TL;DR
Meta has removed manual placement selection at ad set level for campaigns using the Leads, App promotion, and Sales objectives. Awareness, Traffic, and Engagement campaigns keep manual placements for now. Account-level placement exclusions still exist, and can now be set per objective. The rollout is gradual, so some accounts will see it before others. The practical shift is simple: you stop choosing placements and start proving, placement by placement, which ones deserve your money.
What changed, exactly
Open a Sales campaign in Ads Manager and the placement checkboxes at ad set level are gone. Meta's own page on placement settings says it plainly: for Leads, App promotion, and Sales, "you no longer choose placements manually at the ad set level." The delivery system allocates budget across placements itself.
This is not a small tweak. Placement control was one of the last manual levers media buyers had. For years the standard advice was to run Feed only, cut Audience Network, and keep Reels on a short leash. That advice assumed you could act on it. Now you cannot, at least not the way you used to.
Two things survive. First, creative can still be tailored per placement, so a vertical video for Reels and a square image for Feed remain separate assets. Second, account-level placement exclusions still exist, and Meta now lets you set them per objective. The four excludable placements are Audience Network native, banner and interstitial; Audience Network rewarded videos; Facebook Marketplace; and the Facebook right column.
Why Meta did it, and why the reason matters
Meta's argument is that letting the system allocate across placements finds cheaper results than a human picking placements in advance. There is a real point buried in the spin: the system sees auction prices across every placement in real time, and you do not. A placement you wrote off two years ago may be cheap today, and a placement you love may be overpriced this week.
But there is also a less generous reading. Placement control was where buyers protected themselves from Meta's cheapest inventory. Audience Network has a long history of accidental clicks and low-quality traffic, and right column ads have been a punchline for a decade. Handing placement choice to the system that also profits from selling the cheap inventory is a conflict worth naming, even if the system genuinely finds bargains sometimes.
Either way, arguing about the motive is a waste of a morning. The controls are gone. The question is what replaces them.
What replaces placement control
Placement breakdowns, read weekly. Ads Manager still reports results by placement. Build a saved breakdown view: cost per result and conversion rate by placement, per campaign, reviewed every week. A placement that spends 20% of your budget and delivers 2% of your results is a placement you exclude at account level, not a placement you complain about.
Account-level exclusions, set per objective. This is your new placement control, and it is blunt. You can exclude the four placements listed above, per objective. Use it surgically. Exclude Audience Network rewarded videos for a lead-gen campaign that keeps buying accidental taps. Do not exclude everything that looks unfamiliar, or you will strangle delivery and blame the algorithm for a cage you built.
Creative built for the placements you cannot avoid. If Reels and Stories are going to take spend, give them creative that belongs there: vertical, captioned, moving in the first second. An ad that only works as a square Feed image will burn money in every placement it gets forced into. Placement-proof your creative the way you used to placement-proof your targeting.
For app advertisers, the job changes most. If you run App promotion campaigns, Meta now decides where your install ads appear, and your MMP becomes the source of truth. An install from a cheap placement that never opens the app is not a cheap install. Judge placements on retained users and paying users, not on install cost, or you will optimise your way into a pile of dead accounts.
The trap to avoid
The obvious trap is treating this as a reason to stop looking. "Meta decides placements now" slides very easily into "placements are Meta's problem now," and then Audience Network eats 30% of your budget while nobody watches. Automation removes the lever, not the responsibility. The buyer who reads placement breakdowns every week still beats the buyer who trusts the system and checks the dashboard once a month.
The second trap is over-excluding. Exclude too much and delivery concentrates on the most expensive placements, your CPM climbs, and you conclude the change ruined your account. It did not. Your exclusions did.
FAQ
Which campaign objectives lost manual placements?
Leads, App promotion, and Sales. Manual placement selection at ad set level is gone for those three. Awareness, Traffic, and Engagement still allow it, at least for now.
Can I still exclude bad placements?
Yes, at account level, and now per objective. The excludable placements are Audience Network native, banner and interstitial; Audience Network rewarded videos; Facebook Marketplace; and the Facebook right column.
Why is my account still showing manual placements?
The rollout is gradual. Meta's own page says the feature may not be available to you yet, which in practice means some accounts lose the controls weeks before others. Check your own Ads Manager rather than assuming your account matches someone else's screenshot.
How do I judge a placement now that I cannot pick them?
Use placement breakdowns in Ads Manager: cost per result and conversion rate by placement, per campaign, reviewed weekly. For app campaigns, judge on retained and paying users in your MMP, not on install cost alone.
Should I exclude Audience Network entirely?
Not by default. Exclude it when your own data shows it spending without converting, and re-check after a month, because auction prices move. A blanket exclusion based on reputation is just as lazy as a blanket trust in the algorithm.
MetaMaxd is a Meta ads agency. We still read placement breakdowns every week, because the controls moved but the cheap inventory did not go anywhere. If your budget keeps finding its way to placements that never convert, we can find out why.
