Ads Manager Defaults to Check Before 2026

Meta did not ask permission in 2025. It moved the defaults.

Audience, placements, budget and creative used to be separate decisions you made one at a time. Through the year they became parts of a single automated setup, and the person who builds campaigns by habit now publishes things they never chose. My rule for the last stretch of December is simple: before spend begins in January, read every default as if you were seeing it for the first time.

What changed in Ads Manager during 2025?

The direction was consistent: fewer manual choices, more automated ones.

Advantage+ became the default posture

In February 2025, Meta announced that Advantage+ shopping campaigns would be renamed Advantage+ sales campaigns, that Advantage+ would extend to leads campaigns, and that it was testing a streamlined setup so marketers would no longer choose between a manual campaign and an Advantage+ campaign. It also added a label showing when Advantage+ optimizations are active.¹ For leads, Meta said early testing showed 10% lower cost per qualified lead with Advantage+ on.¹

By late November, trade reporting described most Advantage+ elements as switched on by default in new campaigns, with Advantage+ audience and Advantage+ placements preselected and a 0 to 100 Opportunity Score rating how well a campaign fits Meta's automated systems.²

Creative enhancements widened

Back in May 2024, Meta had already centralized generative features under Advantage+ creative: image variations, new backgrounds, image expansion for Reels and Feed, text overlays and headline variations.³ That announcement did not say whether advertisers must opt in. Reporting since then disagrees on which enhancements show up preselected. I cannot point you to a Meta list of defaults, which is exactly why you read each toggle yourself.

Which settings should you review, level by level?

Think of it as four passes. The first takes five minutes and the rest each take one or two.

Account level

• Who has access. List every person and partner with a role. Remove anyone who does not need one.
• Payment method and spend limits. Confirm the card, the limit and who gets alerts.
• Account-wide creative features. If your account has a switch that pre-enables creative enhancements for new ads, decide it deliberately rather than inherit it.

Campaign level

• Objective and campaign type. Confirm what Advantage+ means for the campaign you are actually building, since the naming changed in 2025.
• Budget approach. The existing customer budget cap for Advantage+ shopping campaigns was removed, with Meta saying advertisers can set similar limits manually.² If you relied on that cap, set your own control.
• The "on" label. If it says Advantage+ is on, ask which parts and whether you chose them.

Ad set level

• Audience. If the audience is a "suggestion," know what that implies about who sees the ad. Exclusions deserve a second look.
• Placements. Preselected placements are not free. Make sure each one suits the creative, and note that Meta announced that the Messenger inbox placement would no longer be available for new ad creation.⁴
• Attribution setting. More on that below.

Ad level

• Creative enhancements. Open the full list and read every option, using Which to Turn Off as a guide. Do not assume that turning one off turns the rest off.
• Text and headline variations. Read each generated version. Delete any you would not say to a customer's face.
• Destination and URL parameters. Click through on a phone before you publish.

Why does the attribution setting matter so much now?

Because the same campaign can look good or bad depending on a drop-down you set once and forgot. Attribution is a setting, not a fact. The full rebuild plan is in Meta Is Removing View Attribution Windows.

Meta says reported results in its Insights API follow each advertiser's attribution settings, and that its 7-day view and 28-day view windows are scheduled to stop being returned on January 12, 2026, while the click windows (1, 7 and 28 days), 1-day engaged view and 1-day view stay.⁵ If you pull reports into a spreadsheet or dashboard, now is the time to confirm your exports do not depend on the windows being retired. Trade coverage says a request for a retired window will come back blank, with no error, which is easy to miss.⁴

Barry Hott made the practical point in a video posted on May 2, 2025:

I read that as permission to stop chasing a perfect match, and to pick the window you will headline and write it down.

Plays here, from YouTube

Incremental attribution is a signal, not a verdict

Meta also introduced an incremental attribution setting that estimates conversions attributable to ads. In Seer Interactive's test (six accounts, roughly $1.05 million of spend), Meta counted 87% of conversions as incremental, against 67% when measured with GA4. Seer's own conclusion was not to trust Meta's numbers blindly and to cross-check with other tools.⁶

How do you turn this into a January pre-flight?

Make it a routine you can finish in fifteen minutes on any new campaign.

Keep a change log

When something moves in the first week, you need to know whether the cause was the market or your own edit. A running note with date, setting and reason makes that answer cheap. Without it, you will argue with Meta's reporting instead of reading it.

The point of all this

Meta's systems are getting better at finding buyers (more in Meta's GEM Model). Its engineers describe a large generative ads model, GEM, that learns from ad content and user engagement and, they say, lifted ad conversions 5% on Instagram and 3% on Facebook Feed in one quarter.⁷ That is a reason to feed the system clean inputs and to stay in charge of the decisions only you can make: what you promise, what you spend and how you judge results.

For what to do with the score itself, read Opportunity Score: Which Meta Recommendations to Ignore. The same pre-flight discipline is built into the systems I build for clients.

Keep building.Ekai