Facebook Ads’ long slide into ineffectiveness for authors continues, with word that placement controls are being taken off us.
Placements does what it says on the tin: it’s where your ad shows up. Feed, Reels, Stories, Marketplace, the right-hand column, Audience Network, Messenger, and a dozen others. For a lot of authors the old-fashioned newsfeed is the only placement that reliably converts, largely because our readers are older and that’s where they live. So we tick Manual Placements, untick everything except Facebook Feed, and sleep a little easier at night.
That’s the bit that’s going.
What’s actually changing
But before we throw our laptops across the room, some facts, or at least my attempt to extract facts from the actual announcements.
What Meta is removing is the ability to exclude placements at ad set level. Along with that go platform exclusions (Facebook vs Instagram), device exclusions (mobile vs desktop) and operating system exclusions (iOS vs Android).
But here’s the part I don’t see many others reporting properly: it only applies to campaigns running the Sales and Leads objectives. Every other objective keeps full placement control, at least for now.
Most of us are on Traffic. Not because Traffic is better, but because we’re sending readers to an Amazon product page and we cannot put a pixel on an Amazon product page. No pixel, no conversion event, nothing for a Sales campaign to optimise against. Traffic has been our primary choice for some time and if it’s yours, your placement controls are staying put.
Also…
Account-level exclusions survive regardless, but they only cover three placements: Audience Network, Facebook Marketplace and the right-hand column. Feed-only isn’t on the menu and won’t be.
On Sales and Leads there’s a checkbox, switched on by default, that lets Meta spend up to 5% of your budget on each placement you’ve excluded, whenever it reckons that’ll improve performance. So even the exclusions that still exist leak a bit. Jon Loomer has been all over this one, and he’s right that the default-on part is annoying. Read him here.
Oh, and there’s no firm date for any of it. Advertisers are getting notices, the change has been running as a test, and Meta hasn’t committed to a switchover.
The irony, which is not lost on me
Work out who this affects the most, and it’s the big growth area in indie publishing.
It’s the authors selling direct.
Your own store, your own checkout, your own pixel firing on a real purchase, which means a real Sales campaign, which means you’re in the group losing placement control. The people who took the advice, built the shop, wrangled the tax and did the hard version of this business are the ones getting the feature taken away.
The rest of us still funnelling everything to Amazon are untouched.
For now.
I’d like to tell you Traffic is a safe harbour. I don’t believe it is. Meta has spent five years pulling levers out of our hands one at a time, and they always start with the objectives where their automation has the most data. Sales and Leads first because that’s where the conversion signal lives. Traffic is not immune, it’s just further down the list, I suspect.
What do we actually do?
If we can’t tell Meta where to show the ad, and we can’t really tell it who to show it to either (interest targeting has been quietly dying for years) then the creative and the offer are the targeting. That’s how the system works now, and it’s how it’ll work from here.
Meta’s algorithm has been switching to learn from our ad creatives and the product details at the end of our target link.
So, put a Vulcan bomber on the ad with a headline written for a man who remembers the Cold War, and the AI will try to find that man, wherever he happens to be scrolling. Feed, Reels, Stories, doesn’t matter.
Run a vague ad with a stock photo of a paperback and it’ll find nobody in particular, at considerable expense. So from that point of view, I agree with Pierre Alex Jaunty writing in the 20Books group, that the platform can still be profitable, we just need to be better at our own marketing.
And we need to adapt, as always. I was personally cynical about video ads on Facebook. Historically I saw them gain clicks but not sales. But Meta has created a user expectation now and that means some form of animations/movement is fast becoming the minimum for a successful campaign.
So the job for the rest of 2026 looks like this. Get better at creatives and design them for the way the platform works today.
Make vertical versions of everything, and make the first second earn the second second. Also, test offers as hard as you test images, 99p first-in-series/ box set / reader magnet.
And judge campaigns on cost per acquisition/sale (using benchmarking) rather than sitting up reading placement breakdowns like tea leaves! (Something I am guilty of).
I’m still annoyed. Goddammit, Meta. But of everything they could have taken off us, a checkbox isn’t the worst of it.
They can have the checkbox. I still control my ads.
Just a note on Value Rules, which a few of you have DM'd me about. My first draft of this post included the workaround (use Value Rules to reduce spend by 90% in everything other than Newsfeed). But then I read Pierre Alex Jaunty's post on the 20Books Facebook Group and I think he nails what I was leaning towards - we need to accept the changes Meta is making and adjust our marketing for that, not rely on workarounds that will one-by-one be withdrawn.
Its blummin annoying innit? Especially for a slow worker like me! Every time I catch up enough to spend some time relearning and sorting out some ads FB changes the whole thing. I do wish they could leave it alone for a while. Never mind onwards.