You build a visual, you rewrite the hook, you approve the ad. Then, on your client's phone, the ad is not quite the one you approved. The crop has changed, a banner has appeared, your hook has become the headline.
This is not a bug. It is a family of settings called Advantage+ creative, and some of them are switched on by default the moment you build the ad.
What these settings do
Meta describes these enhancements as automatic transformations applied to your images, videos and text, so that a more personalised version of the ad can be shown to each person.
In practice this covers two kinds of intervention. Media changes first: adjusting brightness and contrast, varying the aspect ratio, adding a template so an image fits a placement better. Compositional changes second: rearranging the elements displayed around the ad, surfacing relevant Facebook comments, or reusing one of your text fields as the headline, primary text or description.
Meta states that some enhancements are on by default, that you can turn them off at any time, and recommends reviewing the previews of all your ads before they go live. The behaviour is documented in the creative enhancements help centre.
Why this matters, and is not a cosmetic detail
Three reasons.
You are no longer testing what you think you are testing. If you compare two creatives and the platform re-crops one but not the other, the comparison no longer measures what you set out to measure. On a test budget, that is wasted spend.
Re-cropping breaks designed creative. An image built with type placed deliberately, on a grid, with margins, does not survive an aspect ratio change well. Text ends up cut off or pinned to the edge. This is especially true for editorial visuals, where layout does half the work.
A surfaced comment is not neutral. Pulling a comment under an ad can help, or can highlight exactly the remark you would never have chosen.
What we switch off by default
Our starting rule is simple: on a test campaign, anything that alters the image or moves the copy gets switched off, because the point is to measure a message, not to measure a variation a machine introduced.
That does not make these settings bad. Some are genuinely useful once a concept is proven and you are chasing volume. But turning on an automatic transformation before you know which message works means changing two things at once.
The right order is this: three genuinely different concepts first, with no automated assistance, to find out which one the market responds to. Then variations on the winner. Then, possibly, the enhancements.
How to check in three minutes
- Open Ads Manager at the ad level, not the campaign level.
- Find the creative enhancements section, below placements.
- Go through the enabled options one by one and switch off anything touching crop, templates or text ordering.
- Open the ad preview for every placement, not just the feed. That is where the surprises show up.
Do this on an ad that is already live before doing it on the next ones. Most of the time you will find at least one active setting you did not know was there.
The takeaway
Meta has sound commercial reasons to simplify ad production, and these tools genuinely help an advertiser with no considered creative. If you do have considered creative, they work against you until the message is settled.
The right posture is neither to accept everything nor to refuse everything. It is to know what is switched on. Before concluding that a creative does not work, check that the creative that ran was actually yours.
From here, our guide to Meta Ads test budgets covers how much to commit for a reliable read, and reading the Meta Ad Library covers how to choose which concepts to test first.