Meta has quietly removed one of the most-used tools in every advertiser’s playbook: the placement checkboxes inside an ad set. For years, if you wanted to keep your Instagram or Facebook campaign off Audience Network or low-quality partner apps, you simply unchecked the box. That option is gone. In its place is a “value rule” that can only discount your bid on a placement by up to 90% — it cannot switch the placement off. If you’re an Indian business about to increase Meta ad budgets for the festive season, this is worth checking before you spend another rupee.
Why Meta Ads Placement Exclusions Disappeared
According to recent tracking of Meta’s ad platform changes, the stated reasoning is that hard exclusions limited its delivery algorithm’s ability to find cheap, high-converting inventory. The replacement — a bid-discount value rule — still lets the algorithm serve your ad on a “excluded” placement if the auction is cheap enough, just at a steeper bid. For most campaigns that’s a meaningful behaviour change, not a technicality: placements you thought were locked out can start showing up again the moment competition (and CPMs) rise, which is exactly what happens during Diwali and Big Billion Days-adjacent shopping weeks.
Do this: Open every currently active ad set and check its placement settings today, before you raise festive budgets — don’t assume an old exclusion is still holding.
The Only Hard Switch Left: Account-Level Placement Controls
The one setting that still fully blocks a placement lives at the account level, under Business Settings, not inside individual ad sets. The trade-off is that it applies to every campaign running on that ad account, so you lose per-campaign flexibility. If there’s a placement — say, a specific partner app category — that has genuinely hurt your conversion rate before, this is now the only reliable way to keep it off entirely.
Do this: For any placement you truly need blocked (not just discounted), set it once at the account level rather than trying to recreate the old checkbox behaviour ad set by ad set.
A New Creative Diversity Score Is Also Live
Alongside the placement change, Ads Manager now rates each ad set’s “creative diversity” as Low, Medium, or High. Early data suggests the score leans on visual similarity between your images and video thumbnails rather than simply counting how many formats you’re running — accounts already mixing statics, video, UGC, and carousels are still coming back Low if the creative all looks alike.
Do this: Before your festive campaigns go live, swap in creative that’s visually distinct, not just format-distinct — a UGC video and a studio product shot that use the same colour palette and framing may still read as one creative to Meta’s system.
The bottom line: Meta hasn’t taken away control, but it has moved it and made it blunter. If your Meta ad strategy for this year’s festive-season marketplace push was built around placement exclusions that quietly stopped working, or you’re running paid campaigns alongside a broader shift toward Google’s AI Max migration, now is the time to audit both platforms together rather than assume last year’s settings still apply. A short audit this week is far cheaper than discovering it mid-way through your highest-spend month.
Need help with this? Get in touch with Techqueto — we build and grow websites for 100+ brands across India and the UAE. Ready to get started? Get started here.