on the ones it never had.
If you want a growth partner aligned with your real business goals, let’s chat.
I appreciate you reading and as always if there's anything I can do to help you in anyway just respond to this email. I personally respond to every email I get.
- Kody ✌️
