Meta has changed how ad placements work for its main conversion objectives. For Sales, Leads, Engagement and App promotion campaigns, you can no longer pick placements by hand inside the ad set. Control now sits in three other places: your creative, placement value rules and account-level exclusions. Brands Win is a Singapore-based agency that plans and runs Meta ads for consumer brands, and this guide explains what moved and what to check.

Checked on 23 October 2026 against Meta’s Business Help Centre (pages undated, read 23 October 2026).

What Meta has changed

The source is Meta’s Business Help Centre page What’s new in placement settings in Meta Ads Manager (undated, read 23 October 2026). It lists four objectives: Engagement, Leads, App promotion and Sales. It then says: “For these objectives, you no longer choose placements manually at the ad set level.”

Meta says it has made updates to the placement settings “that allows Meta’s delivery system to allocate budget across placements based on where they’re likely to perform best.”

Meta’s page carries no date, so we are not giving a launch date. Social Media Today reported Meta’s updated guidance on 12 October 2026. What the page does say is that the change is reaching accounts gradually: “This feature is being rolled out gradually and may not be available to you yet.”

Which objectives are affected, and which are not

Four objectives are affected:

• Sales
• Leads
• Engagement
• App promotion

Two are not. Meta says: “Campaigns using the Awareness or Traffic objectives aren’t affected by this change. You can still set placements manually for those objectives.”

One detail to watch. Meta’s pages currently disagree. Meta’s older page, Choose ad placements in Meta Ads Manager (undated, read 23 October 2026), still explains how to exclude placements inside the ad set for every objective, including Sales, Leads, Engagement and App promotion. We follow the newer “What’s new in placement settings” page. If your ad sets still offer manual placements today, plan as if that option will go.

If your team used to untick placements in a Sales ad set, those decisions now need a new home.

The three controls Meta points to

Meta’s page says: “You have options to manage how and where your ads appear”. It names three.

1. Customise media for each placement

Meta’s page describes a newer creative workflow where you load multiple images and videos into one ad, which it calls a multi-media ad. With asset customisation, you can give each placement its own crop, text or link.

The important line is about delivery: “Your ads won’t deliver in placements where the media assets aren’t supported and warning indicators in Ads Manager will communicate when a different image or video, aspect ratio or video length may be needed.”

This works both ways. Missing formats can quietly keep you out of a placement. But that is not a reliable way to block one, because a later edit or a new asset can open it up again. Use creative to fit placements, not to avoid them.

2. Placement value rules

Value rules let you tell Meta that a conversion from one placement is worth more or less to you than a conversion from another. Meta says: “With placement value rules, you can adjust bids up or down for specific ad placements based on their relative value to your business goals.”

Read that carefully. A value rule changes bids. It does not turn a placement off. If you lower the value of a placement, your ads can still appear there.

3. Account controls and placement exclusions by objective

This is where hard limits now belong. Meta says account controls exist for businesses with “specific advertising constraints”, and adds: “Common constraints include legal or policy or business requirements, which can prevent your business from showing your ads on certain placements.”

Meta lists the placements you can control at account level:

• Audience Network native, banner, and interstitial
• Audience Network rewarded videos
• Facebook Marketplace
• Facebook right column

The newer part is exclusions by objective. Meta says: “You can now also set account-level placement exclusions by objective.” That means you can exclude a listed placement for Sales campaigns while leaving it open for Awareness, for example.

There is one catch. Meta says: “Account controls are applied at the ad account level, which means they affect all campaigns in your account.” An exclusion set for an objective reaches every campaign using that objective, including ones a colleague or freelancer set up. Agree these settings before anyone changes them.

What this means for Singapore and SEA consumer brands

For most consumer brands in the region, control has moved rather than vanished. Here is how we see the main risks.

Brand safety rules. If your brand has rules about where ads may appear, those rules used to live in each ad set. They now need to live in Account controls. If the placement you care about is not on Meta’s list of four, you cannot exclude it there, so check the list against your rules before you assume you are covered.

Regulated and sensitive categories. A health, supplements, alcohol or finance brand, for example, may have its own brand-safety reasons to keep ads away from certain placements. Meta names “legal or policy or business requirements” as common constraints for account controls. Write those reasons down in a shared note so the next person to open the account knows why an exclusion is there.

Creative coverage across Feed, Stories and Reels. With Meta deciding placements, creative is now the main lever you still hold. A brand that only supplies one square image is relying on Meta’s handling of every other space. Vertical video, square and landscape versions, plus captions that still read well when cropped, give each placement something that fits.

If you are also reviewing Meta’s other recent change, our post on Meta product browsing covers the separate opt-out decision.

Hypothetical illustration, not a client example: a Singapore skincare brand runs a Sales campaign and used to exclude Audience Network in the ad set. It now sets that exclusion in Account controls for the Sales objective only, adds vertical and square versions of its hero video, and uses a placement value rule to lower bids on a placement it values less. Its Awareness campaigns keep their manual placements.

A planning checklist for the next month

The checklist below is our recommendation, not a Meta requirement.

1. Audit ad sets by objective. List every live and paused ad set under Sales, Leads, Engagement and App promotion that uses manual placements, and note what each one excluded.
2. Sort exclusions into must and prefer. A must is a legal, policy or brand rule. A prefer is a performance hunch. Musts move to Account controls by objective. Prefers become placement value rules or simply go.
3. Check the account controls list. Confirm each must sits on Meta’s list of controllable placements. If it does not, raise it with whoever owns brand safety before relying on the change.
4. Build creative for every main format. Supply vertical, square and landscape versions and check Ads Manager’s warnings before publishing.
5. Set a performance target per objective. Agree what success looks like for each objective before the change reaches your account, so you can judge it on results rather than on where ads appeared.
6. Review placement reporting after the switch. Use Ads Manager’s placement breakdown to see where spend went, and adjust value rules or creative rather than reaching for exclusions every time.

Our Meta ads page explains how we run Facebook and Instagram campaigns for beauty, wellness, lifestyle and F&B brands, with creative testing and tracking we set up ourselves.

Where Growth System 90 fits

At Brands Win, we plan account reviews like this inside Growth System 90, so placement settings and creative needs are mapped out before a change reaches the account rather than fixed after delivery shifts.

FAQs: Meta ad placement controls