Introducing Limited Spend on Excluded Placements in Marketing API

Von Jerome Crochat

Starting October 8th, we’re rolling out a new feature within placements that allows up to 5% of your spend to be allocated for each excluded placement—when it’s likely to improve performance. This update provides you with flexibility to have some delivery to specific placements, without requiring you to completely remove placements from your campaigns.

For Marketing API advertisers: Allowing limited spend to specific placements is not automatically enabled when excluding placements. To apply limited spend to specific placements, you must explicitly use the new API endpoints to designate which placements should have spend restrictions. All placement exclusions and limited spend settings must be managed through the API, and changes can be made at any time by updating your API configuration.

Advantage+ placements (or turning on Advantage+ for placements) remains the recommended solution for most advertisers. This approach reviews all available placements to find the most cost-effective opportunities for every impression, helping you reach more people for less. However, if you can’t use Advantage+ placements and need to manually exclude certain placements, we recommend using this new feature. It’s a smarter alternative to blocking placements entirely, giving you more flexibility and potentially better performance.

What’s Changing?

Today with placements, we offer the ability to completely include a placement, or completely exclude a placement. This new feature will enable advertisers to continue with some delivery (max 5% spend per placement) to specific placements, instead of opting out of them entirely.
For Marketing API advertisers, there is no change to the default behavior. Advertisers are not defaulted into limited spend on placements. To apply a spend limit to specific placements, you must explicitly use the new API endpoints to designate which placements should have spend restrictions.
This feature is available in the Sales and Leads objectives.

Note: While this new feature offers more flexibility, using Advantage+ placements (enabling delivery across all available placements) continues to be recommended for optimal performance and cost efficiency.

Developer Details: How to Implement

API Endpoints Impacted

Create/Update Ad Sets:
- POST act_{ad-account-id}/adsets
- POST {ad-set-id}
Retrieve Ad Set Details:
- GET {ad-set-id}?fields=placement_soft_opt_out

How to Use

1. Fully Opt Out (No Change)

Continue using the Placements API to fully exclude placements. Placements opted out here will not receive any spend.

2. Opt Out with Limited Spend (New)

To opt out with limited spend, include theplacement_soft_opt_outfield in your POST request when creating or updating an ad set. The structure matches the existing Placements API.

Supported positions:

facebook_positions
audience_network_positions
instagram_positions
threads_positions
messenger_positions

Example:

JSON
"placement_soft_opt_out": {
 "facebook_positions": [
   "marketplace",
   "profile_feed"
 ],
 "audience_network_positions": [
   "classic",
   "rewarded_video"
 ]
}