How to Disable Advantage+ on Meta Ads

What is Advantage+ on Meta Ads

You approved a clean 4:5 video, and what actually runs in the feed is a re-cropped version with brightened colors and a text overlay you never wrote. That is Advantage+ at work: a set of automatic features that Meta enables by default on your campaigns. In practice, Meta modifies your creatives (cropping, brightness adjustment, text overlay), expands your audiences beyond your targeting, and redistributes your budget to placements you did not choose. Meta presents these features as optimizations, but for many advertisers, they reduce control over what is actually delivered. It is a hot topic in the media buying community, with dozens of posts every week from buyers discovering that their creatives have been modified without their consent.

The problem with Advantage+ enabled by default

The real problem is that Advantage+ is enabled by default, and that the name covers several different features. Advantage+ campaign budget sits at campaign level and Advantage+ audience and placements at ad set level. The creative enhancements, the ones that recrop your visual and add overlays, sit at ad level, one ad at a time. If you miss a single toggle, your creatives get modified. When you manage 50 ads per week, it is nearly impossible to check everything manually without missing one. The result: your creative tests are polluted by modifications you did not request, and your reporting reflects the performance of creatives you did not approve.

The manual procedure in Ads Manager

If you want to disable the enhancements by hand, here is the procedure:

Open the ad at the ad level (not campaign or ad set).
In the ad setup, find the Advantage+ creative (or “Enhancements”) block.
Click Edit and uncheck each enhancement one by one (cropping, brightness, text overlays, music…).
Repeat for EVERY ad: the setting does not propagate, and it comes back on on new ads.

Keep in mind that Meta’s interface changes often, and the exact location of these toggles may move.

The enhancement toggles live at the ad level, not the campaign or ad set level, and the setting does not propagate: every new ad ships with enhancements enabled again until you uncheck them one by one.

What this does not solve

Disabling Advantage+ gives you back control over delivery, not performance. If a creative is weak, serving it exactly as designed will not make it convert: you are protecting the integrity of your tests, not guaranteeing their outcome. There is also a case where keeping an enhancement on is a reasonable choice: if you run a single creative and have no creative team, Meta’s automatic variations are the only iteration you will get. The point of disabling is to keep your data clean when you produce and test your own variations.

How it works with Apogee

Apogee automatically disables all Advantage+ Enhancements on every creative uploaded through the platform. This is done at the API level, before the ad is even published. No toggles to check, no risk of forgetting. Whether you upload 1 or 200 creatives, each one is protected. This is actually one of the most cited reasons by our clients for their subscription: the peace of mind of knowing their creatives are delivered exactly as designed, without algorithmic modification.

Disabling at the API level happens before the ad is published, which is what removes the risk of forgetting: there is no toggle left to check afterwards, whether you upload 1 or 200 creatives.

Try Apogee for free and take back full control over your Meta Ads creatives.

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