Open a Sales or Leads ad set in Meta Ads Manager and you may see a new notice in the Placements section: excluding placements, platforms, devices and operating systems will no longer be available for your ad sets. For years, unchecking Audience Network was the first thing many media buyers did. That checkbox is on its way out, and Meta value rules are what Meta offers in its place.
The frustration in the PPC community is real. Practitioners already spent months hunting for placement settings that kept moving behind new menus. Now the control itself is going. But value rules are not a like for like replacement. They lower a bid. They never switch a placement off.
This guide explains what is changing, how value rules work, where the 90% limit matters, and what to do with each exclusion you have today. In the accounts I manage, most placement exclusions turned out to be habits copied from an old template. A few were doing real work. The job now is to tell them apart.
What Meta is changing in ad set placements
Around August 19, 2026, advertisers started seeing an in product notice about ad set placements. Jon Loomer documented it the next day. The sentence covers four controls, not one.
Individual placements
No more unchecking Audience Network, Marketplace or Right column inside an ad set.
Whole platforms
An Instagram only ad set built by switching Facebook off stops being a setting.
Devices
Mobile only and desktop only delivery can no longer be forced at ad set level.
Operating systems
iOS only or Android only ad sets go the same way as device targeting.
Meta has not published a formal announcement or a date. Based on what practitioners report, it is a staged test that applies to the Sales and Leads objectives only, with sensitive verticals left out. Other objectives keep full placement control for now.
None of this came out of nowhere. Meta removed detailed targeting exclusions in January 2025. In October 2025 it added a default option that lets up to 5% of an ad set budget reach each placement you excluded in Sales and Leads campaigns. On a €100 per day ad set, that is up to €5 per day per excluded placement going somewhere you said no to. The exclusion was already only partly an exclusion.
Meta's reasoning
Meta's Business Help Center states that in an experiment, ad sets using Advantage+ placements delivered an 11.7% lower cost per action on average than ad sets with manual placements. Meta does not publish the sample, the verticals or how the manual group was configured. Treat it as a direction, not a promise for your account.
What Meta value rules are and how they work
Meta value rules are ad set level bid adjustments. They tell Meta that some people or placements are worth more or less to you, and Meta bids up or down accordingly. You keep one ad set instead of splitting audiences into separate ad sets. Placement based value rules became available in July 2025 and Meta expanded value rules to all ad accounts in August 2025.
| Element | How it works |
|---|---|
| Rule set | A container of up to 10 rules, applied to an ad set. |
| Criteria | Each rule uses up to two of: age, gender, location, mobile operating system, device platform and placement. |
| Adjustment range | From a 1,000% bid increase to a 90% bid decrease. |
| Rule order | When someone matches several rules, only the first matching rule in the list applies. |
| Placements covered | A limited list. At the time of writing, seven placements, including Audience Network. More are expected. |
| Reporting | A value rules breakdown in Ads Manager shows results per applied rule. |
Meta is upfront about the cost. During setup you confirm that your overall cost per result may increase when using value rules. That is by design. You are asking Meta to pay more for results you value more, or to stop buying cheap results you value less. Eligibility rules for objectives, performance goals and bid strategies have changed several times, so check Meta's value rules help page for what your account supports today.
Rule order is where most setups go wrong
Say rule 1 raises bids 30% for people aged 35 to 54, and rule 2 lowers bids 90% on Audience Network. A 40 year old browsing a third party app matches rule 1 first. Meta bids 30% more for that impression and never looks at rule 2. If the placement rule is the one that protects your budget, put it at the top.
Exclusion vs value rule: the 90% floor
The single most important fact about value rules: a bid decrease cannot go past 90%. A placement can be made expensive to win, but never impossible to win. A bid at 10% of normal still clears the cheapest auctions.
| Question | Ad set exclusion (old) | Placement value rule (new) |
|---|---|---|
| Can delivery reach zero? | Yes, unless the 5% excluded placement option was on | No. Maximum 90% bid decrease |
| Placements covered | All | A short list, currently seven |
| Can it favour a placement? | No | Yes, up to a 1,000% increase |
| Effect on cost per result | Often higher, fewer cheap results | Meta warns it may increase |
| Right tool for brand safety? | Partly | No. Use account level controls |
A worked example
Take an illustrative traffic ad set at €100 per day, optimising for landing page views. Before any rules, Audience Network takes €30 per day because it delivers the cheapest views. You add a value rule that lowers Audience Network bids by 90%.
- arrow_forwardWhat you will likely see. Audience Network share drops sharply, but some spend remains on the cheapest inventory.
- arrow_forwardWhat happens to your averages. Cost per landing page view goes up and volume goes down. The dashboard looks worse even if the traffic got better.
- arrow_forwardWhat to judge it on. Bounce rate, engaged sessions and downstream conversions in GA4, not the cost per view inside Ads Manager.
If a campaign only looks healthy while it buys the cheapest possible clicks, the problem is the performance goal. No checkbox or value rule fixes that. Our guide to Facebook Ads reporting covers which metrics to put in front of stakeholders instead.
When a placement value rule is worth it
Value rules solve a specific problem: Meta finding cheap, low quality results in one segment. If you do not have that problem, a value rule only adds cost. These are the cases where it earns its place.
- checkLink clicks or landing page views. Audience Network is the classic source of cheap, accidental clicks. A strong decrease here is reasonable.
- checkThruPlay video views. Audience Network Rewarded Video pays app users in virtual currency to watch. Views are real, attention is not.
- checkLead forms with a proven quality gap. If your CRM shows leads from one placement rarely qualify, lower the bid there. Base it on closed revenue, not on a hunch.
- checkCreative that only works in one format. If a campaign has only 9:16 video, a modest increase on Stories and Reels can steer delivery while you produce other formats.
- infoPurchase optimised campaigns. Placements are rarely a source of cheap, fake purchases. Most of these campaigns need no placement rule at all.
- infoLow conversion volume. With a handful of conversions per week you cannot tell whether a rule helped. Fix tracking, offer and creative first.
A useful test before you create any rule: write down the problem in one sentence, with the number that proves it. "Audience Network brings 40% of our clicks and 3% of our leads" is a reason. "We always exclude Audience Network" is not.
How to set up a placement value rule
Menu names shift often in Ads Manager, but the flow is stable. If you are new to the interface, our Meta Ads Manager guide covers the basics.
Pull a placement breakdown first
In Ads Manager, use Breakdown by Delivery, then Placement, for the last 30 days. Note spend share, results and cost per result per placement. This is your baseline.
Create a rule set at ad set level
Open the ad set and find the value rules section. Create a new rule set, or pick an existing one, and give it a name that says what it does, such as "AN minus 90 traffic".
Add the placement rule and set the adjustment
Choose placement as the criterion, select the placement, and set the bid decrease. Start with the size of the problem: a placement that is mostly waste can take the full 90%, a placement that is only weaker might need 30% to 50%.
Order the rules deliberately
Put protective rules first. Only the first matching rule applies, so an audience rule above your placement rule can quietly cancel it.
Review after two weeks, not two days
Compare the placement breakdown and the value rules breakdown against your baseline. Judge on quality metrics downstream. If nothing changed in the outcomes you care about, remove the rule.
Meta brand safety: move hard rules to account level
Some exclusions are not about performance. A regulated brand that must never appear in third party apps, or a client contract that rules out a surface, needs zero impressions, not fewer. Value rules cannot deliver that. PPC Land put it plainly: suppression at 90% is not exclusion.
The hard boundaries that remain all sit at account level, and Meta applies them even when Advantage+ placements is on.
- arrow_forwardAccount level placement controls. Go to Advertising Settings, then Account Controls, then Placement Controls. Turn on the option that your business only advertises on specific placements, and uncheck the ones you want gone. This is the only real off switch left.
- arrow_forwardInventory filters. Set how sensitive the content around your Feed and in content ads may be, in the Brand Safety and Suitability section of Business Settings.
- arrow_forwardBlock lists. Stop delivery to specific publishers and apps on Audience Network and in content placements.
The catch for agencies and multi brand teams
Account level controls apply to every campaign in the account. If you run several brands or clients through one ad account, one brand's rule becomes everyone's rule. That is a good moment to review your account structure, not just your settings.
A 30 minute Meta ads placements audit
Do this while the old checkboxes still exist in your account, so you can compare both setups side by side. Sort every current exclusion into one of three buckets.
Habit: remove it
No one can explain why it exists, and the campaign optimises for purchases or qualified leads. Let Meta use the placement and watch results for two weeks.
Performance: replace it with a value rule
You can show the placement brings cheap, low value results. Write the value rule for that ad set only, not across the account.
Policy: move it to account level
It exists for brand safety, compliance or a contract. Use Account Controls, inventory filters and block lists.
After the change, check placement spend share every week for a month. The risk is not one bad day. It is spend drifting slowly toward placements you used to block, while your monthly budget quietly funds them. The same discipline applies to overall spend: our guide to ad budget pacing shows how to catch drift before month end.
Where aubado fits
Platforms keep moving controls around. Your budget should not move with them. aubado checks your actual spend against your monthly budgets once a day across Google Ads, Meta and LinkedIn, so a shift in how Meta spends shows up early. Duetto, our upcoming tool for structured 1-on-1s with your ad accounts, gives you a recurring moment to ask the questions from this audit every week. Check once a day, then close the tab.
Frequently Asked Questions
Fewer controls. Same budget.
aubado checks your ad spend against your monthly budgets once a day, across Google Ads, Meta and LinkedIn. Less time in Ads Manager, fewer surprises at month end.
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