"I'm running the same setup — why is performance swinging?"
Lots of accounts are feeling it: "Why does Advantage+ feel like it changes every week?" or "Same creative, same audience, but CPM is way off." There's a reason.
Meta announced it officially in December 2024 and has been rolling it out in stages since: a next-generation ad matching engine codenamed Andromeda.
In plain terms, the brain that picks "which ad to show this person right now" when they open their feed has been replaced. The old system whittled a few thousand candidate ads down step by step. Andromeda expands the candidate pool to tens or hundreds of thousands and scores them all at once on a GPU.
Source: Meta Engineering — Meta Andromeda: Supercharging Advantage+ automation
Why This Matters for Advertisers
| Old system | Andromeda |
|---|---|
| Thousands of candidate ads, progressive filtering | Tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands scored at once |
| Your ad has to survive to the "final shortlist" to serve | Evaluated in many more contexts |
| Thin creative library means limited learning | Creative variety directly translates to delivery variety |
The bottom line: accounts with creative variety now win. The old move of pushing a single winning creative still works less well. Running 3-5 similar creatives together gets more impressions and a more stable CPA. The "A/B test, pick one winner, concentrate spend" approach is actively hurting you.
3 Signs the Rollout Has Hit Your Account
If you see 2 or 3 of these, you're adapting normally.
- Advantage+ campaign share has drifted up automatically (70%+ of total)
- Creative-level CPM variance is higher than before — a signal that Andromeda is experimenting
- Budget is spreading from one concentrated creative to multiple creatives
If you see none of them and things look exactly like before, the rollout probably hasn't reached your account yet. Meta is phasing it in by country and vertical. It's coming soon.
What Should You Change?
Bottom line first: Increase the number of creatives. That's about it.
Budget structure, targeting, bid strategy — leave them alone. They're already tuned for the Advantage+ era. The one thing to change is ad sets should now carry 3-5 creatives each.
| Metric | Old recommendation | After Andromeda |
|---|---|---|
| Creatives per ad set | 1-2 concentrated | 3-5 distributed |
| Creative refresh cadence | 1-2 every 2 weeks | 1-2 added or removed weekly |
| A/B testing method | Creative 1 vs Creative 2 | Creative pack vs creative pack |
FAQ
Q: Can I raise the budget right after the rollout?
A: Hold for 2 weeks. The system is learning new patterns and budget changes shake the learning. What not to touch during the learning phase is covered separately.
Q: Is Broad targeting still the best?
A: Yes. Andromeda works even better with Broad. Fine-grained interest targeting often performs worse now.
Q: Video vs image — has one gotten more favorable?
A: Neither format has an inherent edge. Variety is what matters, so mixing both beats going all-in on one.
Q: Once Andromeda settles, does the operator have less work?
A: Yes. But the work shifts from "optimization" to "creative planning and supply". Teams that can't feed the creative pipeline fall behind.
Hands-on guidance for targeting, funnel design, and budget structure is covered in Meta Ads Book 2.