Meta took away the button that turned placements off

A window and door contractor in Avon called me two Tuesdays ago, and he was not calm. His Facebook lead form ads had pulled in 41 leads in a week, more than double his usual pace. He called back the first fifteen. Nine were disconnected numbers. Four were people who had no memory of filling out a form for anyone. This is Meta ads doing exactly what Meta ads always did when nobody is watching the placements.

For years, the fix was simple. You opened the ad set, found Placements, and unchecked the ones producing garbage. Audience Network was the usual suspect, a grab bag of third-party apps and games that Meta fills with your ad because it's cheap inventory and cheap inventory makes the average cost per lead look good on a dashboard, even when the leads are worthless. You turned it off. Done.

You can't do that anymore. Or you're about to lose the ability to, depending on which account you're logged into this week.

What Meta changed

Starting around August 19, 2026, advertisers began opening the Placements section of an ad set and finding this message where the exclusion checkboxes used to be: "Excluding placements, platforms, devices and operating systems will no longer be available for your ad sets." Meta ads consultant Jon Loomer documented it with screenshots on August 20 and confirmed the rollout again on August 24. Meta has not published an official announcement. Its own Help Center pages, as of this writing, still describe manual placement selection as something you can do.

Four things are going away at once: excluding a specific placement, excluding an entire platform like Audience Network, limiting delivery to mobile or desktop only, and limiting delivery to a specific operating system. Right now the change is rolling out as a test, and it appears limited to ad sets using Sales or Leads objectives. Meta has carved out sensitive categories such as health and special ad categories for now. That won't last. Read Meta's own changelog and this is the fourth step in a pattern, not the first: Meta removed detailed targeting exclusions in January 2025, started routing a mandatory 5 percent of spend to excluded placements anyway in October 2025, and banned campaign-level placement exclusion outright when it unified the Advantage+ structure in February of this year. Each step was small. Meta hasn't reversed any of them.

Why the replacement isn't a replacement

Meta's answer is something called a value rule. You can set one to bid up or down by placement, by platform, by device, or by operating system. It sounds like the same control with extra steps, but the math is different in a way that matters to your invoice. A value rule tops out at a 90 percent bid reduction. It cannot reach zero.

That means the placement you hated is still eligible to win. You've made your ad expensive to show there, not impossible. If Audience Network is throwing cheap, low-quality clicks or leads at you, a 90 percent bid cut will shrink that traffic, but it will not stop it, and you have no clean way to verify from inside the ad set how much still gets through.

Meta didn't fix the placement you hated. It just changed how much you have to pay to avoid it.

Meta's stated justification, from its own documentation, is that ad sets using Advantage+ placements deliver an 11.7 percent lower cost per action on average than ad sets with manual placement settings chosen by the advertiser. That's a real number, and it's also a number Meta measured, on Meta's terms, comparing its own automation against manual choices made by advertisers of wildly different skill levels. It tells you Meta's system beats an average human. It doesn't tell you whether it beats you, specifically, once you already know Audience Network is the problem.

The two things to do this week

You still have two real levers, and one of them is not going anywhere yet.

First, set your placement rules at the account level, not the ad set level. Go to Advertising Settings, then Account Controls, then Placement Controls. Turn on the option limiting your account to specific placements, then uncheck the ones you don't want across every campaign you run. This still gives you a true off switch. It applies account-wide instead of ad set by ad set, which is less work once it's set, not more.

Second, if you need finer control inside a specific ad set, use a value rule and treat minus 90 percent as your real ceiling, not the finish line. Right now only seven placements are eligible for placement-based value rules, Audience Network among them. Set the rule, then check your placement breakdown report weekly rather than assuming the discount is doing the whole job for you. We walked a Meta Ads account through exactly this kind of settings sweep last month, described in Seven Meta Ads settings to change in your first hour, and the placement tab was already worth a look before this change made it more urgent.

None of this is the first time Meta has changed something in Ads Manager that costs you money without a press release about it. We wrote about the location fee Meta added and never announced back in July, and the pattern is the same both times: the change shows up in the interface before it shows up in the documentation, and the advertiser finds out by noticing the number moved.

The Avon contractor's fix, once we looked at his account, wasn't complicated. Audience Network Rewarded Video, the placement where third-party apps pay users in fake currency to sit through a video, was pulling nearly a fifth of his lead form budget. He'd had it excluded for over a year. He never knew the switch got quietly reset, because nothing told him it had. If you haven't checked your placement breakdown report since August, you probably have the same blind spot right now, and you won't get a notification about it either. If your account needs a full audit rather than a single settings check, that's the kind of work we do for clients through our services.

Check the account controls this week, not the day you notice your cost per lead climbing for no reason you can name.

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Sources

#	Source	What it backed up
1	Meta Is Removing Placement Controls From Ad Sets	Screenshots and dates of the rollout, the objective and vertical limits, the seven eligible placements for value rules, and the account-level workaround steps.
2	Meta removes ad placement controls as bid cuts get capped at 90%	The minus-90-percent ceiling on value rules, the timeline of prior placement-control removals back to January 2025, and Meta's 11.7 percent CPA claim.
3	Some Meta advertisers lose placement controls, with bid cuts capped at 90%	Confirmation that Meta has not published an official announcement and that Help Center documentation still describes the old behavior.
4	Meta added a fee to your ad spend and hid it from Ads Manager	Background on Meta's pattern of shipping account changes ahead of documentation.
5	Seven Meta Ads settings to change in your first hour	Related settings audit referenced for the placements tab.