If you want the short answer to what’s working in meta ads right now, it is this: account structure is losing you money and account hygiene is saving it. The biggest live change is that Meta has started telling advertisers it will remove placement, platform, device and operating system exclusions from ad sets, which quietly deletes a lever most media buyers have pulled for years. The second is that cheap leads keep getting cheaper and worse, so the only number worth managing to is cost per booking. These are field notes from real accounts, not a roundup of other people’s roundups.
What is changing with placements?
Advertisers started seeing an in-product notice in the Placements section in late August 2026 stating that excluding placements, platforms, devices and operating systems will no longer be available for their ad sets. Jon Loomer documented the notice and the workarounds on 20 August 2026, and his read of the rollout matches what I am seeing.
Four details matter more than the headline, and almost nobody is reporting them:
- It is a test, not a finished rollout. As I write this, on 22 September 2026, Meta has published no formal announcement and its help pages still describe manual placement selection. Treat it as coming, not as done.
- It appears limited to Sales and Leads objectives. Other objectives keep full placement control, which is sensible, because placement problems cluster in exactly those two.
- Sensitive verticals look excluded. Special ad categories, and reportedly health and wellness, are not in the test. If you run clinic accounts, you may not see this for a while.
- The replacement is weaker than what it replaces. Value rules let you bid up or down by placement, but only about seven placements are currently eligible. A discount is not an exclusion.
That last point is the one to plan around. If you were removing Audience Network because it was buying you cheap junk, a bid reduction still lets some budget flow there.
What should you do about it this month?
Move your exclusions up a level before the ad set level stops working. In Advertising Settings, open Account Controls, then Placement Controls, and set the placements your business is allowed to run on account-wide. This survives the ad set change and takes about five minutes per account. I did this across client accounts as soon as the notice appeared rather than waiting to find out whether the test reaches us.
Then be honest about whether you needed the exclusion at all. Most placement exclusions I inherit from other agencies were never solving a measured problem. They were habit. The genuine cases are narrow: an objective that rewards cheap actions, where a low quality placement can farm them. If your performance goal maximises conversions rather than clicks or video views, you probably have less to lose here than you think.
What’s working in meta ads right now for lead quality?
Measuring the right thing. This is the change that has made the most money on my accounts this quarter and it costs nothing to implement.
On one client I reviewed the pipeline properly rather than the dashboard, and the picture inverted. The cheapest source was producing a flood of conversations that almost never turned into a booking, while a more expensive source booked at a rate that made it the better buy by a wide margin. Judged on cost per lead, the cheap source was winning. Judged on cost per booking, it was the most expensive thing in the account. We rebuilt the qualification step rather than the ads, and lead quality came up to roughly seventy percent usable from a much worse starting point.
Nothing about that is a Meta trick. It is the discipline that produced AED 322,500 in ninety days for a client while we were cutting the ad budget, not raising it. The ads were never the expensive part.
Is creative still the main lever?
Yes, and more so every month that manual controls disappear. Every lever Meta removes from the ad set pushes more of the work back onto the creative, because the creative is now doing the targeting. The rule I run on every account has not changed: each ad in a test set must differ in both the argument it makes and the visual world it lives in. Same photo with a new headline is one ad, not two.
What has changed is how fast sets wear out. If you are not sure whether yours has, the three signals and the fix are in the piece on meta ads creative fatigue. Watch frequency, not the calendar.
What is not working?
- Rebuilding audiences when performance dips. Under a creative-led delivery system the audience is rarely the variable that moved.
- Daily edits to live ad sets. Every meaningful edit restarts learning and destroys the read you were waiting for.
- Optimising for cheap actions. Link click and ThruPlay goals invite exactly the low quality delivery that placement exclusions were being used to patch.
- Reporting on cost per lead to a business owner. It is the number most likely to be flattering and least likely to be true.
FAQ: what’s working in meta ads right now
Has Meta officially announced the placement change?
Not as of 22 September 2026. The evidence is an in-product notice shown to some advertisers, and Meta’s own help documentation still describes manual placement selection. That is why this is written as a change to prepare for rather than a rule already in force.
Will I lose placement control completely?
No. Account-level placement controls still exist, and value rules let you bid down by placement. What goes away is the per ad set exclusion. Set your account-level controls now and the change becomes uneventful.
Does this affect clinic and wellness accounts?
Reportedly not yet, since sensitive verticals appear to be excluded from the test. I would still move exclusions to account level rather than rely on being left out of a rollout indefinitely.
What single number should I manage to?
Cost per booking, or cost per qualified conversation if bookings are too far down the funnel to attribute. Cost per lead tells you what you paid for a name. It does not tell you whether you bought a customer.
The one thing to do this month
Open Account Controls and set your placement rules there. It takes five minutes, it costs nothing, and it makes a change you cannot stop into a change you do not notice. Last month’s edition is still worth reading for the lead quality material: the September 2026 field notes. The thinking underneath all of it is in what AI-powered marketing actually is.
I publish one complete workflow a week from live accounts in The AI-Powered Marketer newsletter, and the case studies behind the numbers here are on my client results page.