What is Meta Andromeda?

If you’ve been running ads the past few years, you know it’s been chaos. Apple n*ked targeting with iOS14.5, Meta rebuilt its engine, and now we’re in the Andromeda era - where creative isn’t just important, it’s everything.

Let’s break down how we got here, what Andromeda actually is, and how you should be building ads in 2025.

Here’s what Meta says about Andromeda:

According to Meta’s engineering team, “Andromeda is a personalized ads retrieval engine powered by advanced AI and custom hardware like the NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip and Meta’s MTIA accelerators. It reimagines the retrieval stage - the part of the system that has to sift through tens of millions of ad candidates in real time - using deep neural networks and a hierarchical indexing system.

Meta says this delivers a +6% recall boost and an +8% ads quality improvement, while also preparing the system to handle the creative explosion from Advantage+ automation and generative AI tools.”

Looks confusing, huh? Here’s the easy version:

Before Andromeda, the system let almost any ad variation slip through, even tiny tweaks like a new background color.

Now, the engine is way pickier. It only surfaces ads that look and feel like genuinely different ideas. That’s why small changes don’t work anymore - if you don’t give Meta enough variety, your ads never even make it out of the “tens of millions” pile into the handful a user will actually see.

The Golden Age: Pre-iOS 14

This was “easy mode.” Meta ads worked like a math equation:

find the right audience + show them an ad = conversions.

• How it worked: Meta leaned on third-party data like the IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) plus the Pixel to track everything users did.

• The playbook: Stack tiny custom audiences, run lookalikes, and let targeting carry you. Creative mattered, but it wasn’t the star.

Then Apple’s iOS 14 hit. Tracking collapsed. The old playbook died overnight.

The Recovery: Meta Lattice (2023–2024)

Meta’s answer was Meta Lattice, a new AI system trained on billions of data points.

Instead of obsessing over micro-targeting, advertisers leaned on broad audiences + better creatives. Creative testing became the new battleground. Meta also launched a lot of different things like Advantage+ Shopping and the Advantage+ Placements with a whole range of Advantage+ things, just like Google’s Performance Max

But this was just the warm-up.

The Leap: Meta Andromeda (2024–2025)

Enter Andromeda, Meta’s next-gen AI architecture.

What makes it different?

• Built on massive model scale

• Trained to predict what creative will work before you even launch it

• Smarter at finding buyers without pixel-perfect tracking

What stopped working

Cranking out 3–5 slight variations of the same idea, swapping backgrounds or fonts, and relying on a single designer to recycle static changes doesn’t move the needle anymore.

What works now (post-Andromeda)

Andromeda rewards volume + variety. The brands winning today are the ones treating creatives like product lines, not one-offs.

• 4–10 unique designs per concept

• Big differences in layout, visual style, and even copy

• Static + video designers collaborating on each idea

• Every ad concept launched as a bundle of variations

This approach consistently improves ad hit rate (the % of ads that become winners).

💡 Quick math:
Ad Hit Rate (%) = (# Winning Ads ÷ # Ads Tested) × 100

• 2% = broken process

• 10–20% = healthy, scalable system

Action steps to adapt

1. Stop iterating. Start variating.
   Color swaps aren’t strategy. New layouts and angles are.

2. Add more hands.
   Even one extra static designer or video editor can double your creative output.

3. Think in bundles.
   Each ad concept = 3–10 versions. Build that into your workflow.

4. Track winners, not output.
   Don’t brag about “making 50 ads.” Brag about your hit rate.

5. Do better research.
   Study 3–5 ads in your niche, then remix them into something original. Beauty and supplement brands are usually ahead of the curve - watch them.

6. Deploy more UGCs
   Try getting more user-generated content, you can generate them from ChatGPT Sora, Google VEO or can get it done by influencers

The big takeaway

The game is all about creative testing, not about about audience testing. Test more creatives and research more brands that you know to see what they are doing.

What I recommend?

Test as many ads as you want - don’t rely on Meta Andromeda. Experiment as much as you can with creatives, but make sure they’re the kind you’d want to buy from yourself: simple, appealing, and effective.

What should you do?

• Audit your current workflow – are you actually producing variety, or just recycling?

• Build a creative system that outputs bundles, not one-offs.

• Track your hit rate weekly. If it’s under 10%, your process is broken.

• Treat creative like product development: research, test, launch, refine.

That’s how you win in the Andromeda era.