Notes

How to Run Meta Ads in the Andromeda Era.

Article — Meta recently rebuilt the system that decides which ads people see. It’s called Andromeda. Here’s what we have found actually works, and the strategy we would put in place to get the most out of your Meta ads.

Posted by
25.08.2026

Meta recently rebuilt the system that decides which ads people see. It’s called Andromeda, and it’s changed one big thing: your ads now mainly get matched to people based on the creative itself, not so much the audience settings you pick. Put simply, your creative is essentially your targeting now.

At Spicy Web, we’ve spent a lot of time testing Meta ads across very different businesses, from ecommerce to lead gen. Here’s what we have found actually works, and the strategy we would put in place to get the most out of your Meta ads.

meta andromeda

Launch fewer ads, not more

The instinct most of us have is to flood an ad set with variations and let Meta sort it out. It feels safer to give the system more to work with. In practice, the opposite is true. These days, it’s much better to launch one to three ads at a time in one campaign/ad set.

Meta tends to pick a favourite and run with it. It funnels budget toward the ad it backs and quietly starves the rest. Therefore, launching ten ads does not give you ten shots on goal. It gives you one winner and nine hangers on, each nibbling at your budget while they wait to be turned off. Three genuinely different ads is plenty for the system to choose from.

There is a budget floor too. For a lead generation, sales or remarketing campaign, put at least $50 per day in the campaign as a bare minimum. Go lower and the system simply does not have enough signal to learn from, so you end up paying the learning tax without ever reaching the payoff.

Let Advantage+ do the targeting

Because the creative now carries the targeting, narrow audience settings often work against you. Advantage+ targeting gives the system the widest possible pool to match your ad against, and it consistently outperforms tightly built interest stacks.

In practice you can get away with very little manual input. Set your age, gender and location, add any audience exclusions you need, and let Advantage+ handle the rest. While you are at it, consolidate fragmented ad sets. Splitting your spend across a dozen micro audiences just thins out the signal the system needs to learn quickly. Fewer, broader ad sets concentrate that signal and the engine learns faster.

There is one big exception, and it is worth noting down: remarketing. Here you want to stay narrow on purpose. Hand a remarketing campaign to Advantage+ and Meta treats your warm audience as a jumping off point, then wanders off into new, colder people who have never heard of you. That is the exact opposite of the point. Keep these audiences tight, and leave Advantage+ switched off for them.

advantage plus

Build different angles, not different versions

This is where a lot of good creative strategies quietly fall over. Andromeda lumps similar looking ads together and treats them as one. Change a headline colour, swap a button, shave two seconds off a video, and the system shrugs and sees the same ad twice. That carefully built A/B test never even makes it to the auction as two separate things.

So the old habit of ten near identical variations is well and truly dead. What works now is real variety. Build different messaging angles, not different versions. Put genuinely opposite messages up against each other, the cool rational one full of numbers versus the warm emotional one built on a story, and see which crowd each finds. Different formats, different personas, different problems being solved. That spread is exactly what lets the system find the little pockets of people each ad speaks to.

And when something lands, do not just admire it and move on. Reiterate it. A winning creative is a starting point, not a fluke. Take the angle, the hook or the structure that worked and build your next round off it, rather than starting from a blank page every time.

The brand Olipop does this well

meta interface

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Optimise weekly and respect the learning phase

Two habits sit on either side of this, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is to check in on your ads weekly. Creative fatigue sets in faster than it used to, because the system quickly finds your best ad's favourite audience and rinses it. Most accounts now need a refresh every one to three weeks, not once a month. A weekly look keeps you a step ahead of that.

The second habit is patience, which sounds like the opposite of the first but is not. Do not pull the pin on the learning phase early, give your new ads at least a week to optimise. Andromeda is learning the whole time, and campaigns often open below target before they climb. Kill a campaign three days in because the numbers look soft and you are yanking it out right before it would have hit its stride. Give it the data it needs before you pass judgement.

None of this works without the fundamentals

Here is the part that matters most, and the part no clever setup can do for you. Every tactic above assumes your copy and creative are actually saying something worth matching. The system can only put your ad in front of the right person if the ad makes it obvious who that person is.

That means your creative has to speak to your audience's real pain points, who they are, how they actually buy, and where their head is at when they see it. Andromeda is brilliant at finding the people your message is built for. It just cannot work miracles on a message that is not built for anyone in particular.

The businesses that win in this new era are not the ones with the most ads or the slickest hacks. They are the ones who know their audience well enough to make creative that does the targeting on its own, then have the discipline to step back and let the system do its job.

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