The news: Meta expanded restrictions on marketers’ ability to choose where their ads show up in its ecosystem, per a blog post, a change it alluded to in August.

Its AI system in Advantage+ will make placement decisions on ads that drive engagement, leads, app promotions, and sales according to what it deems most optimal. Ads that drive awareness and traffic can still be manually controlled.

Meta stated that marketers can still affect some placement decisions, including by customizing media to fit specific placements, setting conversion values for different kinds of placements by increasing or decreasing bids, and setting exclusions at the account level.

What it means: Meta wants to automate placement decisions and is encouraging advertisers to cede control no matter the KPI they’re after.

The inclusion of engagement and app promotion objectives is notable given that marketers tend to use social media advertising to drive the top half of the funnel. While marketers can still control higher-funnel objectives like awareness, those too are likely to be absorbed into the remit of Meta’s AI system in the future.

With AI making placement decisions throughout Meta’s ecosystem, marketers will have to take additional measures to verify that performance reports are accurate, though engagement and awareness can be harder to prove compared with concrete metrics like sales.

Recommendations for marketers: Use Meta’s still-existing exclusion tools in the short-term but prepare to lose manual control overall.

• Upload multiple assets for every ad, customized to fit different placements, to reduce the likelihood of Meta's AI system running an asset in the wrong context.
• Determine which campaign objectives are less critical to brand success and use the corresponding ads to test the efficacy of Meta’s AI system. Since their performance is less important, marketers can afford to use them for experiments.
• Invest in more third-party auditing capabilities to evaluate metrics as AI takes on additional campaign objectives.

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