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Meta killed your placement checkboxes
Meta is removing ad-set placement exclusions for some Sales and Leads campaigns. Value Rules can bid a placement down by 90%, but not to zero.
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TL;DR
Unticking a box said, “Never run here.” Value Rules say, “Only if it’s cheap enough.”
Meta is removing ad-set placement exclusions for some Sales and Leads accounts, and a Value Rule can bid a placement down by 90%, but not to zero.
Before you launch, ask yourself: “Is this block about performance or principle?”
Ask a media buyer how they kept spend off Audience Network and, until recently, the answer took about two seconds: you unticked the box. Done, zero spend, on to the next ad set. That box is now disappearing from ad sets, particularly for Sales and Leads campaigns, and what replaces it is not a bigger box. It is a Value Rule, which lets you bid a placement down by as much as 90% but not switch it off. Exclusion has become suppression.
What actually changed
From around 20 to 25 August 2026, some advertisers began seeing an in-product notice, flagged first in practitioner reports such as Jon Loomer's and then by PPC Land: excluding placements, platforms, devices and operating systems at the ad-set level would no longer be available for some Sales and Leads accounts.
Meta has published no official post confirming a finished, global change, and its Help Centre still documents manual placements. The rollout appears to be happening account by account, which means two buyers can open Ads Manager on the same morning and disagree about reality. The only reliable test is your own ad set.
The substitute lives elsewhere in Meta's stack. According to its Marketing API and Ads Manager guidance, a Value Rule adjusts how much you value an impression by criteria including placement, device and operating system, with bid adjustments running from roughly +1,000% down to a floor of 90% below. The cap is ninety, not a hundred, so a cheap enough auction can still clear a discounted bid. "We never run on Audience Network" quietly becomes "we would really rather not, unless Meta finds it cheap enough."
One hard exclusion survives: account-level Placement Controls, under Advertising Settings, then Account Controls, then Placement Controls. That switch is real, but it is also account-wide, covering every campaign and every client that shares the account.
Why it feels worse than a UI tweak
Marketers do not, on the whole, hate automation. What they dislike is losing the illusion of a veto. The checkbox is a veto; a 90% discount is a preference with a price tag. It works rather like a "suggested tip" in place of "no tip": the system keeps the default path open and makes your resistance expensive to express.
Meta's case is set out on its Advantage+ placements help page, where it says that in its own experiment Advantage+ placements delivered an 11.7% lower cost per acquisition than manual placements. That is plausible, since broader inventory usually wins more auctions. But it is Meta measuring Meta's outcome in Meta's experiment, with no public sample or method. It is fine as a vendor claim and less fine as something to promise in a client agreement.
There is also a quieter point about where control really lived. People overvalue the controls they can see, such as boxes, and undervalue the ones upstream: creative crops, account structure, brand-safety lists. Meta has moved the visible knob. The durable levers were never the boxes.
Move the hard control up a level
The useful response is to sort exclusions by motive. If a surface must never run, for contractual, compliance or brand-adjacency reasons, do not trust an ad-set discount; move the block to account-level Placement Controls, or split accounts so that one client's never is not another's maybe. If the exclusion was about performance rather than principle, a 90% Value Rule plus a weekly placement breakdown beats nostalgia for checkboxes. And ship every crop, at 9:16, 4:5 and 1:1. Placement exclusions used to hide thin asset libraries, and that free insurance is ending.
Every ad set that still excludes a placement can be sorted by finishing one sentence:
We block [placement] because [performance or principle].
If the answer is principle, the block belongs at account level. If it is performance, it belongs in a Value Rule, built now, before the checkbox disappears from that account.
Still, 90% off is not zero, so the placement breakdown is worth checking for the next few weeks for Audience Network, in-stream video and anything else you used to block. Then change the sentence you use with clients. Stop saying "we exclude" and start saying "we bid down" or "we block at account level", and put it in the Q4 deck before a report surfaces spend you promised would not exist. If you quote the 11.7% figure, label it as Meta's own experiment.
