Placements

Placements are the different spots where your ad can actually show up across Meta's surfaces, and they are not all the same room.

When you build a campaign, the same ad can land in a handful of very different places. The main ones are the Facebook and Instagram feeds, Stories, Reels, the in-stream spots that play inside longer videos, Messenger, Facebook Marketplace and search, and the Audience Network, which is the collection of apps and websites that sit outside Meta but still run its ads. A full-screen vertical Reel that someone is thumbing through at speed is a completely different experience from a small square sitting in the middle of a feed, and each spot has its own shape, its own pace, and its own expectations from the person looking at it.

You get to decide how these are chosen. You can hand-pick them yourself with manual placements, or you can let Meta spread your ad across all of them with the Advantage+ placements setting and let the system decide where each impression goes.

This matters because the same ad performs very differently depending on where it shows, and a creative that was built for one spot can look plain broken in another. A wide image that reads perfectly in the feed can get awkwardly cropped in Stories, and a message that needs a second to land can get skipped in Reels before anyone reads it. Knowing that placements exist, and knowing what each one feels like to the person on the other end, is what lets you make sure your ad actually fits the room it walks into.

Do not confuse choosing placements with fixing your creative. Turning a placement on or off is a blunt tool, and cutting one because it looks like it is dragging your numbers down often just shifts the same problem somewhere else rather than solving it. The bigger move is usually giving Meta the right shape of creative for every placement, so your ad can run everywhere without looking wrong, instead of switching spots off one at a time and hoping the average improves.

Placements are the rooms your ad can walk into, so build a version that belongs in each one.