What Every Business Owner Needs to Know About Meta’s Hidden Ad Settings

So picture this: you sit down and set up your Meta Ads campaign, you follow the steps, you set your budget, you choose your audience, you upload your creative, and you hit publish. 3 weeks go by and you look at your results and you think, huh, where did the money go? You turned off all the things that you were supposed to turn off, you followed the instructions, and yet somehow your budget has gone sideways. Your ad showed up in places that you never intended for them to show up, and your results just don't make sense. Welcome to the experience of running ads on a publicly traded platform. And while we could bring Google and YouTube into this conversation, we're going to focus on Meta, but it applies over there too. Today I want to pull back the curtain a little bit on something that many small business owners and marketers who are not experienced on the platform never see coming. And quite honestly, marketing agencies who do this for you don't even actually know some of this is happening themselves. And if they do, They just don't make you aware of it because frankly, it's just easier to let the platform take the wheel. But I think you deserve to know what's actually happening inside of Meta's ad manager and more importantly, what to do about it. Let's start with first principles because I think this will change everything. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, generated somewhere over $160 billion in revenue in 2024. Nearly all of it is from advertising. That's not trivia. That's the lens with which I want you to understand every single feature and every single default setting and every single recommendation that they make inside their platform. So every toggle that they offer you, every checkbox, every performance suggestion, all of it is designed for one primary goal, and that's to increase the amount of money that flows from your account into theirs. Now, look, I know I'm laughing and joking a little bit. It's not cynicism. It's just how publicly traded platforms work. Their shareholders expect growth quarter over quarter, year over year. Their product team's job is to find ways to capture more of the budget, and they're exceptionally good at it. So here's one of the clearest examples of what I'm talking about. So when you head up, head into the Meta Campaign Manager and you start setting things up, you have this option about where to control where your ads are going to appear. You can choose feeds, stories, reels, Messenger, WhatsApp, or even third-party apps and websites that are off-platform from Meta. They call this the Audience Network. Now, it sounds comprehensive. More placements, more exposure, more chances to get more business, right? Wrong. What the data shows, and this is from us running well over a decade of ads since 2012 on the platform at the agency level, It has taught us that things like the audience network, specifically placements in these third-party apps and game sites and other platforms they don't technically own, perform terribly for most small businesses. People are not thinking about your lead magnet or your product or your service when they're playing games like Candy Crush or FarmVille or whatever the latest game is of the week. They're clicking by accident and your budget gets consumed And guess what? Nobody becomes a lead and nobody's buying. So there is a move that you can use to restrict your placements. You can go in and tell Meta manually to only show my ads in the Facebook feeds, in the Instagram feeds, on Instagram Reels, on Instagram and Facebook Stories, etc., etc. And there's a way to do this so you can cut everything else. And here's where it gets interesting. And after you do all that, after you systematically unchecked the placements that you don't want, you scroll down and find a checkbox that's pre-selected and it reads something like, "Allow a limited amount of spend on excluded placements when it's likely to improve performance." And don't let me get started on audience choices as well because that same button shows up there, which says that if you said to only use your custom audiences, you also, as a pre-selected box, it's checked to say, "We can expand beyond this audience." if we think it's gonna improve performance. Now let that sink in for a minute. You just told them where not to show the ads and their default settings say that they can show them there anyway, up to 5% if they think it'll help. Help who? Help your campaign or help their revenue, right? This is the kind of thing that keeps your ad spend from ever performing the way that it should. And you never know it was happening if no one pointed it out to you. So let me give you one more example that I think will help illustrate the dynamic here. Meta has a feature now called the Opportunity Score. Google has it as well, different name, same idea. It grades your campaign on a scale from 0 to 100, you know, kind of a report card type of thing. High score equals good student, low score means you're doing something wrong. So we have a campaign right now. I looked at our Ads Manager and it's got a campaign score, opportunity score of 72. Now I want to walk you through what Meta is telling me to do to improve this campaign and to improve that score. They want me to do things like turning on all of the automatic creative enhancements, meaning let them alter my ad copy, alter my images however they see fit. They want me to remove budget controls and allow them to allocate spend across placements however they choose. They want me to re-enable placements that I've deliberately excluded, and they want me to consolidate the campaign so that only the best performing ads get the budget instead of testing the multiple ads that we strategically need to test in this campaign. Every single recommendation is a transfer of control from me, my team, or you to them. I have another campaign going on right now, same account, Different client, score is an 88, near perfect. It's performing terribly. The leads are coming in expensive, they're off target, but Meta loves the setup, right? Because it's exactly what they want. The score isn't measuring whether the business is winning, it's measuring how much you've handed over the wheel to the platform. So one more here for you. When you upload a video or an image to run as an ad, Meta will likely suggest all of these creative enhancements. They'll suggest things like, let us add music to your video, let us change the color contrast on your images, let us add text overlays and calls to actions, let us change the image to better fit certain placements. Now, I like that one, quite honestly. These all sound helpful, but many business owners don't know that you're letting Meta alter your creative that you spent all the time getting prepared through your hypotheses and logic about why you wanted to use those creatives in the first place. And sometimes these are significant changes without your approval on each individual change. Your ad could look completely different to some audiences than what you originally designed. Now, I'm not saying every single enhancement they recommend is bad. There are some that are useful and we use 3 or 4, maybe 5 of the 12 or 13 that they offer. But you've got to make these choices deliberately. Not by accident and not by a box that's pre-checked. So what do you actually do with all this? First, you've got to understand that the platforms are your partners. Now, that might not feel like where I was going here, but they are not philanthropists. Let me be real clear. You need them. They need us because they make money from ads. They have access to your most ideal customers at scale. Neither you nor I or our agency or anyone else out there can replicate the opportunity they present us. The point isn't to fight them, it's to stay informed about where their incentives diverge from yours. Next, you should audit every campaign setup that you have right now as if the defaults are wrong, because many of them are, and you're wasting budget, especially if you're a small business owner. You've got to check your campaigns not only every time you set them up, but even when you duplicate a previous campaign, you've got to go in and make sure all of those default buttons didn't turn themselves back on even though you turned them off in the existing campaign. Check those creative enhancements, check your optimization goals, check your placements, check those settings because they don't always carry over the way you've previously set them up. Third, I need you— hear me on this— for those of you that got straight A's, ignore the opportunity score. Run your campaigns according to your business objectives and not that score. And fourth, you've got to find someone who's staying current on these platforms, not just someone who's reporting the change, but someone who's reporting the perspective as it relates to real budget being spent on campaigns. Maybe it's us, maybe it's someone else, because when things are changing, they not always changing in the benefit of you. Sometimes they're changing in the benefit of them unless you push back. We've been at this for a long time and I still catch new traps that were not there 6 months ago, not there 2 weeks ago. And this isn't a knock again on these big platforms. We really do need these platforms. We really do need the audience. We can't reach new customers at scale without either of these 2 platforms. Obviously, I've been beating up Meta in this video. We do love Meta, and I know that might not make it sound that way, but we love you more because we know as a small to mid-sized company, you don't have tens of millions of dollars to throw down the drain. Your job as a business owner is to know the rules of the game that you're playing, because these rules are real and they have consequences, and they can delude you from thinking that the platform doesn't work because it's working for them and you just haven't tweaked the dials to get it to work for you. I'm Darrell Evans. This is the Mindshift Podcast. I'm the CEO of Mindshift Digital. Watch your settings and watch this video next.