Showing advertisers how Meta uses their data, without hurting adoption

Context

When someone sees an ad on Instagram or Facebook, they usually have to tap it and leave the app to learn more about the business. Meta is evolving ads to show more business information inside the ad itself. For example, a text-based summary of the business, more product images, or links to other pages on the advertiser's website. These are now called interactive experiences.

Within interactive experiences, Meta pulls metadata from the advertiser's ad sources, like their website, product catalog, or app store listing. Advertisers can review their ad sources and metadata when they set up a campaign.

Interactive experiences change what people can see and do around an ad, but they do not change the advertiser's own image or video. Since this is a completely new mental model for advertisers, we had to create a new category for these products.

Original ad: the user must click the call to action to go to the advertiser's website.

Interactive experience: the user gets product images within the Instagram story ad to learn more about what the business offers.

Problems

For advertisers

Advertisers saw changes in their ads they did not expect. Interactive experiences were on by default. The products sat in a sub-menu within a modal that few advertisers opened, so many could not find where they had opted in or how to opt out.
Advertisers could not connect their metadata to the interactive experiences it powered. They approved ad sources in one step of setup and controlled the features in a different step.

The first step of the old creative setup modal. It lists the advertiser's website source URL and the information Meta found there, under Website summaries, Website highlights and Site links, each marked On.

Old experience: in the first step of this modal, advertisers opt into ad sources.

For the business

Transparency had already failed once. Earlier tests showed interactive experiences earlier in the creative modal, and adoption dropped by 14.8%. The team rolled it back.
Meta needed low opt-out rates to launch to every advertiser. Those opt-outs also had to come from informed choices, not from confusion.

Goal

Show advertisers how their metadata appears in interactive experiences without losing adoption. We tracked three measures:

Transparency: More advertisers see the new card than saw the old preview screen.
Adoption: No drop.
Control: Fewer than five advertiser escalations a month.

Our longer-term bet was that clear information would build trust, and trust would raise adoption.

Key decisions

1. Ask advertisers why they opted out

The team had few direct signals from advertisers. We had a few research studies and some complaints passed on by the sales team, so most decisions about what to show in-product were guesses. With our UX researcher, I designed an in-product survey that asked advertisers why they turned interactive experiences off.
The answers pointed to one cause: advertisers did not understand how Meta used their metadata. They saw their ad sources in one place and interactive experiences in another, and they could not connect the two. This finding set the direction for the redesign, which was to put them side by side.

The in-product survey, titled “Give us feedback on ad sources used in interactive experiences.” It lists seven reasons to select, like “I can't preview what this will look like” and “I don't understand what this does for my ad,” with a box for other feedback.

2. Put metadata and interactive experiences in one new card, and move control to the metadata

My product design partner and I outlined four places these products could live:

Number	Option	Result
1	Metadata and interactive experiences on one screen in the creative modal	Too much to review at once
2	A new card in ad setup, with metadata shown in context	Visible and focused
3	Move into the creative modal	A related test cut adoption
4	Keep in advanced preview	Still hidden

We proposed #2, which eventually shipped.
Next, the team had to decide how advertisers would control these interactive experiences. Before, advertisers approved their ad sources in one step and turned each feature on or off in another. We proposed removing the on/off switch for each experience and moving the control to the ad sources. Now advertisers choose which ad sources flow into each interactive experience.
The team was comfortable removing the switch because these features do not change the advertiser's own image or video. This model only works if advertisers can see which data powers which feature. I shaped the content around two principles:
1. Show every pairing. For each interactive experience, advertisers see the ad sources that feed it, with a preview of the result.
2. Give each pairing its own control. Advertisers can stop one ad source from feeding one interactive experience without turning off anything else.
This design added choices. With three types of metadata and three interactive experiences, advertisers went from about six choices to twelve. We accepted the longer list because advertisers needed to see the link between their metadata and each interactive experience.

Ad setup in Ads Manager with a new Interactive experiences card highlighted below creative enhancements. It reads “Review the information people see when they spend a few seconds or interact with your ad,” with an Edit button.

The new Interactive experiences screen. Each experience, like Show summaries and Show spotlights, has its own preview and the ad sources it uses, with a panel on the right listing the advertiser's ad sources and where each one is used.

New experience.

3. Name and group a new kind of feature

These products needed a name that advertisers would not confuse with creative enhancements, which alter the advertiser's image or video asset. Interactive experiences leave the creative untouched, so grouping them with enhancements would make them seem riskier than they are and could drive opt-outs.

I put forward several names, and the team aligned on "interactive experiences" because it described what people do with the ad. Under this category, I built a naming system with four layers, so each name told advertisers one thing.

	Layer	Name	What it tells advertisers
1	Category	Interactive experiences	Products that control what people can see and do after spending a few seconds with your ad
2	Ad products	Show summaries, Show spotlights, Reveal details over time	What advertisers will opt into; follows Ads Manager naming conventions
3	Metadata source	Ad sources	Where the information comes from
4	Metadata	Information from your ad sources	Information

Outcomes

Interactive experiences shipped to all advertisers by mid-2026, and the team met every target it set. 99% kept their ad sources on and there were zero advertiser escalations to our sales teams. Survey feedback on the new section was positive.
Most importantly, it reversed the earlier lesson that transparency hurt adoption. We proved that transparency, at the right moment, builds trust instead of hurting adoption. That cleared the way to move all interactive experiences and ad sources into the new card.

Reflection

I would question inherited rules sooner. One rolled-back test had turned into the rule "show advertisers less," and nobody had checked why the test failed. Next time, I would push for evidence before a belief like that shapes product strategy.

Peer feedback

"He put forth multiple taxonomy options and helped the team align around the one that was most intuitive, which helps to simplify the complex surface. He was also exhaustive in his approach to develop intuitive names for these features, which are not the simplest to describe."Product Manager

"I especially appreciated how he broke down the data consent flows into clear categories and surfaced the most important information."Product Designer

"Based on the launch result, we now know the [feature] taxonomy and feature naming are successful without causing any escalations or confusions."Software Engineer