Limited Spend on Excluded Placements

A new feature is coming that will allow Meta to spend a small amount of your budget on placements you’ve excluded, if it will improve results.

Here’s what you need to know…

The Announcement

Meta explained in a recent announcement about Limited Spend on Excluded Placements:

Starting October 8th, we’re rolling out a new feature within placements that allows up to 5% of your spend to be allocated for each excluded placement — when it’s likely to improve performance.

What it Means

Let’s unpack this…

First, this is a Marketing API update, so it applies to third-party tools. But I’d assume Meta will work this into the main Ads Manager interface as well.

Meta recommends using Advantage+ Placements to make use of all placements to get the best results. If you turn off certain placements, you will have the option to apply this feature.

Instead of ignoring the placement entirely, Meta will then spend up to 5% of your budget for each excluded placement. Only if it will improve performance, of course.

But… Why??

Honestly, kind of a weird feature.

You should use Advantage+ Placements in most cases, particularly when using a performance goal that maximizes conversions. But if you remove a placement, it’s probably for a reason. Especially if you’re optimizing for link clicks, landing page views, or some other top-of-funnel action.

The reason advertisers remove placements in those situations is that Meta’s delivery algorithm will exploit weaknesses in certain placements that will get you cheap and low-quality actions that match your performance goal. In that case, Meta sees “improving performance” as getting more of those cheap actions.

Because Meta’s algorithm for ad delivery is literal.

So it just doesn’t make sense in that case. You removed the placement because you don’t want to waste your money on cheap and low-quality actions. If that’s your motivation, you wouldn’t be fine with wasting up to 5% of your budget on that placement. Waste is waste.

So, I’m not really sure why Meta is giving us this option. It could just create more confusion, and advertisers may use it when they shouldn’t.

Value Rules could otherwise be an option. It allows you to bid more or less based on certain variables, like placements.

The problem is that not all placements are available.