Meta ads placements: Advantage+ placements vs manual

This guide is built from the Meta Business Help Center: About ad placements across Meta technologies, About Advantage+ placements, What's new in placement settings, Choose ad placements, Available ad placements and ad formats by ad objectives, Set audience and placement controls for your ad account, About limited spend on placements, Best alternatives to excluding ad placements, How the delivery system works using Advantage+ placements, Best practices for placements, About asset customization for placements, About value rules, About breakdowns, metrics and filtering and About the breakdown effect. Checked on 10 November 2026. Meta is rolling some of these changes out gradually, so what you see in your own account may differ. How campaigns, ad sets and ads fit together is in our Meta ads basics guide; this page covers placements only.

What a placement is

A placement is a place where your ad can appear: the Facebook Feed, Instagram Stories, WhatsApp Status, an app in the Audience Network, and so on. Meta lists Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads and Meta Audience Network as the places your ads can run, depending on the objective you choose. It adds that "Not all placements are available for every ad": the ad type and your settings decide which ones are on offer.

Two points from Meta matter before you change anything. "Adding more placements does not increase the cost of your ad." And Meta groups placements by how people experience them, so a Stories ad behaves much the same on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram.

The placements Meta offers

This is Meta's own grouping. Some placements are still being rolled out and are not available in every country.

Group	Placements
Feeds	Facebook Feed, Threads feed, Instagram Feed, Instagram profile feed, Facebook Marketplace, Facebook right column (computers only), Facebook notifications, Facebook Business Explore, Instagram Explore home
Stories, Status and Reels	Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories, Messenger Stories, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, WhatsApp Status
In-stream ads for reels	Facebook in-stream reels, ads on Facebook Reels (banner or video ads shown while people watch reels)
Search	Facebook search results, Instagram search results
Apps and sites	Audience Network native, banner and interstitial; Audience Network rewarded videos

Meta notes that from March 2026 the Facebook Feed placement includes the Facebook Friends tab. Formats differ by placement: Meta's table of placements by objective shows, for example, that Instagram Explore home only takes a 1:1 aspect ratio and that carousels in Facebook Reels and Instagram Reels must use images, not video. You also do not need an Instagram account to use Instagram placements; your Facebook Page can be the voice of the ad there.

Advantage+ placements

Advantage+ placements (shown as "Placements with Advantage+ on") lets Meta's delivery system spread your budget across every placement your ad can run in. Meta recommends it as the default and describes the aim as finding "the most cost-effective opportunities across Meta technologies and placements". It reports that in an experiment, ad sets using Advantage+ placements had an 11.7% lower cost per action on average than ad sets with manual placements. That is Meta's figure from its own test, not a promise for your account.

You do not have to switch anything on to get it. If you exclude no placements in any ad set and do not opt out of mobile or desktop devices, Ads Manager treats the setup as Advantage+ placements and shows "Advantage+ on" next to Placements.

Which objectives still let you pick placements

Meta is rolling out a change that splits objectives in two:

• Leads, App promotion and Sales: these default to Advantage+ placements, and Meta says "you no longer choose placements manually at the ad set level". You can still exclude placements under Show more settings, but any exclusion switches Advantage+ off.
• Awareness, Traffic and Engagement: not affected. You can still choose placements by hand.

For the first group, Meta points you to three other levers instead: customizing your media for each placement, placement value rules, and account-level exclusions by objective. All three are covered below. The campaign-wide Advantage+ setup, where Meta also manages audience and budget, is in our Advantage+ campaigns guide.

Choosing placements by hand

For an Awareness, Traffic or Engagement campaign, Meta's steps are:

1. In Ads Manager, click + Create, pick the objective and continue to the Placements section of the ad set.
2. Advantage+ placements is selected by default. Hover over it, click Edit and select Manual placements.
3. Optionally, under Devices and operating systems, untick devices you want to leave out, and under Platforms, untick whole platforms.
4. Under Placements, untick the placements you want to exclude.
5. Decide on Allow limited spend to excluded placements (see below), then finish and publish the ad.

For Leads, App promotion and Sales the path is Show more settings, then Devices and operating systems, Platforms and Placement controls. If there is no box next to a placement, it is not available for that ad type or objective. With the Sales objective, choosing specific mobile devices may still not keep you off others: Meta can reach people on additional devices unless you deselect Reach more people across other mobile devices.

Limited spend on excluded placements. When you exclude a placement, Meta can still put a small share of the budget there: it aims to spend "around 5% of your budget on each excluded placement, if it's likely to improve performance". Eligible advertisers are opted in by default when they exclude placements. You can switch it off, or click Manage excluded placements and decide placement by placement. Meta says ad sets that allowed limited spend saw on average a 7.7% lower cost per result in its global analysis. If a placement must never show your ad, for legal or brand reasons, turn this off or use account controls.

Account-level placement controls

If your business cannot advertise on certain placements at all, set it once for the whole ad account rather than in each ad set. In Advertising settings, open Placement controls, toggle on My business can only advertise on specific placements and untick what you need to exclude. The options Meta lists are:

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

Meta is also adding placement exclusions by objective, so you can exclude a placement for, say, Sales campaigns only. Things to know:

• Account controls apply to every campaign in the account, existing ones included, and are applied even when Advantage+ placements is on.
• Changes to existing campaigns may take up to 48 hours.
• They do not apply to ads about social issues, elections or politics, or to ads about financial products and services, employment or housing.
• Meta warns that hard exclusions "may limit the effectiveness of Advantage+ placements".

Excluding a whole placement is the blunt tool. To keep ads away from specific apps, publishers or kinds of content while staying on the placement, use block lists and inventory filters instead; our Meta block lists guide covers those.

Why cutting the "expensive" placement can cost more

The usual reason to exclude a placement is that the report shows a higher cost per result there. Meta explains why that can mislead. With Advantage+ placements, the delivery system aims for the most optimization events at the lowest average cost overall, "not the lowest average cost for each placement".

Meta's simplified example: a $27 budget, 11 opportunities. Facebook results cost $3 each, Instagram $5, and Audience Network has 3 at $1 and 2 at $7. With all three placements you get 9 results at an average of $3. Turn off Instagram because it looks expensive, and you get 8 results for $26, at $3.25 each. In Meta's words, a placement with a higher average cost "doesn't necessarily mean it's inefficient".

Meta's page on alternatives to excluding placements goes through the usual reasons for excluding one, and what to do instead:

• My creative doesn't fit that placement If a placement truly does not support a format, Meta leaves it out automatically. Otherwise, adapt the media per placement (next section) or use Advantage+ creative.
• Excluding will cut costs Meta suggests expanding the audience instead, since a very narrow audience can cost more to reach.
• My audience isn't on that placement Meta suggests Advantage+ audience, with your audience suggestions.
• The content around my ad isn't suitable Use the brand suitability controls: inventory filters and block lists.

Fitting the creative to each placement

Most placement problems are creative problems. Meta's guidance on aspect ratios:

• Feeds: 1:1 and 4:5 are supported for images and video. Meta recommends 4:5 for single-image ads in Facebook Feed and 1:1 for single-image ads in Instagram Feed.
• Stories, Status and Reels: 9:16, because most people hold their phones upright.
• Carousel: 1:1 or 4:5 for images, kept consistent across cards.

In the newer Ads Manager workflow you can upload up to 10 images and videos into one ad (a multi-media ad), and Meta matches them to placements. At least one piece of media is needed for each placement, and Meta says your ads "won't deliver in placements where the media assets aren't supported". Warnings in Ads Manager tell you when a different image, aspect ratio or video length is needed.

Asset customization lets you change the crop, video, text, headline and link for a placement or a group of placements, for example a shorter video for Facebook Stories or short copy for Instagram Stories. It has limits: Meta lists formats and features it does not work with, such as Advantage+ catalog ads, ads made from existing posts and the flexible ad format, and you cannot vary assets by device type. Use the placement preview in Ads Manager to check each version before you publish.

Placement value rules

When some placements are worth more to you than others, Meta's suggested route is a value rule rather than an exclusion. Value rules tell Meta how much more, or less, a result from a given placement, audience or conversion location is worth, and delivery adjusts the bids to match. Bids can go up by as much as 1000% or down by as much as 90%. Meta says they are not available for manual bid strategies such as ROAS goal or bid cap; our Meta bid strategies guide explains the difference. Meta also warns that you may get more results from the segments you favour while your overall cost per result goes up.

Reporting by placement

In Ads Manager reporting, open Breakdowns and choose Placement, Platform or Placement and device under Delivery to see results for each placement. For offsite conversions, Placement is one of the delivery breakdowns Meta supports.

Read these numbers with care. Meta calls the common misreading the "breakdown effect": the belief that the system moves spend into placements that perform worse. In its example, two Stories placements share a $500 budget. Facebook Stories starts cheaper, but its cost per result rises faster, so the system shifts most of the budget to Instagram Stories. The final report shows Instagram Stories at $1.46 per result on $450 of spend and Facebook Stories at $1.10 on $50, which looks like a mistake but gave more results overall. Meta's rule of thumb: with Advantage+ placements, judge results at the ad set level; with Advantage+ campaign budget, judge them at the campaign level. If a test of placements is what you need, run it as a proper split test; see our Meta A/B testing guide.

How we handle it

This is our own practice for client accounts, not a Meta rule:

• We start with Advantage+ placements and supply creative in 1:1, 4:5 and 9:16, so no placement is left without a version that fits.
• Hard limits (legal, contract or brand) go into account controls once, not into each ad set, so a new campaign cannot forget them.
• We judge placements on the ad set's total results, not on the per-placement cost in a breakdown, and change placements only after the ad set has left the learning phase.
• We check the placement preview of every ad before launch, because a crop that works in the Feed can cut off text in Stories.

Frequently asked questions

Should I use Advantage+ placements or manual placements?

Meta recommends Advantage+ placements for most ads, and for Leads, App promotion and Sales campaigns it is now the default. Use manual placements or account controls when you have a hard constraint, such as a legal or brand reason to stay off a placement.

Does adding more placements make my ads cost more?

No. Meta says adding more placements does not increase the cost of your ad. Your budget stays the same and the delivery system decides where to spend it.

Why are my ads still showing on a placement I excluded?

Allow limited spend to excluded placements may be on. It lets Meta spend around 5% of the budget on each excluded placement when that is likely to help. Turn it off in the ad set, or exclude the placement in account controls.

How do I see results by placement?

In Ads Manager, open Breakdowns and choose Placement under Delivery. Judge the ad set's overall results too, because a placement with a higher cost per result may still be helping the total.

Can I stop ads showing on the Audience Network for my whole account?

Yes. In Advertising settings, open Placement controls and untick the Audience Network placements. It applies to every campaign in the ad account, and changes to existing campaigns may take up to 48 hours.

For more on Meta advertising, see our guides to Meta ads basics, Advantage+ campaigns, Advantage+ creative, block lists, the learning phase and bid strategies. We set up the conversion tracking placement decisions depend on as part of our website development work. See all our services, or browse more guides.