10 Settings That Are Quietly Draining Your Meta Ads Budget

You set up your Facebook or Instagram ad campaign. You picked your audience. You wrote decent copy and used a solid image. Then you hit publish and watched your cost per click climb way higher than it should.

Here’s the thing: Meta’s default settings are designed to spend your money as fast as possible. Not maliciously, but the platform is optimized for reach and delivery, not necessarily for your bottom line. If you don’t go in and manually adjust certain settings, you’re almost guaranteed to overpay for results.

These are the 10 settings most businesses never touch, and fixing them can dramatically lower your cost per click and improve the quality of your leads.

1. Turn Off Audience Network (For Most Campaigns)

Audience Network shows your ads on third-party apps outside of Facebook and Instagram. Sounds great for reach, right? The problem is that clicks from Audience Network are notoriously low quality. We’re talking accidental taps, click fraud, and users who bounce immediately.

If you’re optimizing for link clicks or landing page views, Audience Network will eat up a huge portion of your budget chasing cheap clicks that never convert. One analysis found that most Meta ad refunds are due to click fraud violations on Audience Network specifically.

How to fix it: Go to your ad set, click “Placements,” switch to manual placements, and uncheck Audience Network. Keep it on only if you’re running pure awareness campaigns where you don’t care about click quality.

2. Match Your Placements to Your Creative Format

If you’re running a vertical Reel, keep it on Reels placements. If you’re running a square image, keep it in Feeds. When you let Meta auto-place a Reel into Stories or a Feed post into the right column, your creative gets awkwardly cropped or resized, performance tanks, and you pay more for worse results.

The data backs this up: vertical video formats outperform square formats by 35% in Reels placements. But that same vertical video performs terribly when forced into a square Feed placement.

How to fix it: Create separate ad sets for different creative formats. Reels go in Reels. Feed posts go in Feeds. Stories go in Stories. Yes, it’s more work upfront, but your CPC will thank you.

3. Turn Off Low-Performing Placements Like Messenger Inbox

Messenger inbox ads and Messenger Stories rarely perform well for most businesses. The engagement is low, the context is wrong (people are there to message friends, not shop), and the costs are often higher than Feed or Reels placements.

Same goes for Facebook Right Column ads. They have the lowest engagement of any placement and only appear on desktop, which is a shrinking percentage of users.

How to fix it: In manual placements, uncheck Messenger Inbox, Messenger Stories, and Right Column unless you have specific data showing they work for your business.

4. Set Up Your Meta Pixel Properly

If your Pixel isn’t installed correctly, you’re flying blind. Meta can’t optimize your ads toward conversions if it doesn’t know who’s converting. You end up paying more because the algorithm is guessing instead of learning.

The Pixel tracks actions on your website: page views, add to cart, purchases, form submissions. Without it, you can’t retarget visitors, build lookalike audiences, or optimize for actual business results.

How to fix it: Go to Events Manager in your Meta Business Suite. Install the Pixel on your website (most platforms like Shopify, WordPress, and Squarespace have one-click integrations). Then verify it’s firing correctly using the Meta Pixel Helper browser extension.

5. Add Conversions API (CAPI) for Better Data

Here’s a stat that should concern you: over 50% of browser-side conversions now go untracked due to privacy regulations, ad blockers, and cookie restrictions. That means your Pixel is missing half of your conversions, and Meta’s algorithm is optimizing on incomplete data.

The Conversions API (CAPI) sends data directly from your server to Meta, bypassing browser limitations. When you run both Pixel and CAPI together, you get complete, accurate tracking that helps Meta find the right people at lower costs.

Real example: One healthcare company using Pixel plus CAPI achieved a cost per lead of $33.08, below the industry average of $41.82, and a cost per click of $0.15 versus the $0.57 industry benchmark.

How to fix it: Most e-commerce platforms now have built-in CAPI integration