How to Use Value Rules to Solve Problems

Value rules are one of my favorite features.

When Meta introduced value rules in 2025, it honestly was a confusing surprise. On one hand, Meta is consistently chipping away at our control. Not only do we have less control now over things like targeting than we had in the past, Meta repeatedly discourages us from doing things that would take back that control.

So, don’t restrict targeting by age or gender or you’ll turn off Advantage+. Don’t remove an underperforming placement because you’ll get better results using Advantage+ Placements.

So on one hand, Meta not only launching but encouraging value rules is a surprise. But the more I think about it, the more it all makes sense in this environment. Let me explain.

So, value rules allow you to bid more or less on specific criteria like age range, gender, location, placement, mobile operating system, and conversion location. You would make these adjustments because you have information that Meta doesn’t. And that’s important here.

Let’s say you’re running a Leads campaign optimized for a lead. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a website lead or an instant form. Meta’s focus is on getting you the most leads within your budget. Cheaper is better.

Of course, we know that cheap leads aren’t necessarily good leads. And in most cases, advertisers would be willing to spend more to get good leads. When optimizing this way, it’s never Meta’s consideration.

You could end up with tons of cheap, low-quality leads, and as far as Meta knows, that’s what you want.

Let me give you an example.

This was something I noticed more than a year ago when running ads for lead generation. I was getting a ton of cheap leads, but they were low quality. I did a breakdown by age and discovered a very high percentage of those leads came from people who were 65 and up. The next largest group was 55 to 64.

Combined, this was making up 70 percent of my budget, and resulting in very cheap but low-quality results.

In the past, my response was to restrict targeting by age to eliminate these two groups entirely. That wasn’t preferred, of course, because I do have some paying customers in those age groups. Especially people in the 55-64 group.

But if I only eliminated 65 and up, Meta would move all of that budget to 55-64. So I removed that group, too.

But now, I can address this with value rules. I bid 50% less on people 65 and up and 20% less on people aged 55 to 64.

The result is that I don’t have the remove those groups, and Meta spends a far more realistic percentage on them. The 65 and up group now reflects the lowest percentage of my budget, with the 55-64 group coming after the 18-24 group.

So that was an example of using value rules to solve this problem without restricting my targeting entirely.

Another example could be related to gender.

While this isn’t relevant for me, you may have a situation where you serve primarily woman-owned businesses. If you optimize for a purchase, Meta will probably spend very little of your budget, if anything, on men.

But if you optimize for clicks or engagement, or video views, all of that changes. Meta only cares about getting you those cheap actions.

And if you can get cheap actions from men, it doesn’t matter to Meta who buys from you or whether you used audience suggestions. Meta will show your ads to men to get you more results.

In the past, you probably would have restricted targeting to remove men entirely. But with value rules, you can lower your bid by 90% on men so that you don’t need to restrict targeting.

A final example is placements.

Audience Network has a deserved reputation for generating very low-quality traffic. It could be accidental clicks, bots, or click fraud before it’s detected.

This is rarely an issue if you optimize for a purchase or even a lead. If that low-quality traffic doesn’t result in a conversion, Meta won’t lean into it.

But that changes if your performance goal suggests you want link clicks, landing page views, or even traffic-adjacent website conversions. That could be the View Content standard event or even custom events related to things like scroll depth and time spent.

Audience Network Rewarded Video can also be a problem for ThruPlay Views optimization.

In the past, I’d just remove Audience Network whenever using one of these affected optimizations. But thanks to value rules, I can simply lower my bid by 90% on Audience Network without removing it entirely.

So here’s the bottom of the glass.

These are just a few examples of how I use value rules to solve problems related to the information I have, and Meta doesn’t. But there are many more possibilities, and Meta will surely add more options since this is a new tool.

Prioritize using value rules instead of restricting your targeting or placements. It could also be related to things like conversion location, country, mobile operating system, and more.

Value rules are one of my five favorite Meta ads features that I can’t live without, and I wrote about them recently. Read my blog post at jonloomer.com/features.