This part hasn’t changed: your objective still shapes everything downstream, from optimization events to where your ad is eligible to show. What has changed is that Meta has consolidated its objective list into six primary types (Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, Sales), simplifying a decision that used to involve more overlapping options.

The original version of this guide recommended narrowing your audience to roughly 500,000 to 1 million people. That advice is now largely outdated: Meta’s AI-driven Advantage+ targeting generally performs better with broader audience inputs and clear creative signals than with a manually narrowed audience, since the algorithm can identify high-value users within a broad pool more precisely than manual filtering can. If your campaigns are still built around tightly restricted audiences, that’s now more often a performance ceiling than a performance booster.

The single “Relevance Score” this guide originally pointed to was retired by Meta years ago. It’s now split into three separate Ad Relevance Diagnostics: Quality Ranking, Engagement Rate Ranking, and Conversion Rate Ranking, each benchmarked against other ads competing for the same audience. If one of the three is ranking below average, that’s your specific signal for where the ad is underperforming, rather than a single blended score.

Manual placement selection is still available, but Advantage+ placements (Meta’s automatic, AI-optimized placement system) is now the default and generally recommended path, since it lets the algorithm shift budget in real time toward whichever placement, Feed, Reels, Stories, or Audience Network, is performing best for that specific ad and audience. Instagram Reels in particular has become a notably efficient placement, with an average CPC around $1.28 compared to $1.72 for Facebook Feed, according to Digital Applied’s 2026 data.

Manually testing $10 versus $20 daily budgets, as the original guide suggested, is largely unnecessary now. Advantage+ campaign budget optimization reallocates spend across ad sets in real time based on performance, and Meta’s own guidance favors letting the system manage this rather than manually adjusting budgets ad set by ad set.

This is where human effort now matters most. With AI-generated creative outperforming traditional creative by 18% on CTR, and roughly 41% of advertisers already using Meta’s generative AI creative tools according to get-ryze.ai’s 2026 industry data, creative quality and testing volume have become the clearest remaining differentiator between accounts that perform well and accounts that don’t.

Clear, specific copy and an unambiguous call-to-action remain just as important as they were in 2018. What’s changed is that Meta’s AI creative tools can now generate and test dozens of copy and CTA variations automatically, so the manual “read it back before you publish” check from the original guide is now better spent reviewing AI-generated variants for tone and accuracy than writing every version from scratch.

This one hasn’t changed at all, and arguably matters more now. With targeting, bidding, and even much of the creative automated, landing page quality (message match, load speed, a clear next step) is one of the few remaining levers entirely in your control, and it’s still where a lot of otherwise well-optimized campaigns quietly lose their return.