How to Get Rid of Facebook Ad
Tired of seeing the same irrelevant ads every time you scroll through Facebook? You're not alone. While ads are an unavoidable part of the platform, you don’t have to settle for a feed cluttered with promotions that miss the mark. This article will show you exactly how to take back control, adjust your ad settings, and create a much better browsing experience.
Can You Actually Block All Ads on Facebook?
Let's address the most common question first: Is there a magic button to turn off all Facebook ads? The short answer is no. Facebook’s business model is built entirely around advertising. The ability for businesses to reach specific audiences is what pays for the platform, allowing it to remain free for users.
Think of it as the trade-off for connecting with friends and family. However, this doesn't mean you're powerless. While you can't install an "off switch" for ads, you have a surprising amount of control over which ads you see, how they're targeted to you, and how often advertisers can reach you. The goal isn't ad elimination, it's ad curation.
How to Take Control of the Ads You See
The best way to "get rid of Facebook ads" is to teach its algorithm what you do and don't want to see. By actively managing your ad preferences, you can dramatically improve the quality and relevance of the ads in your feed. Here’s how to do it.
Step 1: Use Facebook’s Ad Preferences Center
Facebook’s Ad Preferences is your central hub for managing your ad experience. It's often buried in the settings, so many people don’t even know it exists. Here’s how to find it and what you can do there.
Finding Your Ad Preferences
You can access Ad Preferences from your desktop or mobile app:
Go to Settings & Privacy.
Select Settings.
Scroll down and find the Ads section, then click on Ad Preferences.
Once you’re in, you’ll find several tools. Let's break down the most important ones.
Advertisers You've Seen Recently
This tab shows you a list of advertisers whose ads have recently been shown to you. If a particular brand keeps showing up in your feed and you have no interest in it, you can stop seeing their ads directly from here.
Click on the Advertisers tab.
Find the brand you want to stop hearing from.
Click the Hide Ads button next to their name. This tells Facebook you're not interested in that company right now.
Ad Topics
In this section, Facebook allows you to request fewer ads on sensitive or less relevant topics. For instance, you can choose to limit ads related to alcohol, parenting, pets, social issues, or politics.
Click on the Ad Topics tab.
You’ll see a list of categories. Next to each category is a button that says See Less.
Clicking this won’t completely remove all ads in that topic, but it will significantly reduce their frequency, cleaning up your feed from subjects you'd rather not engage with.
Ad Settings
This is arguably the most powerful section for personalizing your ad experience. Here, you control what information Facebook uses to target ads to you.
Data from partners about your activity: This is the setting that controls "Off-Facebook Activity." Many websites and apps use Meta's business tools (like the Meta Pixel or SDKs) to share your activity with Facebook. For example, if you browse a shoe website, that company might tell Facebook to show you ads for those shoes later. Here you can review this data, clear it, and disconnect it from your account so external websites can't be used to retarget you on Facebook.
To manage this, go to Data from partners about your activity, click Review setting, then disable the toggle for using this data. This stops ads targeted based on your browsing habits outside of Meta’s apps.
Categories used to reach you: Based on the information in your profile, like your employer, job title, education, or relationship status, Facebook allows advertisers to target you. In this section, you can review these categories and remove any you don't find relevant or prefer to keep private. Simply click on a category and toggle it off.
Audience-based advertising: This setting controls whether advertisers who have your information (like your email address from a newsletter signup) can target you with ads on Facebook. You can manage which advertisers can — and can't — use their customer lists to reach you, giving you control over whether your off-platform relationships carry over into your on-platform ad experience.
Spending just ten minutes in the Ad Preferences center can make a noticeable difference in the ads you are shown.
Step 2: Hide Specific Ads in Your Feed
You can also train the algorithm directly from your feed. When you see an ad that is irrelevant, annoying, or that you simply see too often, hide it. This sends a direct signal to Facebook about your tastes.
On any ad, click the three dots (...) in the top-right corner.
A menu will appear. Select "Hide ad."
Facebook will then ask you why you hid it. The options usually include "It's not relevant to me," "I see it too often," or "It's sensitive or offensive."
Choosing a reason gives Facebook valuable feedback that helps it serve better ads in the future - not just from that advertiser, but others like it. Over time, hiding irrelevant ads helps prune your feed effectively.
Using Third-Party Tools: Ad Blockers
Outside of Facebook's native settings, some users turn to third-party ad blocking browser extensions (like uBlock Origin or Adblock Plus) that are designed to block recognized advertising scripts from loading on web pages.
For Facebook, this has a few limitations:
They only work on desktop browsers. Ad blockers can be effective when using Facebook on a computer with Chrome, Firefox, or Safari, but they do nothing within the Facebook mobile app, which is where many people spend most of their time.
Effectiveness varies. Facebook is in a constant cat-and-mouse game with ad blockers. Since ads are its revenue source, its engineers are continuously finding ways to make ads look like native content, making them harder for blockers to detect and stop. An ad blocker that works today might not be as effective tomorrow.
While an ad blocker can help reduce the number of visible sponsored posts on your desktop, rely on Facebook’s internal tools for a more permanent and comprehensive solution, especially for mobile usage.
For Business Owners: How to Delete an Old Facebook Ad
If you landed on this article because you’re an advertiser who wants to permanently remove an ad from your Meta Ads Manager account, the process is straightforward.
Maybe an ad campaign is outdated, references an old promotion, or you simply want to clean up your account. While simply turning an ad set or campaign off is usually enough, sometimes you want it gone for good. Here's how to delete it.
Log into Meta Ads Manager. Navigate to your account dashboard.
Go to the "Ads" Tab. Your campaigns are organized into three levels: Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads. Make sure you are on the Ads tab to see a list of all your individual creative pieces.
Select the Ad(s) You Want to Delete. Use the checkboxes on the left side to select one or more ads from the list.
Click the "Delete" Icon. With the ad(s) selected, a toolbar will appear above the list. Click on the trash can icon to delete the ads permanently.
A word of caution: deleting an ad is permanent. Once it's gone, it can't be restored, and its historical performance data will be removed from your main dashboard views. If you might need to reference its performance later, it’s better to simply turn the ad or its ad set off rather than deleting it.
Final Thoughts
You can’t stop Facebook ads entirely, but you absolutely have the power to influence them. By using the Ad Preferences center to review your data, remove irrelevant interests, and hide intrusive ads directly from your feed, you're training Facebook’s algorithm to create a far better, more personalized experience.
Managing your ad preferences cleans up your personal feed, but if you're on the other side of things running a business, the challenge is understanding what’s really working. Pulling reports from Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, and your CRM can feel like a full-time job. We created Graphed to offer a simple and less complicated solution. It connects all of your data and allows you to get answers in a more organic way by speaking in simple English dialogue. Ask your campaigns questions such as, “What were the best Facebook ROIs in August?” and Graphed builds a live, real-time complete presentation in minutes. This, in turn, frees you to actually start making those decisions for your next strategic campaign faster while staying agile as your campaigns run with your new simple solution, Graphed. It turns data into something truly useful, instead of just being another thing on your to-do list.