Meta Ads Manager updates: May 2026

May 2026 was a quiet month on Meta’s ads newsroom, but two changes are worth knowing, and one of them widened your audiences without really asking. Dates and sources below. This is part of a monthly series, linked at the end.

Your purchase audiences can now reach back 730 days

Effective May 18, Meta raised the maximum retention window for custom audiences built on Purchase events (website and app activity) from 180 days to 730 days. The part to notice: existing 180-day purchase audiences were automatically migrated to 730 days unless you opted out before May 18. Common Thread Co. called it one of the most impactful targeting changes in years.

In practice you can now build much longer retargeting and exclusion windows, and seed lookalikes from up to two years of purchasers. That is genuinely useful for considered-purchase and high-LTV brands. The catch is staleness: a two-year-old purchaser is not the same signal as a 90-day one. If your audiences auto-expanded to 730 days, confirm you actually want that before it quietly changes who you target and who you exclude.

May 19: the API door closed on legacy Advantage+ campaigns

On May 19, Meta’s block on creating, duplicating and updating legacy Advantage+ Shopping and App campaigns extended to every Marketing API version, not just the latest. If you or your tools were sitting on an older version to keep managing those campaigns, that workaround ended. It is a developer-facing milestone; the full Marketing API picture is in the Q2 API update.

Otherwise, a quiet month (and why)

Meta’s own business news in May was mostly social-search and SEO thought leadership, not ads product launches. The backdrop is its Q1 earnings on April 29, where Meta said adoption of its generative AI creative tools had doubled to roughly 8 million advertisers in about four months (PPC Land). A fair amount of "Meta May 2026 updates" content online recycles February to April items under a May headline, so if you saw lists claiming a pile of May launches, most of those shipped earlier. We covered them in the April roundup.

More in the series: April, June, and the Q2 Marketing API update.