On October 28, Meta will change your ads without asking you

On October 28, Meta is turning on a new option for every ad already running. Nobody will ask for your approval: if you do nothing, it will apply. It isn’t the only one. Over the past few months, several settings have been switching on by default in ad accounts. Some are harmless. Others cost money. Here is what we turn off on our clients’ accounts, and why.

What changes on October 28

The option is called “product browsing.”

Today, when someone clicks your ad, they land on your site. On the page you chose, with the message you worked on.

With product browsing, they first land on a page inside Facebook or Instagram. They see your products there, with recommendations picked by Meta. Only then do they move on to your site.

Until now, this was an option you had to check. Starting October 28, it will be checked for you, on every live ad.

Meta’s argument: on average, advertisers who use it get 3% more conversions.

That number comes from a test Meta ran itself in August, across roughly 117,700 advertisers. An average, then, mixing brands very different from yours.

Why we turn it off

3% more conversions sounds tempting on paper.

But it can lead to very random placements.

That raises several problems:

• your brand image can take a hit. If a beautiful ad is paired with product recommendations whose visuals are weaker because they come from the catalog, the whole impression falls apart;
• the ad can lose its coherence: if Meta shows products that have nothing to do with the creative, people get lost and the ad stops working;
• finally, we see cases where Meta simply replaces your creative with a catalog ad, DPA style. Your creative no longer appears at all.

This can be a disaster for your creative testing. Your learnings can get muddied by this feature if it isn’t kept in check.

And the timing doesn’t help. October 28 is when brands ramp up budgets ahead of Black Friday. The worst moment to find out that a setting changed how your sales come in.

We are not saying the option is bad in every case. For a brand that sells mostly through its catalog, with a clean product feed, it is worth testing. Not switching on across the board for ads that already work.

How to turn it off

There are two ways.

The fastest: Meta sent advertisers a notification in Ads Manager, in Business Suite and by email. It has an “Opt out” button. Click it before October 28.

The second: ad by ad. In each ad’s settings, under “Advantage+ creative” and destination, turn off product browsing. This works at any time, including after the 28th.

One tip: even after opting out, check your new ads and the ones you duplicate. Meta hasn’t said clearly whether ads created after October 28 will be affected.

The other settings that switch on without your consent

Product browsing is getting attention because, for once, it comes with a specific date. But other options are already quietly being added to your ads.

Added visuals. When you upload a new image, Meta offers to add it to all your active ads as well. The box is checked by default, with the promise of a 12.9% higher conversion rate. The problem is that a new ad often has a different offer or angle than the older ones. We uncheck it.

Automatic enhancements. “Advantage+ creative enhancements” touch up your creative: cropping, brightness, music, animation. Several are on by default. We go through them one by one.

Rewritten copy. Meta can now change the text on your static visuals and swap your buttons. A “Learn more” can become “See details.” For a brand that weighs every word, that is not a detail.

Automatic translations. Meta can translate your copy and visuals into the language it assigns to each person. An ad built for the Netherlands can show up in Spanish. We have even seen visuals translated halfway. If you didn’t choose this, we check which languages are selected.

Placements. Choosing placements (Feed, Stories, Reels) now happens at the ad level. Exclusions at the ad set level are going away. If you exclude certain placements, you need to manage it at the account level.

The habit to keep

Meta’s default settings are built for the average advertiser. They serve the platform before they serve your brand.

For a brand that protects its image, this is a real issue. At 58 Facettes, a pre-owned luxury jewelry platform, the whole challenge was getting out of the automated catalog. The campaigns sold, but they lined up products without telling any story. By replacing that catalog with creative that presents each piece, revenue grew 6.6x in two months.

Meta has also added a “Review defaults” button above each ad preview. It lists the options turned on by default. That is the first place to look.

And if you leave some of these options on, take ten minutes to fill in the “Branding” section. You enter your logo, your typeface, your colors, the tone to use and a list of banned words. It is the only way to frame what Meta’s AI writes on your behalf.

So the rule is simple. With every new ad, we review the settings before launch. All of them. Even the ones we didn’t touch.

Those are often the ones that change the results.

Not sure what is turned on in your account? We can look at it together before October 28. The review is free, with no commitment.