Meta silently implemented “automatic adjustments” across several advertising accounts, giving its system authority to make significant changes to ad campaigns without explicit advertiser approval.
What’s happening. The system can:
- Pause or activate campaigns.
- Adjust budgets up or down.
- Consolidate ad accounts.
- Make changes without notifying advertisers.
- Consolidate audience segmentations and more.
Why we care. This feature gives Meta significant control over campaign management, including pausing campaigns, adjusting budgets and consolidating audiences without explicit approval.
While automation can optimize performance, it also raises concerns about strategic control and potential disruptions, as seen with advertisers reporting unintended changes that negatively impacted their ad spend and segmentation (see below).
How to opt out:
- Navigate to “All tools”
- Select “Automated rules”
- Click “See automatic adjustments”
- Access “Manage automatic adjustments” page
- Toggle the feature OFF
Between the lines. This automatic feature represents a significant shift in control from advertisers to Meta’s automated systems, raising concerns about campaign oversight and strategic autonomy.
Credit and Reactions. The feature was first spotted and shared by Rok Hladnik on X.
Others confirmed seeing the setting being turned on by default and the havoc it caused:
- “Seriously though I was so confused when our advantage plus campaign dropped 40% in spend yesterday. Now I know” said brewsawa on X.
- “This caused a chaos in my account fortunately found it and now feeling great. They’re sneaky thefts” said Rajesh Kumar.
- “It actually turned off profitable ad sets and slowed our ad spend. It also combined some of lookalike audiences but thankfully we caught it. Basically it was defeating the purpose of segmenting them.” Heather Brousell, Lead Generation Ad expert told Search Engine Land.
Bottom line. Advertisers should check their accounts immediately and decide whether to keep this feature enabled based on their comfort level with automated campaign management.
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About the author
Anu Adegbola has been Paid Media Editor of Search Engine Land since 2024. She covers paid search, paid social, retail media, video and more.
In 2008, Anu’s career started with
delivering digital marketing campaigns (mostly but not exclusively Paid Search) by building strategies, maximising ROI, automating repetitive processes and bringing efficiency from every part of marketing departments through inspiring leadership both on agency, client and marketing tech side.
Outside editing Search Engine Land article she is the founder of PPC networking event – PPC Live and host of weekly podcast PPCChat Roundup.
She is also an international speaker with some of the stages she has presented on being SMX (US), SMX (Munich), Friends of Search (Amsterdam), brightonSEO, The Marketing Meetup, HeroConf (PPC Hero), SearchLove, BiddableWorld, SESLondon, PPC Chat Live, AdWorld Experience (Bologna) and more.
