The AI revolution Changing How Meta Ads Work

If your Meta ad performance took an unexpected turn in mid-to-late 2025, you’re not alone. Meta’s Andromeda update, which completed its global rollout in October 2025, represents the most significant shift in Facebook and Instagram advertising since iOS 14.5 disrupted tracking back in 2021.

The numbers tell the story: advertisers who’ve adapted to Andromeda are seeing conversion increases of 8-17% while cutting costs by up to 16%. Meanwhile, brands still running old playbooks are watching their CPMs climb and ROAS decline. 

Here’s what makes this different: Andromeda isn’t just another platform tweak. It’s a fundamental rethinking of how Meta’s advertising ecosystem operates. This guide breaks down what Andromeda actually is, why it matters for your bottom line, and how to restructure your approach to thrive under the new system.

What Is Andromeda and Why Should You Care?

Andromeda is Meta’s next-generation AI-powered ad retrieval engine that completed its global rollout in October 2025. Think of it as the sophisticated system that decides which ads from millions of available creatives get shown to which users. But here’s the key insight: Andromeda completely transforms the first stage of ad delivery, which had become Meta’s biggest bottleneck.

The Three Stages of Ad Delivery

To understand why Andromeda is a game-changer, you need to know how Meta delivers ads:

1. Retrieval – Narrowing millions of potential ads down to a few thousand candidates 
2. Ranking – Scoring those candidates based on predicted relevance 
3. Delivery – Showing the highest-scoring ads to users

The old retrieval system was struggling to keep up. Andromeda fixes that bottleneck and does it with unprecedented intelligence.

The Technical Breakthrough (Explained Simply)

Meta built Andromeda as an end-to-end AI system that combines:

• Cutting-edge hardware (NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip and Meta’s proprietary Training and Inference Accelerator) 
• Advanced machine learning architecture

The result? A 10,000x increase in model complexity for ad retrieval.

What does that actually mean for you? Andromeda can consider vastly more signals, patterns, and user behaviours when deciding which ads to surface. It’s not just faster, it’s fundamentally smarter about matching your ads with the right people at the right time.

How Andromeda Changes Your Ad Strategy

1. Campaign Structure Gets Simpler

Before Andromeda: Advertisers created hyper-segmented campaigns with dozens of ad sets targeting narrow audiences.

With Andromeda: Consolidation wins. The algorithm needs volume and variety within campaigns to learn effectively.

What to do: Merge overlapping ad sets, trust broader targeting, and let Andromeda’s AI find your best customers across larger audience pools.

2. Creative Diversity Becomes Critical

Andromeda’s retrieval power means it can surface different creatives to micro-segments within your audience, but only if you give it options.

The new rule: Supply 8-15 distinct creative variations per campaign, not just minor tweaks. Test different hooks, formats, and messaging angles.

Why it works: More creative variety gives Andromeda more tools to match specific user preferences, increasing relevance and performance.

3. Broad Targeting Outperforms Narrow Audiences

This might feel counterintuitive if you’ve been advertising on Meta for years, but Andromeda’s AI is better at finding your customers than manual targeting ever was.

The shift: Move from detailed interest targeting to Advantage+ audiences or broader demographic parameters.

The evidence: Early adopters using broad targeting with strong creative see 12-18% better ROAS compared to narrow audience strategies.

4. Budget Flexibility Feeds the Algorithm

Andromeda learns faster with consistent data flow. Fragmented budgets across too many ad sets starve the algorithm of the signals it needs.

Best practice: Allocate larger budgets to fewer, consolidated campaigns. Aim for at least £50-100 daily budget per campaign to give Andromeda meaningful data.

5. Creative Testing Needs More Patience

The old approach was to kill underperforming ads within 24-48 hours. Andromeda’s learning phase works differently.

New timeline: Give new creatives 4-7 days and a good amount of spend to find conversions, before making kill decisions. The algorithm needs time to find the right micro-audiences for each creative. 

Pro tip: Use dynamic creative testing (DCT) to let Andromeda automatically optimise creative combinations rather than manually testing everything.

Signs Your Account Needs Andromeda Optimisation

Not sure if Andromeda is affecting your performance? Here are the telltale signs your account structure is still optimised for the old system:

• CPMs climbing 20%+ since mid-2025 – If your costs have spiked without clear seasonal explanation, you’re likely competing inefficiently under the new system. Andromeda rewards consolidated campaigns with creative diversity; fragmented structures pay a premium.

• Your 2024 winning ads are suddenly underperforming – Creatives that crushed it last year falling flat isn’t random. Andromeda evaluates ads differently, prioritising visual diversity and format variation over minor copy tweaks that previously worked.

• Budget concentrating on 1-2 ads within hours – Healthy Andromeda campaigns distribute spend across multiple creatives. If you’re seeing immediate concentration, you likely don’t have enough meaningful creative diversity for the algorithm to work with.

• Running 10+ ad sets with narrow targeting – Multiple fragmented ad sets with detailed interest targeting is the old playbook. Under Andromeda, this structure starves the algorithm of the data density it needs to learn and optimise effectively.

• Killing ads after 24-48 hours of poor performance – The rapid test-and-kill approach that worked previously now fights against Andromeda’s learning phase. The algorithm needs 4-7 days to find the right micro-audiences for each creative.

• Testing only minor creative variations – Swapping headlines, changing button colours, or tweaking background elements used to count as meaningful tests. Andromeda’s visual pattern recognition treats these as the same ad, limiting your reach and driving up costs.

If three or more of these sound familiar, your account structure is working against Andromeda rather than with it.

Why Acting Now Matters

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: every week you delay adaptation, your competitors who’ve already restructured capture efficiency gains whilst you pay a premium for the same audiences.

Andromeda isn’t a temporary algorithm fluctuation that will revert. This is the permanent foundation of Meta’s advertising infrastructure going forward. The system will only become more sophisticated as Meta continues to enhance it with next-generation hardware and AI capabilities.

The advertisers seeing 8-17% conversion increases and 16% cost reductions didn’t get there by accident. They restructured early, tested aggressively, and built creative production systems whilst others waited to “see how it plays out.”

The competitive advantage window is closing. As more advertisers adopt Andromeda-optimised structures, the baseline performance level rises. What feels like strong performance today will be table stakes in six months.

The brands that move decisively now establish momentum that compounds over time. Those who wait will find themselves not just catching up on strategy, but competing against accounts that have months of algorithmic learning and creative testing data already built into the system.

The Bottom Line: Transitioning to AI-Powered Ads

Andromeda represents Meta’s bet on AI-powered advertising, and the results from advertisers who’ve adapted since its October rollout prove it’s not just hype. Those who’ve embraced simplification, broader targeting, and creative diversity are seeing real performance gains. 

The transition requires unlearning some habits that worked for years. But fighting against Andromeda’s design means higher costs and weaker results as more advertisers adapt.

Need Help Navigating Andromeda?

The shift to Andromeda isn’t one-size-fits-all. Your optimal strategy depends on your product, audience, creative assets, and current performance baseline. Our team has been testing Andromeda-optimised strategies since its rollout and have identified what works across different account types and industries. 

Ready to adapt your Meta strategy for the Andromeda era? [Contact us] to discuss how we can help you restructure for better performance as we head into 2026.