Ads Manager is used by over ten million advertisers to publish ads to almost four billion active monthly users across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads, and third party apps and sites through Audience Network. Where each ads appear, referred to as ad placements, across these platforms is managed by advertisers through placement controls.

Placement controls were a legacy experience in Ads Manager, that had historically been built into by scattered product teams that owned ad placement products across the platforms. This meant little to no standardization, no adherence to any centralized design system, and a product that was largely treated as a launch checklist, rather than a product used by millions of dollars in ad spend annually.

When the newly formed Placements team inherited the legacy product, I audited the existing experience and conducted a usability heuristic evaluation to identify potential issues to address. In total, the audit surfaced dozens of issues, and was prioritized down to the most important issues to resolve.

The problem

Advertisers expect simplicity. They want to upload an ad, and the ad shows up everywhere it’s supposed to, looking perfectly crafted for the placement. In reality, advertisers are bombarded with decisions at every level.

  • Aspect ratio
    1:1, 3:4, 4:5, 9:16, 1.91:1
  • Placement type
    Feeds, Reels, Stories, Search, Messaging, Apps
  • Platforms
    Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, Messenger
  • Devices / operating systems 
    Mobile, desktop  / Android, iOS, Mac OS, Windows
  • Format
    Single image or video, catalog, carousel

The solution

I conducted a full experience audit and usability heuristics evaluation, and worked with user experience researchers to understand the challenges and complexities. Dozens of issues were uncovered, and sorted into themes to prioritize:

  • Accessibility requirements
  • Scalability
  • Information architecture
  • Taxonomy and hierarchy
  • Design system compliance
  • Interaction patterns

The outcome was launching a complete ground-up re-imagining of the placements experience, from a usability-first perspective.

Strategy and principles

Simplify

Reduce the cognitive load, and make placement controls as simple as they can be.

Standardize patterns

Placement controls should feel like a part of the same Ads Manager platform as other controls.

Clear dependencies

The burden of complex inter-dependencies of placements should be hidden until it impacts a task.

Keep it contextual 

Complex customization options are accessible to advertisers who want them, but not required in most use cases.

Design for scalability

New placements, or even new platforms, should easily fit into the taxonomy. Threads was the test launch for this principle.

Accessibility

Improved click targets, focus states, and interaction quality to meet global accessibility standards, making the product usable to more people.

The new placements experience

The new placement controls experience is simple, with easy to understand design patterns that now feel native to the platform, rather than a whole new product to learn.

As advertisers diverge from optimal placement configurations, they see recommendations on how to best configure their setup for the best outcomes.

Brand safety controls are decoupled from Placement controls. This gives advertisers the ability to focus on the job to be done: decide where placements should appear.

Account controls allow advertisers to use repeatable “templates” for the placements they typically exclude, setting a rule at the account level to never show ads on a particular placement. This is critical for advertisers with hard business constraints that never advertise on certain placements.

Since the advertiser hasn’t uploaded media yet, placement previews at this level are static, and were moved to overlays to minimize making creative decisions until media is added.

Outcomes

For advertisers

A significantly simpler placement controls experience

Opportunity Score empowered advertisers to make more informed decisions and understand the value of the system’s personalized insights. More importantly, advertisers no longer had to guess which optimizations would drive the greatest impact. They could focus on incremental optimizations that are proven to be the most impactful.

On average, advertisers who used Opportunity Score in their advertising strategy saw a 5% lower cost per acquisition, allowing budget scaling to high-performing ad campaigns.

For Meta

Exceeded launch goals with no regressions

Advertisers appreciated the simplification of complex controls, and showed increased usage of it, with statistically significant gains in key metrics.

The experiment met all goals, with no regressions in guardrail metrics like revenue, task completion, or campaign publishing, and rolled out globally in 2026.

The new placement controls experience is live for millions of advertisers today.