Launch is a Spring 2026 Clutch Global Award winner!
PPC Landing pages can make or break your ad campaign. Here's 5 simple ways to improve them and get your…
By Alice-Rae Pringle, Paid Social Manager, Launch
If you manage paid ads for a scaling UK ecommerce brand, you have likely noticed your campaigns behaving unpredictably lately. In the last couple of years, platform updates have started to arrive without warning. Automations and settings you did not select are quietly overriding your intentional strategy, locking in budgets, and altering your creative assets behind the scenes.
Meta is pushing hard for automation. While the platform frames these changes to meta ads as enhancements, they frequently function as tripwires that drain budgets and reduce your control.
I’m Alice-Rae Pringle, Launch’s Paid Social Manager. I manage performance campaigns for high-growth challenger brands. Here’s what we’re seeing across the platform right now, and how marketing leaders can protect their budgets from hidden automated settings.
TLDR: META ADS UPDATE
Meta’s changed its default campaign configuration rules. “Recommended” settings now automatically activate platform enhancements, control your creative assets, and shift your primary performance goals without permission. To secure your budget, you need to use manual campaign configurations, restrict your brand safety filters, and audit your ad sets before publishing.
You can watch the full breakdown of these interface updates in our livestream recording on YouTube (below) and LinkedIn.
The Shared Budget and Performance Goal Trap
When creating a new campaign, Meta presents a prominent option to apply recommended settings. We advise avoiding this choice. Recommended settings automatically activate automated placements and enhancements, which limits your control over audiences and spend distribution.
A significant budget risk sits at the ad set level. Meta’s introduced a setting that shares your budget across multiple ad sets. If your team selects this option, the interface locks the decision. You cannot undo the choice or alter the budget type after saving. If it is selected by mistake, you must delete the entire ad set and rebuild it from scratch, wasting critical operational time.
Default performance goals have also changed without notification. Traffic campaigns now default to landing page views instead of link clicks. More importantly for online retailers, conversion campaigns now default to maximising value rather than the total volume of conversions. Because you cannot change these performance goals after an ad goes live, publishing without a manual audit locks you into the wrong optimisation framework.
Silent Risks to Brand Safety
Brand alignment requires complete control over where your creative assets appear. Meta now automatically sets inventory filters to Expanded Inventory for in-content ads and the audience network.
The expanded setting permits your ads to display alongside unvetted or extreme content. For a premium direct to consumer brand, this placement presents an immediate reputational threat.
We recommend moving this setting to moderate for every campaign you run. The moderate filter excludes high-risk placements while maintaining the necessary audience scale to drive growth.
When Advantage Creative Modifies Your Assets
The Advantage creative suite uses machine learning to optimise your copy and imagery dynamically. The challenge is that Meta’s algorithm is learning in a live environment using your active ad spend, which introduces frequent mechanical errors.
Our team has caught several specific errors during manual audits:
- Forced Translations: The automated translation tool alters text based on perceived user device settings. The platform regularly misidentifies these settings, causing English-language ads to serve entirely in Spanish, French, Portuguese, or another language to standard UK audiences.
- Outdated Asset Delivery: The related media feature allows Meta to display historical creative assets underneath active ads. If your brand switches from a 30% discount in June to a 20% discount in July, the platform may continue serving the old 30% creative. This creates a compliance risk regarding false advertising.
- Decoupled Interface Toggles: Turning off all optimisations at the top of the ad configuration interface does not disable “Essential Enhancements” located lower on the page, such as the relevant comments filter. Teams must scroll to the bottom of the interface to turn these options off individually.
Controlled Experimentation Over Default Automation
Certain automated tools can improve account performance when applied selectively. For example, dynamic call to action buttons that change “Shop Now” to “Tap to Start Shopping” have improved results for our clients. The distinction is that these configurations were proven through isolated A/B testing, not accepted blindly as a platform default.
When you test automated variations, isolate one change at a time. Run your frameworks for ten to fourteen days to gather reliable performance data. Testing multiple automated features simultaneously makes it impossible to isolate which element impacted your return on ad spend.
Maintain strict manual controls as you approach peak trading periods like Q4. The live learning nature of the algorithm makes automated enhancements highly unpredictable when budgets are under pressure.
Reclaim Your Performance Control
The technical configuration of your ad account requires regular human oversight. You can no longer rely on a set and forget workflow. To protect your brand safety and prevent budget waste, enforce manual setups, move your inventory filters to moderate, and check the base of your ad screens to turn off automatic translations.
Watch the Livestream
We shared the exact visual steps to find and disable these hidden platform toggles during our recent live broadcast. You can watch the full recording of the session on YouTube and LinkedIn.
CONTACT US
If your team needs an independent audit of your paid social architecture, contact our performance marketing specialists today.
About the author
With four years of social media marketing experience under her belt, Alice-Rae manages paid social campaigns at Launch. She specialises in Meta, Pinterest, and TikTok, with a focus on marrying creative strategy with data-driven insights. Her experience spans building social-first campaigns for public sector and travel clients within a graphic design agency environment.
