Meta’s making some changes to its Marketing API, which are designed to ensure that it’s able to maximize ad results via its Advantage+ targeting tools, and explore additional opportunities for your promotions.
First off, Meta’s rolling out a new feature within placements that will allocate 5% of your ad spend to your excluded placements, when it’s likely that they’ll see good performance.
So now, if you exclude certain ad placements (e.g. Facebook Feed, Threads feed, right-hand column, IG Explore), Meta’s system will retain the option to allocate a small amount of your ad spend to those options, if its system thinks that they might drive better results.
As explained by Meta:
“For Marketing API advertisers: Allowing limited spend to specific placements is not automatically enabled when excluding placements. To apply limited spend to specific placements, you must explicitly use the new API endpoints to designate which placements should have spend restrictions. All placement exclusions and limited spend settings must be managed through the API, and changes can be made at any time by updating your API configuration.”
So, a bit technical, but basically, Meta’s saying that when you’re creating your ads via third-party platforms and tools, it will now give its systems more flexibility to try out alternative placements, even if you don’t think they’ll be of benefit.
So if you want to exclude feed placements entirely, but Meta’s system determines that they could be effective, it’ll retain the flexibility to show your promotions in feed in a limited capacity, which could then help to show you how these options can also drive results.
Meta further notes that Advantage+ placements are its recommended option for most advertisers, in order to maximize ad performance.
“This approach reviews all available placements to find the most cost-effective opportunities for every impression, helping you reach more people for less. However, if you can’t use Advantage+ placements and need to manually exclude certain placements, we recommend using this new feature. It’s a smarter alternative to blocking placements entirely, giving you more flexibility and potentially better performance.”
Essentially, Meta’s saying that its ad placement process is getting smarter at showing your ads where they’ll drive the best results, even if you don’t think those placements will work. So now, Meta’s system will retain the option to at least test alternatives to your exclusions, as it looks to highlight the best options.
On a related front, Meta’s also deprecating legacy APIs that don’t utilize Advantage+ setup, in order to ensure that all ad campaigns are able to utilize the power of its evolving AI targeting tools.
“Following the launch of the streamlined Advantage+ experience for sales and app objectives in V23.0 of the Marketing API and the planned deprecation of the Advantage Shopping Campaigns (ASC) and Advantage App Campaign (AAC) APIs for campaign creation in MAPI V25.0 (Q1 2026), we are launching Advantage+ Migrations to support developers in transitioning legacy ASC/AAC campaigns into the new Advantage+ structure.”
Yeah, that’s a bit of a mouthful, but the explanation here relates to the further integration of Meta’s evolving AI targeting capacity, which will ensure that all ad campaigns are able to utilize Meta’s latest tools in this respect.
“From V24.0 (8th October), we will no longer allow new ASC/AAC campaigns to be created using the legacy ASC/AAC APIs. Developers may revert to previous MAPI versions (i.e., v23.0 or less) to continue using or editing legacy ASC/AAC APIs, however we highly recommend that developers start creating and using Advantage+ campaigns.”
In summary, Meta’s now looking to make Advantage+ a bigger focus, and a more critical consideration for all advertisers, as it continues to improve its AI-powered ad tools.
Which should lead to better results, and now, Meta’s systems will have more capacity to experiment with and highlight such through sampling.