Episode 240: The Meta Andromeda Update - Why Your Facebook Ads Stopped Working (And What To Do Instead)

Hey, smart marketers, welcome back to the show. I'm Anthony, creative producer here at Smart Marketer, and today's episode comes straight from Pep Hoofen, who leads our smart marketer agency and oversees millions in monthly ad spend for e-commerce brands. In this episode, Pep breaks down the meta-andromeda update, which he's calling the biggest shift to meta-advertising in years, on par with the impact of iOS 14.5. Have you seen a dip in performance lately, or you're still running the same playbook from 2024? This episode will show you exactly what's changed, why your old strategies might not work as well going forward, and what to do instead. From creative portfolios and campaign consolidation to real-world case studies, Pep's laying out the new rules for how to win in the post-andromeda world. But first, here's a quick message from our founder, Ezra Firestone, about a tool we use, Omnisend. Ezra here with a quick note. You may not know this, but I just bought a new company. You know what the very first thing I did was, was get them set up on Omnisend. I migrated them to Omnisend. That's how much I trust that platform to drive email and SMS performance. You know, it's like Omnisend isn't as well-known as some of the other brands out there, but I really believe in what they're doing, not just the product, but the people behind it. Their support team is next level. The platform gives my brands everything they need to drive real growth, so if you haven't heard about Omnisend for email and SMS, I think you're really going to love them when it comes to comparing them to other things out there. Check them out. They're offering a special deal to smart marketer subscribers. So you can go to smartmarketer.com/omnisend, and you can use the coupon code SMART to get 50% off your first three months. I don't think you're going to find a better platform that's going to help you get set up and integrated and optimized, so go check them out, smartmarketer.com/omnisend. Use the coupon code SMART for 50% off your first three months. Thanks for listening. Meta just rolled out one of their biggest algorithm updates, and it's called Andromeda, and if you've noticed that your ad performance has been down since August, this could be why. Some businesses that are rolling this out see their CPMs drop with 20%, whereas other businesses actually see their customer acquisition tank. Meta quietly builds up their ad platform from the ground up, and some advertisers have no idea what's hit them. I'm about to show you how Andromeda exactly works, why your current Facebook ad strategies might be obsolete, and what strategies you can use and implement right now. We've been testing this in client accounts, and we're spending millions a month, and we have a case study where we actually showed that this is working great, and another case study where actually the customer acquisition is tanking. So if you're running Facebook ads in 2025, you've got to understand this. So let's dive in. So what exactly is Andromeda? Think of it as Meta completely rebuilding the engine of a car while you are still driving it. Andromeda has changed the algorithm. They fundamentally changed how Meta makes decisions, which ads are actually shown to users. Here's the technical bit made simple. Andromeda is Facebook's new ads retrieval system. So let's break that down. Before, when a user opened Facebook, Facebook would basically decide out of a few hundred ads, which ads it was going to show the user. Now it's scanning thousands, if not tens of thousands of ads in a few seconds. In sequence learning, it doesn't just understand what you're doing now, but what you have done last week or past month. The old system was like a librarian grabbing a random book off the shelf. Andromeda is like an AI that has read the whole library, knows what you exactly read, and therefore will have a much better prediction of what you actually enjoy reading. And here's where it gets wild, because Meta paired it with Advantage Plus, which is now on by default on both CBO and ABO campaigns. So this basically forced you to run campaigns on autopilot. No micromanaging anymore. The machine is now really in control. And this changes everything on how we run ads. Like remember that we basically said, hey, you want to have a maximum of three to five ads in an ad set because Facebook is basically going to shift ad spend to one or two. That's done. And this changes everything on how we run ads. We used to want to have only like three to six ads basically in an ad set because we know that Facebook was going to shift the budget to one or two ads. Ads rule is done. Or the 20% tax rule on an image irrelevant as well. What matters now the most is creative diversity. And I'm not talking about making 15 variations of a headline. Andromeda rewards portfolios with fundamentally different creative ad concepts. Think of it like this, rather than split testing the buy now or learn more button, you want to have fundamentally different ads in your ad sets, problem solution ads, founder story ads or UGC. The system now thinks in terms of creative portfolios, not individual ads. The system is now looking at your complete creative library. And it matches your creative library to the behavior of the user. One person might see testimonial because that's what they watched yesterday. Another sees your product demo because they have been researching solutions. And here's the counterintuitive part, adding more creative to your campaigns actually is working now. We are seeing 30, 40 or even 50 ads in a single campaign, absolutely crushing it. The old way of keeping it simple is basically over and done. Forget everything you know about campaign structure. The new winning formula is simple. One campaign per objective, per frontend offer, broad targeting and as much creative diversity as you can. We are really starting to move away from audiences and ABOs. No more complex funnel as one Andromeda Optimized CBO campaign can actually tap into all of the audiences throughout the funnel. Top of funnel, middle funnel and bottom of funnel all squished basically in one campaign. So consolidation is king. Why? Because in order for Andromeda to work well, it needs that data density. If you split your budget across 10 different campaigns, you're basically depriving the algorithm of data. But if you put it in one, two or three campaigns, you're feeding the algorithm with data and you'll see that it will actually start to work better. In the ideal scenario, your campaigns now have at least 10 different ad concepts. So not just 10 different variations, but completely different ad concepts. And the recommendation of Facebook is to try to test at least 20 creatives per week. So that would be 80 per month. And when you have new creatives, you can do two things. Either you feed into your Evergreen campaign, or you have a big testing campaign that you're consistently pushing new ads in, and your winners you push into your Evergreen CBO Advantage Plus campaign. So let me show you what this actually means in practice. So cleanies, one of our mastermind students saw their performance tank in mid August. Their CPM started to increase, which drove a higher cost per click and therefore obviously higher CPAs. And they completely restructured their ad accounts. They went from eight campaigns down to two, one per frontend offer. They took every winning ad from the past year. And even the ones they turned off because they were fatigued, they were loaded into one new campaign. So they added founder stories, behind the scenes, content, customer testimonials, everything. And within days, their CPMs dropped with 20%. And therefore also their cost per click again, and their CPAs actually dropped with 35%. But here's the interesting part, whereas before one or two ads would basically get the majority of the budget, right now with having 15 ads in one campaign, we actually see that Facebook starts to feed the budget and basically spread it out much more equally. And obviously it's still pushing budget to actually the ads that are working, but the spread is much more diverse than one or two ads that are getting like the 90% of the budget. So the lesson, Andromeda rewards creative diversity and creative portfolios. But to be fair, it's also not all sunshine and rainbows. We discovered something actually pretty disturbing from one of our agency clients. So we actually saw in the audience segments in the Facebook ads manager that customer acquisition was really strong. We had strong CPAs after implementing this Andromeda structure, we had strong CPAs and strong ROAS. But the Shopify backend was actually showing a different story, because what we saw is that the number of new customers went down since we implemented this and returning customer rates went up. Now you could think that that's a good thing, but in this case, returning customer rates went up because the number of new customers was going down. So what was happening? Andromeda was basically finding people that were most likely to convert and kept circling actually more towards existing customers and therefore dropping the number of new customer acquisition. So what was the solution? Well, obviously we had to go in and explicitly actually still add in exclusions of site visitors and past customers. So even though Meta says, Hey, listen, you can now have one campaign that's basically a full funnel campaign. The most important thing is your backend. If you see something else happening in your backend, you have to make decisions that are actually the best interests of your business, not in the best interest obviously of Meta. So if you have seen a drop in your ads, here is what you can do and test today. Try to consolidate your campaigns with having a CBO open, broad targeting with a creative diversification portfolio. You can also go back through all of the creatives that you have had in your archive, like historical creatives that did very well. Try to add them together in that one big CBO andromeda campaign and see if they actually start working again because we have seen that that actually does work. And third, you really need to double down on a creative production schedule because creative production, creative strategy has never been more important. Meta recommends to test 20 ads per week. You know, now the question is whether you can reset or not, but you have to start thinking about systems to actually start reading that. So try to use AI to create creatives briefs. You need to hire maybe a creative strategist or you can work with an agency like smart marketer to help you with that. Fourth, please check your backend. If you roll this out and you see the number of new customers go down and your returning customer rates go up at exclusions, even though that's not like best practices of Meta. Your goal and your objective obviously as a business owner and as a marketer is to make sure that your customer acquisition stays strong and that we use the tools that are given to us. So even though we do see that Andromeda actually does very good things for a lot of our client accounts, make sure that you check your backend and that Andromeda is not going after existing customers just to get those conversions and have a good Meta-ROS, which is not in your best interest. Your best interest is a strong backend-ROS. Look, the Andromeda update is the biggest update that we have seen since iOS 14.5 dropped. But not a lot of people are actually talking about it and even Meta keeps it a bit quiet. So the advertisers that figure this out right now can dominate while others are still running the 2023 playbook. The old way of testing your way to the one perfect ad is that. The future is creative portfolios, consolidated campaigns and feeding the machine what it actually wants, which is variety, volume and velocity. If this helps you understand what is working right now, please subscribe, leave a comment or if you see something else happening in your account that is working, please put it in the comments as well. The businesses that adopt to the Andromeda update can absolutely thrive. The ones that don't will wonder why their 2024 campaigns are not working anymore. So don't get left behind. I hope this was useful and I'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye. Thank you so much for listening to the smart marketer podcast. 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