Meta Removes Manual Placements for App Ads

Short answer: Meta's Business Help Centre now says that campaigns using the Leads, App promotion and Sales objectives no longer choose placements manually at the ad set level. Account-level placement exclusions remain and can now be set per objective, and creative can still be tailored per placement. For app teams, the job shifts from picking placements to proving, in your MMP, that the installs Advantage+ placements buy are users who stay and pay.

If your app campaigns still had Audience Network or a handful of Reels placements switched off at the ad set level, that switch is going away. Meta is rolling out the change gradually, so some accounts will see it before others, but the direction is clear: Meta decides where App promotion ads run, and you decide what counts as a good result.

What Meta changed, and where this comes from

Meta's own page, What's new in placement settings in Meta Ads Manager, read on 2 November 2026, says:

Affected objectives: Leads, App promotion and Sales. For these, "you no longer choose placements manually at the ad set level."
Not affected: Awareness, Traffic and Engagement. Manual placements still work for those.
Rollout: gradual. The page is undated and says the feature may not be available to you yet.
Meta's reasoning: letting the delivery system allocate budget across placements "can help you lower your cost per result" compared with manual placements.

How the trade press covered it:

Social Media Today flagged the page on 12 October 2026 and said placement controls were being removed over "the past few months".
Relevant Audience covered it on 13 October 2026. It traced the change back to an in-product notice reported in August and quoted a Meta experiment claiming around 10% lower cost per result for Advantage+ placements. It noted that Meta had not published the experiment details.
Both articles listed Engagement as an affected objective. The version of Meta's page we read on 2 November lists Engagement as unaffected. Sources differ on scope and timing, so treat Meta's live page as the reference and check your own Ads Manager.

Any uplift figure here is Meta's claim about its own system, not something we have verified.

What you lose on App promotion campaigns

Ad set placement selection. You can no longer run an App promotion ad set on Reels only, or on Feed and Stories only.
Placement split tests at ad set level. Cloning an ad set with one placement removed no longer works for app campaigns.
Quick fixes for one bad placement. If one placement sends cheap installs that never open the app twice, you can no longer switch it off for a single ad set.

This builds on a longer trend. When we compared Meta Advantage+ and manual campaigns for app growth, placement exclusions were already one of the controls you gave up by going fully automated. Now that applies to manual App promotion campaigns too.

What you can still control

Meta's page lists three levers.

1. Account-level placement exclusions, now by objective

Account controls apply to every campaign in the ad account.
Meta lists four placements you can exclude at account level: Audience Network native, banner and interstitial; Audience Network rewarded videos; Facebook Marketplace; and the Facebook right column.
New: you can set placement exclusions by objective, for Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App promotion, Sales and Partnerships.
Meta frames account controls around legal, policy or business constraints, so treat them as your brand safety and hard-rule layer, not a daily optimisation tool.
Practical use: if you have a firm reason to keep App promotion spend off Audience Network, set it once for that objective rather than per ad set.

2. Creative per placement

Multi-media ads let you upload up to ten images and videos into one ad.
Asset customisation lets you tailor crops, text and links per placement, and Meta says you can also customise aspect ratio and delivery settings per asset.
At least one media asset is needed for each placement. Ads will not deliver where your media is not supported, and Ads Manager shows warnings when a different size or length is needed.
Practical use: build proper vertical video for Reels and Stories. Creative fit is now your main way to influence placement performance.

3. Placement value rules

These let you tell Meta that conversions from a placement are worth more or less to you, and Meta then optimises against those values.
Meta's page does not say how large the adjustments can be.
Practical use: only set a rule once your own cohort data shows a real, repeated quality gap. Do not set one from a hunch.

How to judge whether Advantage+ placements bring quality installs

Meta now chooses placements, and Meta also reports the results. As a self-attributing network, it grades its own work, which is why Meta's numbers and your MMP rarely match (we explain the mechanics in why SAN numbers differ). Your quality check has to sit outside Meta.

Step 1: Fix the baseline before the change reaches your account

Export the last 30 to 60 days of App promotion results from your MMP by campaign, ad set and ad.
Record install volume, onboarding rate, Day 1 and Day 7 retention, and revenue per install for each.
Note the Meta-reported install count for the same rows and dates.
Mark the date manual placements disappeared from your ad sets.

Step 2: Compare cohorts, not install counts

Use cohort analysis on MMP-attributed users, grouped by install week and campaign:

Day 1 and Day 7 retention rate: if Day 7 falls while cost per install improves, the cheaper installs are lower quality.
Onboarding rate: the share of installs that finish sign-up or your activation event.
Revenue per install and early ROAS: what each cohort earns in its first 7 and 30 days.
Cost per onboarded user: spend divided by onboards, not installs. This is often the metric that shows a hidden problem.

Our guide to measuring retention by channel covers how to set these cuts up so they stay comparable week to week.

Step 3: Watch the gap between Meta-reported and MMP-attributed installs

Track the ratio of Meta-reported installs to MMP-attributed installs per campaign, every week.
A steady gap is normal, because Meta uses its own windows and counts views.
A gap that widens after the change is the warning sign: Meta may be claiming conversions your MMP cannot match to a real user.
If it jumps, rule out the usual causes in our attribution discrepancy guide first.

Step 4: Use creative as your proxy for placement

Most MMPs, including Linkrunner, do not give you a placement-by-placement split of attributed installs. What you can do:

Build placement-specific creative, for example a 9:16 Reels cut and a 1:1 Feed cut, as separate ads where your setup allows.
Read results at ad and creative level in your MMP. If the vertical video ads bring users who retain and the static ads do not, you have a usable signal about where quality comes from.
See creative-level ROAS tracking for the setup.

Step 5: Feed Meta better signals

When placement control is gone, the event you optimise for becomes your main steering wheel.

Send post-install events that predict value, such as first purchase, deposit or trial start, back to Meta through your MMP's postbacks, instead of optimising for installs alone.
Meta can only favour placements that bring buyers if it knows who the buyers are (see why smart bidding optimises the wrong users).

Step 6: Do not forget iOS

On iOS, much of your Meta measurement runs through SKAN, which reports at campaign level with delays and coarse values.
Expect a slower, coarser quality signal than on Android, and judge iOS on campaign-level conversion values and revenue trends.

A one-page checklist for app teams

Check whether your App promotion ad sets still show manual placements.
Export a pre-change MMP baseline by campaign, ad set and ad.
Set App promotion exclusions at account level only for firm brand safety or policy reasons.
Upload vertical and square creative to every ad so it fits each placement.
Track the Meta-reported versus MMP-attributed install ratio weekly.
Judge performance on cost per onboarded user and early ROAS, not cost per install.
Optimise campaigns on a value event, not on installs.
Hold off on placement value rules until several weekly cohorts show the same quality gap.

Where Linkrunner fits

Linkrunner integrates with Meta Ads and shows the full funnel from click to install, sign-up, revenue and ROAS, with creative-level ROAS and Meta creative metrics in one dashboard. Cohort analysis, retention tracking and SKAN 4.0 support cover the checks above, and postbacks send revenue signals back to Meta. Linkrunner does not report placement-level breakdowns, so use the creative proxy in Step 4.

Frequently asked questions

Can I still choose manual placements for App promotion campaigns on Meta?

Not at the ad set level once the change reaches your account. Meta's help page lists Leads, App promotion and Sales as the objectives that no longer allow manual placement selection. The rollout is gradual, so some accounts may still see the old option for now.

Can I still exclude Audience Network from my app campaigns?

Yes, through account controls, which now also let you set placement exclusions for the App promotion objective.

Do Awareness and Traffic campaigns keep manual placements?

Yes. Meta's page says Awareness, Traffic and Engagement are not affected. Some trade press coverage listed Engagement as affected, so check your own Ads Manager.

Will Advantage+ placements lower my cost per install?

Meta says so, and trade press reported a Meta experiment showing around 10% lower cost per result. That is Meta's claim and Meta has not published the details. Judge it on cost per onboarded user and early ROAS in your MMP, not on cost per install.

Where to take this next

Losing ad set placement control removes one lever, not your ability to judge quality. Set a baseline now, compare cohorts after the switch, and steer Meta with value events and placement-ready creative.

If you want campaign, ad set and creative-level cohorts from Meta in one place, request a demo from Linkrunner, or start by exporting your pre-change baseline this week.