Meta Ads update: What's been prepared for us this time?

So, media buyers, is it time to get used to yet another round of changes? This time, Meta’s update touches on several key areas at once: placements, targeting, analytics, working with AI, and creative development.

Meta is gradually taking away some of the manual control and handing over more of what’s called “autonomy” to algorithms. For media buyers, this means one thing—old habits will have to be reevaluated. For those who love trying something new, this is actually pretty good news. Which, of course, isn’t the case for those who’ve gotten used to working the same way for years.

Manually managing placements is becoming more difficult

One of the most talked-about updates is the gradual phase-out of the ability to manually manage individual placements at the Ad Set level.

According to advertisers, the change hasn’t yet affected all accounts, so it’s too early to call this a major overhaul. Meta hasn’t officially announced a date for the final transition, and some documentation still indicates that manual placement selection is available.

Value Rules are emerging as an alternative. With their help, you can lower the bid for a specific placement, but by no more than 90%. In other words, you won’t be able to set a hard limit like “0% or more—don’t allocate here”—it’s no longer an on/off switch, but rather a volume control.

For media buyers and performance marketers, this is an important signal: you’ll have to focus more on creative quality, data, and algorithmic optimization, rather than simply checking boxes to filter out everything you don’t want.

Meta AI can now analyze ad campaigns

Another change is the development of Meta AI as a de facto assistant for advertisers.

Now, through Meta AI, you can ask questions about your own ad campaigns and receive answers based on your account data. 

What can it offer? 

• Performance analysis
• Identifying patterns in campaigns
• Identifying effective audiences and creatives
• Optimization recommendations.

This is a continuation of Meta’s major push into AI. The company is already integrating AI tools directly into its advertising ecosystem, and in 2026, it also introduced the ability to work with advertising data via AI connectors.

Simply put, instead of ten tabs and twenty spreadsheets, you’ll increasingly be able to start your analysis with the question: “What’s actually going on here?”

Targeting is being moved to the individual ad level

Meta is also testing the ability to set age and gender preferences directly for individual ads, rather than just at the Ad Set level.

This is a potentially interesting change for testing creatives. The same offer can be tested with different creative concepts and audience signals without having to rebuild the entire campaign structure.

However, it’s important not to confuse targeting with audience recommendations: some of the new settings help the algorithm understand the desired audience, rather than giving advertisers back the old level of manual control.

Estimated Spend: Meta Shows How Much You Can Spend

The new “Estimated Spend” metric shows the projected average daily spend for a campaign based on a specified cost-per-result goal. The calculation is based on the results of similar campaigns over the past two days.

And here, the key word is “projection.”

Two days is too short a period to treat this figure as a financial prophecy. Seasonality, changes in creatives, the day of the week, or a sharp spike in conversions can significantly affect actual spending. Therefore, it’s best to use Estimated Spend as a guideline alongside your own statistics.

Ads-Only Locations for Local Businesses

For companies with physical locations, Meta has added the ability to create ads-only store locations directly through Business Suite.

Such a location can be used in certain ads, but it does not appear as a regular location on Facebook and is not displayed in Facebook Search. This can be convenient for temporary locations, warehouses, pop-up stores, or other addresses that do not require a full-fledged public page.

Ad Creative Studio: The Best Creatives Become the Building Blocks for New Ones

And perhaps the most interesting new feature for those who are constantly looking for “20 more creative options” is Ad Creative Studio.

The tool lets you identify the most effective ads based on key metrics and then create new variations based on them. The generated creatives can be edited, saved, downloaded, or sent directly to Ads Manager. For now, access is granted through registration.

And this is a very telling direction for Meta’s development: AI is no longer just helping to launch ads—it’s gradually becoming involved in deciding exactly what we’ll be testing.

Instead of a conclusion: What does this mean for advertisers?

All these changes paint a single picture. Meta is moving away from a model where the media buyer manually controlled nearly every parameter toward a system where the algorithm has more freedom, and the advertiser sets its goals, signals, and constraints.

Therefore, in 2026, the advantage won’t necessarily go to whoever knows the most buttons in Ads Manager, but to those who understand data, know how to create strong creatives, quickly test hypotheses, and know when to trust the algorithm and when to verify it.

And yes, it looks like there will be fewer checkboxes in Ads Manager. But there will be more questions for AI.