Top Ads Fall First
Your Meta performance didn’t go down due to your product or budget.
It fell due to your knowledge of the old game and the demise of that game by Meta Andromeda AI.
It was confirmed by a new study from Confect, which polled 3,014 advertisers and $834 million in ad activity, “A study of the ad landscape: The latest data on advertising trends and performance.”
The ROAS fell 31% for top performers due to the Meta Andromeda AI rollout.
Mid-performers barely moved.
The lowest scores improved.
The algorithm works to reduce the gap between those who are at the top and others – intentionally. Knowing the “how and why” is the only way to make recovery.
This isn’t a phase. The previous delivery system has been discontinued. It’s getting replaced by something else, and it’s a different kind of advertiser that Meta Andromeda AI rewards.
The Logic is Reversed
Andromeda AI is preceded by an audience setting. Meta discovered humans in the box.
Now it’s the other way round:
- Meta has been reading the first creative hook, format, narrative angle. Then it can predict the reactions of users according to behavioural signals .
- Your audience settings don’t hard-stop your audience, they are just a soft suggestion.
- Now you are the creator and your viewers are your audience.
That one change will partially impact all legacy account structures prior 2025.
The Entity ID Trap
This is where most budgets drain off and go under the radar.
Andromeda AI groups together ads that are visually similar into a single Entity ID. The same background, the same creator, the same product shot and the same headline – the same Entity ID.
– For each of 50 identical ads, one ad retrieval ticket will be added to the auction shortlist.
– If you upload any ads, one of you will get 1 chance to compete, whichever person the retrieval ticket is for. = no more than 1 person could compete per retrieval ticket regardless of how many ads they uploaded.
Years of experimenting and polishing elements of a call to action, changing the headline, varying the color of the buttons, tweaking the layout and more, all came together in one place in the system’s mind.
The solution: All new ads should be an idea change not a cosmetic change.
Before you create something new, ask yours.
lf these 3 questions: Is the message different? Does the format change if you print it out? Is there any other point of view in the audience? If you can answer “yes” to two or more, you are NOT making a duplicate.
Switch Landing Pages First
It is a no-brainer that the best win right now is a no-brainer.
The average ROAS for category pages dropped by 24x from about 12.5x to 9.5x. Product pages improved. Homepages improved slightly.
– Actions to take: Clear all running ads from category or collection page and review them –
– This applies to the product page – navigate to it instead.
Monitor the changes in ROAS over the 1st week.
– Data is consistent throughout all accounts at all spends.
The only modification that can be made in minutes and has an immediate effect.
Don’t take this step lightly. It’s a no-brainer that most advertisers will bypass it. That’s why, it is still one of the most sure bets you can have at this time.
Fatigue Hits in Two Weeks Now
The life of the ad has been reduced drastically under Andromeda.
– New system: creatives were viable for 15 weeks or more
– The fatigue from 1-2 weeks is now 2-3 weeks after the update.
– If you get tired, your delivery goes down – CPM up, ROAS down and basically your ad is dead.
Don’t wait for a creative ‘land’. By Week 1 if the signal performance is not present, replace it with a different shaped performance. If the creative fails, now it’s a straight plane that’s off the budget.
Diversity Over Volume
Do not assign a number to your ads! Begin to record the number of different Entity ID’s you’ve won.
Develop creative diversity on four aspects:
- They are in static, video, carousel and catalog formats.
- Person : founder, UGC creator, customers’ testimony
- BUILDING: studio, lifestyle, screen demo.
Rational, social, problem led, emotional outcome.
In the shortlisting phase of Andromeda, each of these dimensions gets a retrieval ticket for the ads.
Strong accounts have 15–20 creatives in different structures, at any given time. But 8-12 can be a possibility if budgets are smaller and if they can be assigned their own Entity ID.
Raw Outperforms Polished
All of the data from the agencies comes from the same conclusion: Video beats has been able to generate 2x to 3x ROAS for brand creative.
– Clips, BTS and raw testimonials do better on retrieval.
– The system can receive more authentic motion signals and a more authentic demonstration of the product than the high production image source signals.
– The word authenticity is not as important as production budget. Make small adjustments to the creative mix.
If it’s not in your production process then make it a priority NOT EXPERIMENT. Start off with one video shot directly to the camera and contrast retrieval with well done videos.
Simplify or Stall
The other most frequently occurring structural flaw, aside from post-Andromeda, is that the plant is being over-segmented.
That kind of set up means that each ad set has none of the pieces of data that the system needs to learn, which leads to multiple campaigns, stacked interest targeting, and age/gender splits. When accounts are divided into small parts they will not work well.
What are their good arguments: A single or two Shopping campaign(s) with the extra advantage of the + sign.
- The advantage of maximum targeting is that there is no interest stack.
- A unified and common creative pool.
- The first step in restructuring anything is to repair the foundation:
- Events occurring on your Pixel, in addition to the Conversions API.
- Event Match Quality score is greater than 7.
Replacing data on a broken-down signal will only further exacerbate issues.
The Window Is Closing
Many advertisers are still using 2023 playbooks: Interest stacks, slick brand video, and broken up ad sets. It’s a competition cupping deficiency that has to come to an end, but will have to come to an end for some time.
It’s now possible for a brand with $50,000 in spend/month to outperform enterprises with 10x that spend using legacy approaches.
Meta has announced that the upcoming generation of hardware will be 1000X more complex. Andromeda is not an end; it’s a beginning.
Simplify your structure. Develop authentic creativity diversity. Fix your signals. Don’t create copies of ads that the algorithm already recognizes as one.
The system is not flawed. The playbook is.
Structural benefits that accrue over time within accounts built as they adapt. Wait, what account? They are not “waiting,” they are falling further behind by the day by viewing ads on a platform that the algorithm isn’t paying them for.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is Andromeda AI in Meta advertising?
Andromeda AI is Meta’s advanced ad retrieval and ranking system that uses machine learning to decide which ads enter the auction and receive the most impressions. It evaluates creative quality, user behavior, and conversion signals to optimize ad delivery.
2. Why is Andromeda AI affecting Meta ad performance?
Andromeda AI prioritizes creative relevance and behavioral signals over traditional targeting methods. As a result, many advertisers using older campaign structures have seen changes in ROAS, CPM, and overall campaign performance.
3. How can I improve my results under Andromeda AI?
To perform better with Andromeda AI, focus on creative diversity, authentic video content, strong conversion signals, and simplified campaign structures. Small creative tweaks are often less effective than completely new concepts.
4. Does Andromeda AI make audience targeting less important?
Not entirely, but Andromeda AI treats audience settings more as guidance than strict limitations. The system relies heavily on creative signals to determine which users are most likely to engage with your ads.
5. What types of ads work best with Andromeda AI?
According to many advertisers and agencies, raw videos, customer testimonials, behind-the-scenes content, and authentic product demonstrations tend to perform better with Andromeda AI than highly polished brand-focused creatives.