If you’re advertising on Meta, you’ll have noticed plenty of change lately. As the tech giant continues to lean into AI, much of it is happening behind the scenes, and for those of us who spend our days in Meta Business Suite, it’s often a source of real frustration. So much so that Smart Company reported that the Ombudsman has been flooded with complaints from small businesses.
It’s a timely reminder of something we talk about often: social media is one part of a broader marketing plan, not where you spend all of your time and energy. Yes, there are benefits here in terms of getting your story in front of an audience, but remember it’s a channel you don’t own and don’t fully control. So while these changes are frustrating, they’re a useful prompt not to build your house on foreign soil. Prioritise your email database, your website and other owned platforms, and use social media to drive people back to the assets you actually control.
Here are a few of the recent changes advertisers on Meta need to know about.
Business Verification
Meta is rolling out a new business verification process for those running Meta ads. This isn’t the paid blue tick, it’s a request for documentation to validate your business account and confirm who is actually advertising and paying for particular content. It’s a simple process: you can verify via email, a phone number that can receive a code, or by uploading a document with the right details (Meta Business Help Centre).
This has grown out of Meta’s page transparency rules, which already require businesses running ads about social issues, elections or politics in the US, or with a large US audience, to verify and claim responsibility for their Page. Meta has since been extending similar beneficiary and payer verification requirements to advertisers reaching audiences in other countries. Worth keeping an eye on whether this expands further, since it has real implications for who’s named as running the ad and how quickly a creative can go live.
Advertiser Controls
Meta is handing Advantage+ more responsibility for targeting, placement and delivery. Increasingly, advertisers provide the objective, the creative, customer signals and the budget, and Meta’s systems decide more of what happens in between.
Over recent months, Meta has progressively removed detailed targeting options, eliminated interest and behaviour exclusions, consolidated granular audiences, and turned many targeting selections into suggestions rather than instructions. Placements now appear to be the latest area where manual control is being wound back (see below for further details).
The direction is clear: Meta wants advertisers to set the objective, supply the creative and customer data, and fund the budget, while its systems decide who sees the ad, where it appears and how spend is distributed. For many advertisers, this may ultimately improve performance. It also changes what paid social expertise actually looks like day to day, and Google is moving in a similar direction across Search.
For many brands this means more creative and in different formats to be able to optimise how it is viewed. No longer can you restrict the placement to just be on the feed and not need story sized content. You can add in some value parameters to give guidance, but in the end the controls that you used to have are diminishing. It also means that in some instances you need to allocate a slightly bigger budget to test and learn (remember there is a 5 day learning phase) before results are fully optimised.
Limited Recommendations for Alcohol Pages
Seen a notice that your alcohol-related page is no longer eligible to be recommended? You’re not alone. In January 2026, Meta notified a large number of alcohol-related business pages that they would no longer be recommended by Facebook’s algorithm, initially describing it to affected users as a technical issue that had been resolved. Despite that, over the last few weeks we’ve seen nearly all of the alcohol related pages that we work on and even though we appeal this decision, there is no change. This will have some impact for organic reach.
Other changes to be aware of
A few further shifts worth having on your radar, with sources so you can dig into the detail yourself:
Placement exclusions may be on the way out, though Meta hasn’t confirmed this formally. From late August 2026, some advertisers began reporting that the option to manually exclude a placement (say, keeping ads off Audience Network) was disappearing from the ad set level in their accounts, with “value rules” offered as the substitute, a tool that can discount a bid by up to 90% but can’t switch a placement off entirely. This was first documented by Meta ads specialists in industry posts rather than a Meta announcement, and Meta’s own Business Help Centre pages still describe manual placement selection as available, so treat this as an emerging, partial rollout to watch rather than a confirmed policy (PPC Land, Social Media Today via Relevant Audience).
Creative is doing more of the targeting work. Meta’s Andromeda delivery system, which reads an ad’s creative itself (imagery, copy, format) to help decide who sees it, has now finished its global rollout. Meta has described this shift toward creative diversification, rather than narrow audience targeting, as the more effective lever under AI-enabled delivery (Jon Loomer, summarising Meta’s own April 2025 announcement). In practice, this makes creative briefing as much a targeting decision as a brand one.
Lookalike audiences haven’t disappeared, but they’ve been demoted. They’re still a live targeting option in Ads Manager (Meta for Developers documentation), but under Andromeda they now function more as a directional hint for Meta’s delivery system than a hard audience boundary, with Advantage+ campaigns generally outperforming manually built lookalikes on cost per result. Custom audiences such as your customer database are still important (for now!).
Attribution rules have shifted again, and this one is confirmed directly by Meta. Engaged-view attribution for video now counts an engaged view from 5 seconds (down from 10), and non-link interactions such as shares and saves have moved into a renamed “engage-through” attribution category, alongside a new “Maximize Interactions” goal replacing “Post Engagement” (Meta for Business).
CPMs are climbing. In its own Q2 2026 results (the quarter to 30 June 2026), Meta reported average price per ad up 12% year-on-year, with ad impressions up 14% (Meta Investor Relations). So budgets that “used to work” may simply be buying less reach than they were twelve months ago.
An easier way to regram. Instagram has added a new “Add to Grid” function to its app. If a user tags you in their post you are given the option to add the post to your grid. This replaces the “regram” tools of old and means you can now easily share posts to your Stories and your grid. Notification of this will appear in your DMs.
