How to Stop Facebook Ad Suggestions
Tired of Facebook’s non-stop ad suggestions cluttering your dashboard? You're not alone. While some of these automated recommendations can be useful for beginners, experienced marketers often find them distracting, irrelevant, or even counterproductive. This guide will walk you through how to turn off these suggestions in different parts of the platform and take back full control of your advertising strategy.
Why Does Facebook Give You Ad Suggestions in the First Place?
Meta's advertising platform is engineered to be user-friendly, especially for new advertisers who might feel overwhelmed. The suggestions that pop up in your email, notifications, and within Ads Manager are driven by an algorithm designed to spot perceived opportunities in your account. The primary reasons you see them are:
To Help Beginners Get Started: The system identifies simple actions you can take, like increasing a budget on a seemingly well-performing ad or expanding your audience targeting. For someone just learning the ropes, these nudges can provide a starting point.
To Encourage Increased Ad Spend: Let's be candid - Facebook is in the business of selling ads. Many recommendations, such as "Increase your budget to get more results," are directly tied to getting you to spend more money. The platform often operates on the assumption that more spending on an ad set getting cheap clicks will lead to more conversions, which isn't always true.
To Promote Automation: Meta continues to push its machine learning and AI features. Features like Advantage+ campaigns and auto-applied suggestions are designed to take decisions out of your hands, trusting the algorithm to optimize for you.
The core issue is that these automated suggestions lack critical context about your business. Facebook's algorithm doesn't know about your inventory levels, your profit margins, your customer lifetime value, or that a campaign’s primary goal is lead generation for a high-ticket service, not just cheap clicks. Relying solely on these generic tips can lead you to waste money on optimizations that don't align with your actual business objectives.
How to Turn Off "Account Recommendations" from Being Auto-Applied
One of the most disruptive types of suggestions is those that Facebook can automatically apply to your campaigns without your explicit, one-by-one approval. While you can't stop the recommendations from appearing altogether in the "Recommendations" tab, you can prevent them from being automatically implemented. It’s a crucial step for maintaining control.
Here’s how to manage and disable auto-applied recommendations:
Log into your Facebook Ads Manager.
On the right side of your main dashboard, look for the "Recommendations" tab or button. You can also access it through the account overview section.
Once inside the Recommendations hub, you'll see a list of suggestions for your account, ad sets, and ads. At the top of this screen, find the button that says “Manage auto-apply.”
Clicking this opens a panel where you can see all the types of recommendations that Facebook could apply automatically. These often relate to evolving your ad setup over time, improving performance, and making campaign management easier.
Go through each suggestion category and manually select "Don't auto-apply" for every single one. Save your settings.
Performing this check regularly is a good practice, as Facebook occasionally introduces new types of automated recommendations, and you will be opted-in by default. You need to proactively check to turn them off.
Disabling the All-or-Nothing "Automated App Ads"
If you're an app advertiser, you’ve probably encountered Automated App Ads. This isn't just a suggestion, it's a campaign type that completely redesigns the ad creation process to give Facebook's automation full control.
This feature simplifies campaign setup to a few questions and a few buttons to click. It makes for easier, faster campaign creation, saving advertisers time and guesswork, but it comes with significant trade-offs. It fully depends on Meta's algorithm for optimization of your audience targeting, creative, and bidding. This removes nearly all advertiser control, limiting strategic, custom optimization and not enabling opportunities for deep learning generation.
If you want to move back to manual app install campaigns for more control, here’s what to do:
In Ads Manager, click "Create" to start a new campaign.
Select the "App Promotion" campaign objective.
On the next screen, you’ll be asked to choose between an "Automated App Ad" or a "Manual App Ad." By default, automated app campaigns will be pre-selected.
Simply select "Manual Setup" or a similar option to bypass the automated creation flow. Click “Continue” and proceed with the creation of your campaign as any other manual campaign.
Choosing the manual setup restores all the familiar ad set controls, allowing you to define your audiences, placements, budget schedules, and bidding strategies yourself.
Beyond Disabling: Building a Better Optimization Strategy
Simply turning off Facebook's suggestions isn't the end goal. The real goal is to replace those low-context recommendations with high-context insights derived from your own, complete business data. Facebook’s algorithm only sees what happens on its platform - it can't see the full picture.
Facebook might suggest you boost an ad getting tons of "Post Engagements," but without connecting that to your website data, you won't know those users have a 95% bounce rate and never sign up. The platform may push you to increase the budget on a campaign with a low Cost Per Click, but it has no idea whether those clicks ever translate into actual sales in your Shopify store.
A truly effective strategy requires you to become your own source of truth. Here’s what that looks like in practice:
1. Centralize Your Essential Data
Your performance story is scattered across multiple platforms. To get a clear picture, you need to bring your key data sources together. This typically includes:
Ad Platform Data: Spend, clicks, impressions, and conversions from Facebook Ads, Google Ads, TikTok Ads, etc.
Website Analytics Data: Traffic sources, user behavior, session duration, and goal completions from Google Analytics.
Sales/E-commerce Data: Revenue, average order value, customer lifetime value, and purchase data from sources like Shopify, Stripe, or your CRM.
Email Marketing Data: Open rates, click-through rates, and conversions from your email campaigns for the evaluation of your leads' quality.
Manually exporting CSVs from each of these platforms and combining them in an Excel or Google Sheet is the classic, time-consuming way to do this. But it’s slow, tedious, and prone to errors.
2. Define Your Own Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Instead of relying on Facebook's vanity metrics, focus on the KPIs that have an actual impact on your business growth. These are a few of the metrics marketers should focus on:
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Are you making more money than you're spending?
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): How much does it cost, on average, to acquire a new paying customer?
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): How much revenue does the average customer generate over their entire relationship with your business? A healthy business model requires that LTV is greater than its CAC.
Lead-to-Close Rate: For service or B2B businesses, what percentage of the leads generated by your ads actually become paying clients?
3. Analyze the Full Funnel, Not Just the Ad Click
With unified data, you can trace the entire customer journey. You can finally answer the crucial questions that Facebook’s suggestions can’t:
"Which exact Facebook campaign is driving the highest-value customers on Shopify, not just the most initial purchases?"
"How does Google Analytics' bounce rate change for users coming from our video ads versus our static image ads?"
"What is the true ROAS when we account for cost of goods sold, shipping fees, and processing fees reported in our financial tools?"
Answering these types of questions allows you to make optimization decisions based on comprehensive reality, not just the isolated and often misleading data point your Facebook Ad Manager is providing you with.
Final Thoughts
Turning off Facebook's automated ad suggestions gives you the freedom to run campaigns your way, based on your own knowledge and strategy. By managing auto-apply settings and choosing manual campaign setups, you take back control from an algorithm that lacks the nuanced context of your specific business goals.
But the best alternative to Facebook's suggestions is developing your own powerful insights. In the past, this meant spending hours drowning in spreadsheets to connect data from Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, and my sales platform. We built Graphed to solve this exact problem. I can now connect all my data sources in a few clicks, and instead of wrestling with manual reports, I simply ask questions in plain English like, "Show me a dashboard of my marketing funnel, from Facebook ad click to Shopify sale" and get an answer in seconds. It allows me to make genuinely data-driven decisions based on the full picture, not just the limited view Facebook shows me.