PPC Land’s headline says some Meta advertisers are losing placement controls. Meta’s own documentation says nothing of the sort: the July 29, 2026 Marketing API v26.0 changelog lists two placement removals, both narrow, both dated. The wider claim rests on what two practitioners have published, and it runs against Meta’s Business Help Centre pages, which still describe manual placement selection as available.
What advertisers are reporting
Bram Van der Hallen, a digital marketing practitioner at Edge.be, wrote on LinkedIn on August 25, 2026: “Some advertisers are seeing the ad placements control being removed.” PPC Land, reporting on his post the same day, found no matching announcement from Meta. A separate Social Media Today report on August 20 sourced the same pattern to Jon Loomer: the placement-exclusion option going from ad sets, the ability to exclude entire platforms included, some advertisers alerted, and “no timeline has been announced yet.”
Loomer’s own post that day stated it more broadly: “Excluding placements, platforms, devices and operating systems will no longer be available for your ad sets.” He characterised it as a test for now, with plans to expand more broadly, scoped to Sales and Leads objectives and excluding sensitive verticals such as special ad categories and health and wellness. He also wrote that it is not clear when the change will go into effect.
Can advertisers still exclude a placement in Meta ad sets?
As of August 25, 2026, Meta has published no announcement of the removal of placement exclusions, and the company’s Business Help Centre pages, captured the week of August 25, 2026, continue to describe manual placement selection as available. In reports published by PPC Land and Social Media Today between August 20 and August 25, 2026, practitioners say the exclusion option has disappeared from some advertisers’ ad sets. No Meta-published source confirms a platform-wide rollout, or a date for one.
The tool PPC Land points to is a dial, not a switch
Value rules, which PPC Land’s headline couples to the missing exclusion control, do not remove a placement from delivery; they price it differently. Value rules operate at the ad set level and let advertisers raise or lower bids for defined segments, including placements such as Instagram feed, Facebook feed, Stories, Reels and Marketplace. The decrease a value rule can apply is capped, per PPC Land: “A bid decrease under value rules cannot exceed 90%, so a placement can be made expensive to win but never made impossible to win.” Exclusion is binary. A value rule is a dial, and the dial stops at 90%, not 100%. Meta’s own setup screen for value rules carries a warning advertisers must confirm before proceeding, quoted by PPC Land: “your overall cost per result may increase when using value rules.”
What Meta has documented, dated and published
The placement changes Meta has published and dated sit in the Marketing API v26.0 changelog, released July 29, 2026. It states plainly: “The Instagram Explore Feed placement is no longer available. Delivery shifts to other eligible placements, and requests that explicitly specify Explore return an error.” A second entry in the same changelog covers Messenger: the story value in messenger_positions “is silently removed for versioned v26.0 or later calls and no longer appears in effective placements,” with full removal across all Marketing API versions by October 27, 2026. Both changes are narrow, both are dated, and neither is the exclusion feature the two practitioners are describing.
The account-level control
One placement lever is untouched in these reports. Account-level block lists still prevent delivery to specific publishers on certain placements, and PPC Land reports those controls “are applied even when Advantage+ placements is switched on.” Loomer points to Placement Controls, under Account Controls in Advertising Settings. Whatever a bid modifier leaves running still has to be measured, and that measurement depends on campaign data arriving intact: elsop’s campaign URL builder generates consistent UTM parameters, and elsop has separately covered how to track Meta Ads campaigns in GA4.
Until Meta publishes something with a date on it, the exclusion story stays where PPC Land left it: reported by some, confirmed by none, running against a Help Centre page that still describes manual placement selection as available.
