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Research snapshot: 11 September 2026. Meta changes fast. Re-check anything marked "reported" before you act on it.

How much to trust each claim: Items tagged [Meta] come from Meta itself (engineering blog, earnings, product changes confirmed by several trade outlets). [Consensus] means experienced practitioners broadly agree. [Heuristic] means a single agency or vendor rule of thumb. It's directional, not proof.

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1. The short version

The system Meta runs now isn't the one most accounts were built for. Three things changed how it works:

  1. Creative now does the targeting. Andromeda, Meta's retrieval system, narrows tens of millions of candidate ads down to a few thousand for each person before ranking even starts. It works from what the ad is rather than who you told it to reach. [Meta] Meta's own framing: "the focus has shifted from niche targeting to creative diversification." [Meta, via Jon Loomer]
  2. Consolidation beats segmentation. Interests and lookalikes are now only suggestions, so ad sets split by audience end up competing for the same people. Fewer campaigns and ad sets, fed with more varied creative, is the default. [Consensus]
  3. Measurement is your job, not Meta's. View windows have been cut, click attribution has been redefined, and Advantage+ happily spends on existing customers. Platform ROAS is a steering signal. It isn't the P&L. [Consensus]

Operating rule worth adopting (Loomer): every change has to fix a problem you've proven with data. If you can't say what problem an edit solves, don't make it.

2. What changed in 2026

When Change So what
12 Jan 7-day view and 28-day view attribution windows removed. Remaining windows: 1d/7d/28d click, 1d view, 1d engaged view. [Meta] Year-on-year comparisons that used view windows no longer match up. Rebuild baselines on click.
2025 → Feb 2026 Advantage+ Shopping replaced by Advantage+ Sales (announced Feb 2025, rolled out through 2025). Advantage+ audience, placements and budget are on by default for Sales, App and Leads, and turning one off moves you to a manual setup. Multiple ad sets are now allowed. [Meta] Creating legacy ASC through the API was reportedly disabled in v25.0 (Feb 2026). Old "ASC" playbooks and naming are out of date.
Mar Click-through now means link clicks only. Likes, comments, shares and saves move to a new engage-through column (1-day). The video engaged-view threshold drops from 10s to 5s. [Meta] Reported click conversions dip, mostly for retargeting-heavy accounts.
2026 Customer lifecycle setting in Sales campaigns: "Reach new and existing customers" (default) or "Acquire new customers", which auto-excludes your defined Existing Customers. The old existing-customer budget cap is gone. [Meta, via Loomer] Now the main lever against spend leaking to returning customers.
Jul (reported) Advantage+ can rewrite headline text on the image itself, generating variants. Custom audiences are grouped under Customer/Engaged labels, which unlock value rules. Premium brands should fill in the Branding settings or opt out of rewrites.
Q2 earnings Average price per ad +12% YoY (US & Canada ~+20%). New ranking models: +8.3% ad clicks, +15.7% conversions on Facebook. Advantage+ at a $75B annualised run-rate. [Meta] Plan for higher CPMs. Meta is betting everything on automation.
Ongoing Data retention: frequency breakdowns kept for only 6 months, unique and hourly data for 13 months. [Meta] Export frequency and hourly data every month if you want history.

3. Account structure

Default: one campaign, one ad set per business goal, optimised for the deepest conversion event you can feed. [Consensus] Add a campaign only when it has a genuinely different job:

Separate retargeting campaigns are rarely worth it. Meta already sends roughly 20–25% of budget to warm audiences on its own (Loomer's account data), and a separate campaign mainly adds overlap. Some agencies add one only past about $1K/day and cap it under 10% of spend. [Heuristic]

The main disagreement is where testing happens: