Meta advertisers at the Center for 2025 complaints about controlling the topic or lacking the topic. My biggest frustration is from the advertiser Obsession with fleeting control fantasy.
Stop advertising like in 2017. I miss those days, too, but we won’t go back. The tools have changed, and your roles have changed in the process. Your rejection of evolution will not stop ad development. Ignore this progress and you will be eliminated.
There was a time when control of advertising was possible and necessary. There is one benefit. But now in many cases, it is unnecessary or impossible to try to force such control. Nowadays, most of this benefit has evaporated.
But this won’t stop countless advertisers from trying. They insist that their control is necessary. Many of their actions revolve around The Phantom of Controlassuming they limit something when they don’t have one. Even if it is possible to control, whether their behavior has any positive impact is often questionable.
There are exceptions when available controls are needed, but these exceptions are becoming increasingly rare.
It’s time to roar…
Target controlled Haishi rage building
Meta has been targeting control over the past four years rather than targeting controls. Initially, detailed positioning expansion was an option. You can decide whether allowing Meta to expand its audience will improve results.
Ultimately, it was renamed to “Advantages” for detailed positioning. It becomes the default value and can no longer be closed when optimizing the landing page view, link clicks, converts or converts values. Advertisers lose control.
The same goes for similar audience expansions. Advertisers initially have the option to turn on this, which will allow Meta to expand your appearance audience if results can be improved.
This feature will be renamed “Advantages” and cannot be turned off when optimizing conversion or converting values.
In the process, Meta introduced Advantage+ audiences. When used, target inputs for the highest age, gender, custom audience, viewers, and detailed goals are considered as suggestions. If the meta can (and) can (and) reach people outside of these inputs, if it can improve the results.
Meta constitutes the advantage + listener default. You can “switch” the original audience, but you’re deeply discouraged.
But this ability to “switch” is part of the problem. Advertisers think it gives them more control than they are now. However, when using performance targets that can automatically start the scalable, switching does not give you more control over detailed positioning or similar audiences. In most cases, advertisers don’t know this.
In some cases, you use advantage + audience or original audience, it doesn’t matter whether you use advantage + audience or original audience. The wording changed, but the expansion still happened. This is the phantom of control.
As the new Advantage + campaign settings move, Phantom is disappearing. Language has changed. The detailed positioning of advantages and advantages seem to have disappeared. Now, in many cases, the fact that these inputs are merely “suggestions” is no longer avoidable.
If you optimize for any type of conversion, the target control is limited. Over the past few years, you think you have more control than before. The phantom disappeared.
Because control over positioning is limited, stop obsessing with your interests, behaviors and the same audience. Whether these inputs are completely different is controversial. They are not respected. The algorithm will go to where you need to get the result.
If you advertise like you did in 2017, you might actually make the results worse. There is no reason to create separate ad sets for viewers, detailed positioning and extensively. You will get different results, but these results may be based on randomness. And you can reach all the same people in every ad set.
Let go of the target control you once had and think you But don’t do this anymore.
“I need to find a winner”
Are you?
Let me ask this controversial question for advertisers. It has been so integrated by our roles and responsibilities that it is considered necessary and advantageous.
Do you actually need to find a winning combination of ad copy and creative ideas?
It may sound crazy to give up on the idea, but we can tell how we evolve to achieve our goals. We should ask if our advertising copy and creative approaches are still relevant.
Don’t get me wrong about my advice here. Your copy of your ad is important. Your creative choices are important. You want to generate the combination that leads to the conversion. But I think you rarely need to find a winning version right now.
Let’s go back to the point in time when 2017 was our “good time”. We have much less location. Each ad has a main text, title, description, and image or video. “Find a Winner” is not only possible, but also a worthwhile goal.
Consider the changes in this area. From my point of view, there are 26 positions, and new positions keep appearing. Advertisers are encouraged to provide up to five versions of main text, titles, and descriptions for each ad. Meta can display different versions and asset portfolios of your ads, depending on where and who you are arriving.
Shelving whether it is necessary to find the winning combination temporarily. Is it possible? For most advertisers with moderate budgets, I think the single combination’s results are negligible. This data is usually too much to make sense.
But another problem is finding that winners are beneficial. Suppose you manage to isolate the highest performance combination of main text, title, description and creativity. This is the highest performing combination of all positions that everyone shows.
This ignores some important facts about how delivery optimization works. This combination works best overall, but that doesn’t mean that other versions are not the best versions for a particular person or placement. One of the reasons this “best combination” works well is that when the combination is less efficient, different combinations are shown.
Everyone is different. Each location is different. The best performance portfolio for Facebook mobile feeds will be different from the portfolio of best performance compared to Instagram reels. The interaction with content is different in these locations, So, why don’t the best performing ads be unique?
Finding winning combinations tries to simplify a complex problem. This complex problem does not always require a solution.
The algorithm is not perfect. But human interpretations of results are often less reliable. See my post on segmentation effects for an idea about how we often misunderstand the meaning of results when it seems like we are spending incorrectly on lower-performing advertising ideas.
“I close the position of low performance”
I feel like we’ve finally got to where most advertisers understand where low performance is closed, which is rarely a good way. But this prospect has not been fully adopted.
This seems counterintuitive. You can break down the results by placing them and find that one has a low conversion or the highest cost per conversion. It’s only logical that if you turn it off, the results will improve.
So you turn it off. But you don’t see this improvement. Why?
Some locations are more likely to be noticed than others. Some are more likely to click. But just because the placement doesn’t gain the reputation of the conversion, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t help.
Take the right column as an example. This location is rarely clicked. But this is also obvious And cheap. Although high impression frequencies in the feed can be annoying and expensive, neither of the high frequencies in the right column may be. But this may affect the final decision.
In short, if you force only the first two “most effective” locations and delete everything else, you’re unlikely to get better results. Your expenses will soar.
You need to have some trust that the algorithm will execute as expected. But stick to all positions as long as you are not in a low performance position (usually by optimizing driving discovery) to waste your budget height.
This doesn’t control what you need. It is inefficient. Let go.
“I turned off every enhancement”
It has long been popular for Bash Meta’s strengths + creative enhancement and sometimes earns this popularity. Some of these enhancements are already known to scare customers when they contradict the approved creativity.
But AI-driven enhancement is getting better and better. Add animations to static images to make them stand out. Generate background to fill in the blanks by placing. Automatic adjustments are made by placing or adjusting the aspect ratio to improve fit. Emphasize important texts to inspire action.
Don’t take the blanket approach to these enhancements in the name of greater control. Check them out in advanced preview to see how they work, but many of them are low-risk and worth keeping.
Even the most criticized enhancements can be saved. Most advertisers turn off music due to the automatically generated selection meta selection. But these options can be customized. When your images are displayed in the position of the story, it is better to supplement the music correctly than not having a sound.
I’m not saying you should blindly accept all enhancements. But the opposite may be worse. Know what you accept and customize if necessary. Turn off enhancements that cannot be saved.
Over time, these AI-powered enhancements will become better and more beneficial. Those who react to reject them will accidentally harm the potential outcome in the name of control.
Embrace reduction control
Those who stick to the little control we have and feel attacked by this article will miss this. I’m not saying there are never exceptions.
Sometimes, you may need to add some target controls to cover weaknesses in your AD delivery algorithm. Meta provides some help with the rule of value in this field.
Sometimes, you can spend enough time and get the necessary results to find a successful combination of creative assets to get something meaningful. In this case, there may be a benefit in which you can apply this information to potential changes.
Sometimes, strengths + creative enhancement is not only useless, but can be harmful.
All of this is true. Know the difference.
Accept your control less than before, and you won’t reclaim it. Recognize that manual adjustments often do more harm than good.
Sticking to the past is not a badge of honor. The automation of rejecting control controls won’t end well.
You will be outdated.
If you are offended by this article or attacked by my words, I encourage you to take a step back. Consider our current location and the direction of meta-advertising. Ask yourself: Do I want to be trapped in the past or become a part of the future?
Change is often painful. I experienced that one in person. I also have a hard time developing and resisting change.
Eventually, I let go of my resistance and accepted the change. So can you.
now you
What have you finally accepted about Meta Advertising?
Let me know in the comments below!
