Meta has shared new guidance on how advertisers can maintain ad placement controls as the company continues to update its automated ad and display systems.
Over the past few months, Meta has been removing manual ad placement options, which means that advertisers no longer have the ability to control where their ads will be displayed across Meta’s various placement options.
For example, until now, advertisers have been able to choose whether they don’t want their ads shown in Facebook search results, or via in-stream ads between Reels. But now, Meta is removing these exclusions in order to give its ad system more options to display ads wherever its artificial intelligence-guided ad serving process determines that they’ll work best.
Thus far, Meta has removed placement controls for ads that use the engagement, leads, app promotion or sales objectives. Awareness and traffic objective ads are still able to use placement controls as of now.
But soon, it’s likely that all Meta ads will lose this control, which could impact campaign planning.
In order to help advertisers deal with these changes, Meta has provided guidance on options within its ad creation process that enable ongoing placement control, at least in some capacity.
First, Meta said that advertisers can customize their media for each placement in the ad creative element.
As per Meta: “Multi-media ads and media customization are features in a new creative workflow in Meta Ads Manager. They allow you to upload multiple images and videos into a single ad and control how they appear across placements. For each asset, you can customize aspect ratios, text, URL and delivery settings for each asset, and Meta's delivery system can help you match the right creative to the right placement to maximize your ad’s performance.”
That could ensure that the right ad format is displayed in each placement, which could help to improve performance.
The company also said that advertisers can increase or decrease bids for placements.
“With placement value rules, you can adjust bids up or down for specific ad placements based on their relative value to your business goals,” Meta said. “You can create rules to tell us how much more (or less) the conversions from a placement are worth to your business. Meta will then optimize for outcomes based on these rules.”
That provides another way to ensure that advertisers maintain some level of control over how their ads are displayed.
Meta added that advertisers can still set account-level placement exclusions by objective within their account control tools.
Finally, Meta said that advertisers can partner with creators, brands and businesses to run campaigns, which is another way to manage ad placement.
“When using Advantage+ placements and partnerships, you retain control at the ad creation step to select the media and text for your ad or message [and] manage the placements your partnership appears, if it's limited to specific placements after you select a post.”
Clearly, some advertisers have raised concerns about losing the option to manage their ad placements, which is why Meta wants to provide alternatives instead of imposing a blanket removal of ad controls.
But looking ahead, it seems as though Meta wants to fully automate the ad placement process in order to maximize performance via its AI-enabled targeting and placement system.
