Meta’s Andromeda update isn’t a tweak. It’s a ground-up rebuild of the ad delivery engine that changed the rules of the game in 2025. If your campaigns suddenly “fell off a cliff”, this isn’t an unlucky patch of bad luck it’s a structural shift. The old playbook (tight audiences, dozens of ad sets, 3–6 similar creatives) no longer maps to a system built to do one thing very well: match the right creative to the right person.
This guide explains what changed, why your old approach failed, and most importantly the exact, practical steps to get your account back to profitability over the next 30–90 days.
What actually changed (the short version)
Meta rebuilt ad delivery around a two-stage, AI-first architecture:
- Retrieval (Andromeda): a pre-screen that scans millions of candidates and filters out conceptually similar ads before the auction.
- Ranking: a final, sophisticated auction that selects the single ad the system believes is best for that impression.
The engine runs on custom, high-performance hardware and models that are thousands of times more complex than before. The result: creative matters far more than manual audience targeting. If your account is still organised for “who should see this ad?”, Andromeda is already penalising you.
Why the 2024 playbook failed in 2025
Briefly, three things broke the old model:
- Gen-AI + scale: a tsunami of low-effort, similar creatives flooded the platform. The old retrieval engine couldn’t tell genuine variation from near-duplicates.
- Fragmented structure: many ad sets spread budget and conversion signals too thin for a data-hungry AI to learn.
- Creative scarcity: ad sets with only 3–6 similar ads give the matchmaker nothing meaningful to match; the retrieval layer simply filters most of them out.
You’ll see the symptoms: sudden drops in conversions, previously winning creatives “flopping”, lookalike and remarketing campaigns burning budgets, and accounts feeling “throttled”. These are the new systems doing precisely what it was designed to do.
The new philosophy: “Which ad should this person see?”
The central question moved from who to which. That flips how we build accounts:
- Creative is the new targeting. Conceptual diversity (different angles, personas, formats) is the signal the AI uses to find buyers.
- Consolidation is the new hygiene. Fewer ad sets more creatives inside each allows the model to gather dense conversion data and match effectively.
- Broad targeting is the default. Age, gender, location only. Lookalikes are suggestions, not boundaries. Use exclusions smartly to protect outcomes (e.g. exclude recent purchasers or very recent site visitors to force new customer acquisition).
What “meaningful creative diversity” actually means
Minor copy tweaks or two-second overlay changes won’t pass the retrieval gate. Andromeda applies a similarity penalty. To satisfy it you must provide distinct concepts, different hook, angle, persona, format not iterations of the same idea.
A reliable creative portfolio includes content angles like UGC/testimonials, demos, problem→solution, founder story, authority signals, educational pieces, comparison, objection handling and feature-led assets. Mix formats: vertical video (9:16), short clips, carousels and single images.
Practical baseline: 8–15 conceptually different creatives per ad set as a consistent minimum. Some teams run 25–50; 8–15 is the practical starting point.
The evidence: consolidation wins
A controlled 1 vs 5 ad set test (same creatives and budget) shows the consolidated approach: one ad set with all creatives outperformed fragmentation with ~17% more conversions at ~16% lower cost. That’s causal proof the old “isolate audiences” approach no longer holds.
The recommended operational standard is simple: 1 campaign per objective → 1 ad set (unless there’s a non-negotiable split) → many creatives. (Think “1-1-15”.)
New measurement rules: MER and creative diagnostics
Relying only on in-platform ROAS is risky Advantage+ and Andromeda can inflate ROAS by re-targeting low-cost repeat buyers while new customer acquisition stalls.
Adopt a two-layer measurement approach:
- Strategic source of truth: Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) = Total Revenue / Total Marketing Spend. Use MER at board level to confirm incremental growth.
- Creative diagnostics: build custom KPIs in Ads Manager to find the real problem:
- Thumb-Stop Rate (TSR) = (3s video plays / impressions) × 100. Benchmark elite TSR ≈ 35–45%; <25% is in the “fix it” zone.
- Hook Hold Rate = (ThruPlays / 3s plays) × 100. Measures whether the story/offer keeps the attention after the hook.
- CTR, frequency and other standard diagnostics still matter, but TSR and Hook Hold give you surgical insight into creative health.
Use these diagnostics to decide why CPA is high bad hook, weak story, or a poor offer and iterate accordingly.
Practical 30–90 day implementation plan (what to do, in plain English)
Phase 1 Foundation (Days 1–30)
- Audit tracking: ensure CAPI and server-side tracking are active and Event Match Quality is high. No exceptions, the AI needs trustworthy signals.
- Build your MER dashboard and baseline. Start measuring blended performance outside Ads Manager.
- Pause old fragmented prospecting campaigns. Do not tweak them.
- Launch one consolidated CBO campaign per objective (e.g., “Prospecting – Purchase”) with one ad set. Target broad (age, gender, location only). Apply smart exclusions (recent purchasers and very recent site visitors).
- Load 8–15 diverse creatives into that ad set and do not edit for 5–7 full days (patience window). At Day 7, record TSR, Hook Hold, CPA, and MER.
Phase 2 Creative velocity & testing (Days 31–60)
- Build an Ad Creation System: map your top 2–3 buyer personas to the creative matrix (testimonials, demos, UGC, founder story, FAQ, etc.).
- Establish a refresh cadence: weekly or bi-weekly add 5–8 net-new concepts. Creativity at scale beats tiny iterative edits.
- Use diagnostics: kill ads with low TSR; keep hooks that stop scrolls but fix the body if Hook Hold is low. Aim for an “ad hit rate” (winning ads / tested ads) >20% and TSR >30% average.
Optional: run a formal A/B test to show stakeholders the consolidation effect (1×25 vs 5×5) if you need proof.
Phase 3 Scale & automate (Days 61–90)
- When the consolidated campaign is profitable by MER, scale gradually (increase CBO by 15–20% per day). Don’t double budgets overnight.
- Launch Advantage+ Shopping (ASC): connect the product catalogue and manually upload your top 3–5 product-angle ads (UGC, demo, testimonial) to feed conceptual signals into ASC.
- Aim for a two-part evergreen system by Day 90: a manual prospecting “testing” campaign (1-1-15) that continuously finds winners, and an ASC “scale” campaign that runs catalogue + proven winners.
Expected outcome: a measurable improvement in blended MER (the research suggests a 10–15% improvement over Day 1 if executed well).
Common traps and how to avoid them
- Keep budgets spread thin across micro-audiences. Consolidate.
- Don’t panic edit or flip budgets mid-day. Respect the 5–7 day learning window.
- Stop treating lookalikes as fences. They’re seeds allow expansion.
- Avoid low creative diversity. Volume alone isn’t enough; create meaningful variety.
- Don’t use in-platform ROAS as your only north star. Confirm against MER to avoid cannibalisation illusions.
Quick tactical checklist you can use today
- Pause legacy fragmented prospecting campaigns.
- Launch one CBO prospecting campaign per objective with 1 ad set (broad targeting + exclusions).
- Upload 8–15 conceptually different creatives mapped to the creative matrix.
- Build MER dashboard and confirm CAPI is firing correctly.
- Enforce the 5–7 day patience window before making major edits.
- Create a weekly creative refresh pipeline (5–8 net-new concepts).
- Track TSR and Hook Hold; kill low TSR creatives, iterate bodies on high TSR but low Hold creatives.
- When stable, scale by +15–20% CBO per day and feed winners into Advantage+ ASC.
Final note mindset shift more than a checklist
Andromeda is less about algorithms you can out-smart and more about systems you can feed. The winners will be the teams that adopt a creative engine: regular production of distinct concepts, a disciplined measurement system that privileges MER, and account architecture built for the matchmaker, not the micromanager.
