We’ll be honest: when we first started noticing some of our Meta campaigns behaving differently a few months ago, we thought we were doing something wrong. CPAs were fluctuating in ways that didn’t match our usual patterns. Ads that should have been winners were underperforming. Our tried-and-true audience strategies seemed to have lost their edge.
Turns out, we weren’t doing anything wrong. Meta had fundamentally changed the game.
Enter Andromeda: Meta’s next-generation retrieval engine that quietly rolled out and completely transformed how ads compete for attention on Facebook and Instagram. And here’s the wild part: everything we thought we knew about Meta advertising? We needed to rethink it.
And what we found kind of blew us away.
So, what exactly is Meta’s Andromeda?
Andromeda is Meta’s next-generation AI-driven ad-retrieval engine, built to sift through millions of ad candidates and, using deep neural networks and custom hardware, surface the most relevant ads to individual users in real time.
Here’s what has changed:
The old system looked at a few hundred ads and matched them to users based primarily on the targeting parameters we set. Pretty straightforward.
The update throws that playbook out the window. It uses advanced sequence learning to understand user behavior patterns and matches them with creative content, analyzing everything from your video pacing to your emotional tone to your visual style.
Meta’s engineering team now reports an 8% improvement in ad quality and 6% better recall. But more importantly, early testing by advertisers who’ve restructured around Andromeda principles are reporting seeing 17% more conversions at 16% lower cost. Those aren’t small numbers.
The shift that changes everything: Your creative IS your targeting
This is the part that kind of blew our minds when we really understood it.
For years, we’ve spent countless hours perfecting audience layering—stacking interests, behaviors, lookalikes—trying to find that perfect customer profile. We’d obsess over whether to include or exclude certain demographics. Should we go broader or narrower? Testing audience after audience after audience.
Andromeda makes all of that… kind of obsolete.
Now, the algorithm analyzes every element of your creative (e.g., your visuals, your copy, your pacing, your format, your emotional tone) and uses those signals to find the right users. A founder story video naturally gravitates toward people who respond to brand narratives. A problem-solution format finds people actively looking for solutions. UGC finds audiences who value social proof.
It’s like the algorithm is reading your creative and saying, “Oh, I know exactly who needs to see this.”
What this actually means for how we work
Remember when we’d spend weeks perfecting a single hero ad? Testing every headline variation, every button color, every minor tweak?
Yeah, those days are done.
1.) Stop perfecting. Start creating.
Here’s the hard news. Andromeda can recognize near-duplicates. If you upload 10 versions of the same ad with slightly different hooks, the algorithm treats them as essentially the same. One underperforms? They all underperform. One doesn’t get spend? Neither do the others.
What Andromeda wants is genuine conceptual diversity. Ads that speak to different people, different motivations, different stages of awareness. Not just different words saying the same thing.
Here’s an example of differentiation from Meta:
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Problem-solution narratives that speak to customer pain points
- Founder stories that build authentic brand connection
- Customer testimonials and UGC for social proof
- Educational content and how-to formats
- Product demos that show features in action
- “Us vs. them” competitive positioning
- Values-driven narratives that connect on emotion
Use the PDA Framework instead of brainstorming random hooks, mixing and matching these three core components in your creatives:
- Persona: Who, specifically, are you talking to in this ad?
- Desire: What does this specific persona truly want?
- Awareness: Where is your persona on their customer journey?
Each framework speaks to different motivations and stages of awareness. That’s what gives Andromeda the signals it needs to work its magic.
2.) Simplify everything (seriously)
This one was hard for us at first. We’re media buyers, we like control. We like having campaigns for different audiences, ad sets for different objectives, and carefully allocated budgets.
But here’s what we’ve learned: all that structure is actually holding us back now. Andromeda learns faster and performs better when you consolidate.
Your new default structure? One campaign per objective. Campaign Budget Optimization turned on. Advantage+ placements. Broad targeting. And 8-15+ creative variations in a single ad set.
That’s it.
But more isn’t necessarily better. If you create more ads, they also need to represent a more diverse group of creative.
3.) Speed beats perfection (and we mean speed)
The brands winning right now? They’re not the ones with the most polished creative. They’re the ones producing and testing creative at scale. We’re talking about new creatives every 7-14 days.
The goal is simple: keep feeding Andromeda fresh creative signals so it can continuously refine who sees what.
4.) Let go of the micromanaging
This is probably the hardest shift. At least for us.
We’re used to checking campaigns multiple times a day, pausing underperforming ads, reallocating budget. It’s what good media buyers do, right?
Not anymore. Andromeda needs time—at least 5-7 days—to properly learn and optimize. That ad that looks terrible on day one? It might be your top performer by day five. The algorithm is doing things we can’t see at the micro level.
Now we focus on campaign-level performance: Marketing Efficiency Ratio, blended ROAS, customer acquisition cost. The big picture stuff. And we let the algorithm handle the rest.
One caveat though: keep an eye on new customer acquisition. Sometimes Andromeda over-optimizes for easy conversions (returning customers). If you see that happening, you might need to add exclusion audiences even though Meta says not to. Your goal is sustainable growth, not just impressive ROAS.
How we’re actually implementing Meta Andromeda
Audited the creative libraries. Turns out we had a lot of variations on the same themes. We identified where we had gaps in our creative frameworks and prioritized building those out.
Simplified campaign structures. This can be scary. One example is to consolidate five campaigns into one. Turn on campaign budget optimization (CBO). Use broad targeting. Meta will take control of the wheel from there.
Built a creative system. Develop a framework that allows you to produce variations quickly without sacrificing quality. We’re using modular video templates and AI tools for certain variations.
Created a testing cadence. Every week, launch new creative. Some weeks it’s new hooks. Other weeks it’s format tests. The goal is consistency, not perfection.
Began to monitor differently. Check campaigns less frequently but more thoughtfully. We’re looking at trends over days, not hours. It’s a mental shift, but it’s worth it.
The bottom line on Andromeda
We’re not going to pretend this transition is easy. Letting go of campaign structures we’ve relied on for years? Trusting an algorithm we can’t fully see or control? Going broad when every instinct tells us to narrow? It goes against everything we learned as media buyers.
But the results don’t lie. Our clients are seeing better performance. Our creative team is more energized because they’re making diverse, interesting work instead of endless minor variations.
And honestly? Once we stopped fighting against Andromeda and started working with it, our jobs got more interesting too.
The old playbook is dead. The new one is simpler but requires a different mindset: create compelling, diverse content at scale and trust the algorithm to match the right message with the right person at the right time.
The future of Meta advertising is here. We’re here for it, and we’re helping our clients make this shift by building creative systems that enable rapid testing while maintaining quality.
Have questions about how Andromeda is affecting your Meta campaigns? Want to work through what’s working (or not working) for you? Let’s talk.
