Meta just quietly removed your ability to choose which ad graphic shows up in which placement — and if you’re still running ads the old way, the algorithm is already making decisions for you that could be killing your conversions.
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I break down exactly what changed in Meta’s ad creative setup after the Andromeda update, why you still need to create both your 3×4 feed graphic and your 9×16 story graphic, and what happens to your ads if you only show up with one format.
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If you’ve logged into Meta Ad Manager recently and noticed that something looks different about how you set up your ad creative, you’re not imagining it. Meta’s quietly rolling out a change across ad accounts that changes how you’re able to choose which graphic format shows up in which placement. Feed, stories, reels, that control is changing. And if you don’t know about it, you could be letting Meta decide how to automatically resize your format, and that will hurt conversions. In this episode, I’m going to show you exactly what changed and why it actually matters for your lead generation ads, your launch registration ads, your webinar registration ads, and your low ticket offer, self-liquidating offer ads for your online course business. And what you need to do with your ad creative to make sure Meta’s algorithm and what you need to do with your ad creative to make sure Meta’s algorithm is working for you, not against you. Let’s get into it. I want you to see an important change that’s happening inside of some of my client accounts so that you know how to better set up your account in the future and how to approach this change in Meta’s algorithm and their direction that they’re heading in post Andromeda update. This will help you create ad creative that is shown in the right way and in the right varieties so that you can get better conversions for your online course business. Now, if you’re listening on an audio first platform like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you’re going to want to go down to the show notes and click the YouTube video so you can watch this. This is super important, and I highly recommend that you head over to YouTube and see what I’m looking at. Okay, first question: Do you notice any difference between these two account screens? And you should be able to see that possibly in your account, the current way that we can display graphics allows us to choose between feeds and stories, and even that right column Facebook feed result that really nobody uses or creates graphics in the specific format for. Being able to create graphics in different formats specific for different placements for the longest has allowed us marketers to increase or improve conversions in certain placements. What I mean specifically is that we would create graphics in a specific format. Right now I use the three by four format, as in the three by four ratio for Instagram feeds and Facebook feeds. And then we would create in the 9×16 format for Instagram stories and Facebook story placements so that the graphics were taking up the entire space that was allowed by the placement and thus could do a better job of capturing attention in that placement and resulting towards a conversion. Now though, what I’m seeing in more and more accounts is a change, not just a change in the interface, it seems to be a fundamental change in the approach that meta’s taking to displaying our ad creative. And I’m not going to go in completely into the difference in approach now in this video. I’ll just say that where Meta is going is you upload your creative and it begins to display it or modify it in a bunch of different ways so that, as I specifically just read, so that it can increase the variety of visuals in your ads. Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve seen that for at least six months now, Meta has been allowing you to modify your ads with its generative AI capabilities, meaning that you upload one graphic and then it will give you like 21 different versions of that graphic and AI generated versions. And up till now you’ve had to choose between honestly a bunch of garbage, right? And maybe there are several different AI variations, but combine that with common knowledge already that Meta’s Andromeda update, which was pushed to all accounts last fall in 2025, is hungry for more visuals so that it can do a much better job of matching the right, let’s say, flavor of ad to the right kind of person for your lead magnet or for your offer. Now, back to what I’m seeing and what you want to pay attention to in this account. You know, you could change the ratio of graphics that would display in the feed, and you could also then upload different graphics that would with a different ratio that would display in the stories placement. Now, what we’re seeing in more accounts is just instead of being able to manually choose how to display that graphic, now you can just go and upload two different formats of graphics, you know, a three by four format and a nine by sixteen, side by side. And so Gone is the manual control. We now rely on Meta’s algorithm to take two different formats of the same graphic, and it will choose where to display those. So as where before we would choose one graphic, and that would be the feed format graphic first, then we could choose to upload different formats of graphics for these different placements. Now I’ve always, in most accounts, disregarded this horizontal placement because it doesn’t not many leads come from it data-wise. So I wouldn’t design separate formatted graphics for it, but I would definitely replace the vertical placement or the stories placement with a graphic that’s formatted for the stories placement and that’s vertical, 9×16 ratio, and then meta would show you ah, okay, so for the feed, it’s here, and it’s funny that it says square for the feed placement. When that’s honestly, I would not recommend a square format because most leads are coming from the feed, and thus you want to have the format that takes up the most vertical space in the feed allowed, and that is not even a four by five format. Formerly, or pixels-wise, that was a 1080 pixel wide by 1350 pixel tall format to occupy more vertical space in the feed, and thus as somebody scrolling through your image is in front of them for a longer period of time. The in the past year, that format has been extended to what I refer to as a 3×4 format, which pixel-wise would be 1080 pixels wide by 1440 pixels tall. That is the maximum height allowed for graphics in the feed. And I definitely would not just use square anymore because again, the more vertical space you can occupy with a graphic, the longer your graphic is in somebody’s feed as they scroll past, and thus the more exposure your graphic could have, the more chance your graphic could have to stop the scroll. Anyway, whereas before you could manually choose what would show up in the feed and the vertical, it seems that in more and more accounts, which means pay attention because meta is rolling it out to a higher percentage of accounts. It seems that Meta is doing away with this more detailed approach to setup and moving towards, and I would still recommend that you create different format graphics, but now the algorithm though gets to choose where to put your graphics, and you’ll see a lot more of this algorithm-driven form graphical format management or display management rather than advertiser-driven, meaning we won’t be able to click all of the little buttons anymore, and the algorithm will do more and more deciding for us. By the way, if you don’t know me yet, hi there. My name is Quayjo. I’m from Seattle, Washington, and I am an Instagram and Facebook ad manager and have been managing ads now for going on six years. You can expect interviews of online course creators on this channel. You can expect me to share with you information about running Facebook and Instagram ads for your online course business. And you can also expect interviews with online course creators that are running Facebook and Instagram ads so you can understand more insight and more strategy on running ads to your lead magnet to generate leads for your email list, to build your email list, how to run launch registration ads, you know, for your webinar or your challenge, and how to run ads to low-ticket offers, sometimes also referred to as self-liquidating offers, all together to build your online course creation business so you can working all together to build your online course business, so you can reach and serve more of the people that you were blessed with talents and skills and passions to serve. All right, let’s get back to the episode. What this means for you as somebody who is either has an ads manager for your online course business or you are running your own ads for your online course business, you know, lead generation or running ads for a launch or a low-ticket offer is that yes, you still will absolutely want to create different formats of graphics so that you have a version that’s optimized to show up in the Facebook and Instagram feed, and you have a version that’s optimized to show up in the story placement. And you can even do this when designing carousels, show up prepared. And if you have the right different kinds of formats, then Meta’s algorithm will have more graphics with which it can place in the formats and placements that it deems necessary to get you the best conversion. If you only show up with one format, then you are letting the algorithm possibly very much realistically change the format of your graphic, maybe in a way that you had not intended, in order for it to show that graphic in a different placement. That is the sort of thing that I’m seeing in ad accounts right now. And if this all seems overwhelming for you and you already have Facebook and Instagram ads running for your online course business, what you need to do if you want performance to improve is head down below. There is an ad audit. You can get my eyes on your ad and see the next one, two, three things that I would change in your ads to improve your ad performance. That way you can rest assured, knowing that you’ve had an ad manager with, I guess, now going on six, almost seven years of experience, help you tweak your ads so they can work better to grow your business. Until the next time you hear from me or see me, take care, be blessed, and I’ll see you in the next one.
