What You Still Control in Advantage+ and Performance Max

The loss of creative control and audience control in Advantage+ and Performance Max is uneven, and the uneven part decides whether a consolidation is safe. Some remaining settings are limits the system will not cross. Others are inputs it may set aside when its prediction disagrees with yours, and both kinds can sit side by side in one panel under similar labels. The lesson for a team about to merge campaigns is to sort every setting it depends on into one of those piles first. Everything below comes from Meta's and Google's documentation as we read it on October 7, 2026.

Advantage+ and Performance Max settings side by side

Advantage Plus and Performance Max keep creative control and audience control in different places, so the table sorts each documented setting into a hard limit, a suggestion or best effort. "By our reading" marks a classification the vendor does not state in those words. Meta has no Queries row because we found no query-level setting in the Meta pages we read.

Which Meta audience settings are hard limits in 2026?

Meta Advantage Plus audience control has four documented limits in 2026 that delivery will not expand past: location, minimum age, language and custom audience exclusions. Meta puts it this way: "You can set strict criteria where AI should not expand beyond, based on your business's constraints (including minimum age, location, language and custom audience exclusions)." In Ads Manager, hover over Locations, select Edit, then open Show more options to reach the other three.

Everything else is an Audience suggestion: custom audiences, lookalike audiences, age, gender and detailed targeting. The same page says, "We'll show ads to people matching your suggestion, and other audiences when it's likely to improve performance." An age range of 30 to 55 entered there is a hint.

The one hard age setting is narrower than its name implies. The Marketing API documentation from Meta accepts a minimum age between 18 and 25 only while Advantage+ audience is on, and fixes the maximum at 65. By our reading, a brand that must avoid everyone under 30 cannot express that as an Advantage+ audience control. The documented exit is "Switch to original audience options," which turns Advantage+ audience off.

What did Advantage+ shopping campaigns take away from targeting and creative?

Meta Advantage+ shopping campaigns lose control of targeting in more places than creative, by our reading, and the details moved when the format was replaced. Meta calls the current Advantage+ sales and app campaigns the "updated, streamlined versions of Advantage+ shopping campaigns and Advantage+ app campaigns," and a campaign holds the Advantage+ state only while its budget, audience and placement levers are all enabled.

The existing customer budget percentage is gone for new campaigns. The page says the existing_customer_budget_percentage field is not available for them and, to replicate it, describes two ad sets under one campaign budget: one that includes a custom audience of existing customers, with a daily minimum spend target and a daily spend cap in its example request, and a duplicate that excludes that audience. The share becomes an ad set amount in place of a percentage, so teams that held returning-customer spend to a fixed share should rework their CAC targets before migrating.

Placements run the other way. The Advantage+ state requires that no placement targeting or exclusions be set on the ad set, although ad account level exclusions are allowed. The placement targeting reference from Meta adds a softer ad set exclusion through the placement_soft_opt_out field: "you can allow up to 5% of your spend to be allocated to each excluded placement when it's likely to improve performance."

Creative is where the advertiser keeps the most. In the Advantage+ creative guide from Meta, every feature carries its own enroll status, OPT_IN or OPT_OUT, on the ad creative, and the guide says opt-in for the bundled standard enhancements is deprecated starting with Marketing API v22.0. We found no statement there that an opt-out can be overridden.

What Performance Max lets you fix for audience and queries

Audience signals are the weakest setting in the product. The Performance Max FAQ from Google says they "are not a hard targeting criteria" and that ads "may serve to audiences outside the provided signal, if Google's AI predicts it will help you reach your campaign's goal." Firmer settings exist too: a product post from Google dated August 7, 2025 says "device and age targeting controls are now fully available in Performance Max campaigns" and announces a beta for gender-based controls.

Queries have firm limits with a boundary around them. The brand suitability page from Google states that "Performance Max negative keywords are applicable to Search and Shopping inventory only." The FAQ caps them at 10,000 per campaign and 1,000 at the account level. Brand exclusions also block clear misspellings and foreign scripts, with a caveat: "traffic that mentions the words in a brand name will only be blocked if they clearly refer to the brand." Search themes, raised to 50 per asset group in the August 2025 post, are "additive to the queries and placements Performance Max predicts will perform well based on your assets, feeds, and landing pages."

How much creative control does Performance Max give you in 2026?

Google Performance Max creative control in 2026 starts in one panel: Campaign settings, then Asset optimization, where Text customization and Final URL expansion each have a checkbox. According to Google, "Final URL expansion is turned on by default for Performance Max campaigns." With text customization on, Google may replace your Final URL with a more relevant landing page and generate "dynamic headlines, descriptions, and additional assets (like images sourced from your landing pages)."

Three settings on that page behave as limits:

• Switching off. To prevent unwanted auto-generated text or image assets, Google says to disable Text Customization and, where available, Landing page images. Changes "may take 24-48 hours to fully reflect."
• URL exclusions. "Final URL expansion can serve and receive traffic on any page that hasn't been excluded," so list every page that must never receive ad traffic under Exclude some URLs.
• Page feeds. With Final URL expansion on, a page feed "doesn't restrict ads to serve only URLs from the provided feed." With it off, the campaign "will only send users to the URLs provided in your page feed and asset groups."

Video has a default of its own. Without an uploaded video, the FAQ says, "Performance Max uses video generation technology powered by Google AI to create and serve videos," so by our reading the dependable control is to supply one.

Where do placement and budget guarantees stop?

On Google, placement exclusions are firm and set once for the account: the brand suitability page says Performance Max "will respect all account-level and MCC-level placement exclusions." Content filters carry a disclaimer: "We apply content exclusions to the best of our ability. However, we can't guarantee that every related placement will be blocked." We found no setting on these pages that removes an entire channel, such as YouTube, from a Performance Max campaign.

Budgets bend in documented ways. Google says "your campaign might spend up to twice your average daily budget" on a given day and "no more than 30.4 times your average daily budget" by the end of the month. In the campaign budget guide from Meta, an ad set's daily minimum spend target "does not guarantee you spend this amount, but Facebook makes a best effort to achieve it," and we found no matching statement about spend caps.

A hypothetical example with assumed numbers: at a $500 average daily budget, a Performance Max campaign can post a $1,000 day and is held to $15,200 for the month (30.4 times $500). On Meta, an ad set spending $500 a day with three placements excluded under limited spend could still put up to $25 a day into each, or $75 in total. Weigh that give against your break-even point, which our guide to what ROAS is works through, with the ROAS calculator as a further resource.

Sort your constraints before you consolidate

Write down every rule the current structure enforces and why it exists. Requirements with a legal or brand reason (an age gate, a restricted region, a blocked site, a page that must never take traffic) each need a hard-limit row in the table. Where the only matching row is a suggestion, as with an upper age limit under Advantage+ audience, that requirement stays in a campaign built on the original, manual settings.

Preferences can travel. "Our best customers are women over 40" can ride on an audience suggestion or an audience signal, provided you measure what delivery did with it. A platform report counts attributed conversions, a different question from what the ads caused, so we pair any consolidation with an incrementality read and pace later budget increases as our guide to scaling paid ads without killing ROAS describes.

Our paid media team is there if you want a second opinion on the sort. A consolidated account is easier to defend when every constraint that matters sits on a setting the platform has put in writing as a limit.

Sources

• Meta, Meta Advantage+ audience
• Meta, Advantage+ audience, Marketing API
• Meta, Advantage+ campaigns, Marketing API
• Meta, Placement Targeting, Marketing API
• Meta, Get Started with Advantage+ Creative
• Meta, Advantage Campaign Budget
• Google, Answering Your Top Questions About Performance Max
• Google, Unlock more visibility and control in Performance Max (August 7, 2025)
• Google, How to use brand suitability features in Performance Max
• Google, About Final URL expansion in Performance Max
• Google, About overdelivery and your average daily budget