Meta Andromeda Update: 7 Changes We Made for DTC Ads

Meta now starts every ad auction by sorting through tens of millions of eligible ads and keeping a few thousand. The engine doing that sorting is Andromeda. When it launched, Meta reported a 6% gain in retrieval recall and an 8% gain in ad quality on selected segments, according to Meta's engineering team. That first cut happens before your bid or audience settings get much say.

For a DTC brand, the Meta Andromeda update moved the pressure point in the account. Twenty versions of the same video now fight each other for one slot. Ad sets split too thin never collect enough purchases to learn, and the creative brief has become the closest thing you have to a targeting setting.

This post walks through 7 changes we made across our client accounts once that sank in. Each one comes with the number we use to size it, built on the $49.04 median cost per purchase from our 15-brand Meta ads benchmark. Most Andromeda explainers end at "make more creative." We'll show how much creative your budget can carry.

What is the Meta Andromeda update?

Andromeda is the retrieval layer of Meta's ad system. Each time someone opens Instagram or Facebook, Meta has to choose an ad from a huge pool of eligible ones. Retrieval makes the first cut. Meta's December 2024 engineering post says it narrows tens of millions of candidates to a few thousand, and only those go on to the ranking models that predict clicks and purchases.

Before Andromeda, much of that first cut leaned on rules and simpler models. The new system runs a deep neural network on NVIDIA Grace Hopper hardware and Meta's own MTIA chips. Meta built it to cope with a fast-growing volume of ads as AI creative tools spread.

It works next to GEM, Meta's ads foundation model. Meta's November 2025 post on GEM credits it with 5% more ad conversions on Instagram and 3% more on Facebook Feed. Put together, the platform decides who sees an ad, and your creative tells it who the ad is for.

"Selecting ads from tens of millions of ad candidates into a few thousand relevant ad candidates." — Meta Engineering, December 2024

Change 1: We count concepts instead of ads

Retrieval judges ads on what they show and say. When ten ads share the same footage and hook, the system has little reason to treat them as ten options. In practice they split the delivery that one concept would have earned anyway.

So we stopped reporting "ads live" to clients and started reporting distinct concepts. A concept, for us, changes at least two of four things: the persona, the problem, the format or the setting. A new caption on the same UGC clip is an iteration. A founder demo aimed at a 50-year-old with sensitive skin and a creator unboxing aimed at a 25-year-old gift buyer are two concepts.

This is the first gap we find in most audits. A brand reports 40 active ads and we find 5 concepts underneath them. The fix lives in the creative brief, and no amount of Ads Manager work will close it.

Change 2: We cut ad sets to what the budget can feed

Meta's learning phase guidance says an ad set needs about 50 optimization events in a week to stabilize. Andromeda didn't change that number. It made ignoring it more expensive, because every extra ad set splits the same purchases and the same signal.

The arithmetic is short. Fifty purchases a week at a $49.04 cost per purchase is $2,452 of spend, or about $350 a day for one ad set. At a $25 CPA the same target costs $179 a day. At $100 it costs $714.

Our rule: if daily spend can't reach that figure for an ad set, the ad set shouldn't exist. A brand spending $15,000 a month on Meta has about $500 a day, which covers one prospecting ad set at the median CPA with room for retargeting. Run your own CPA through our Facebook ads budget calculator before you add structure.

"Fifty purchases a week at a $49.04 CPA costs about $350 a day per ad set. At $15,000 a month on Meta, that's one prospecting ad set." — Top Growth Marketing, Meta account model, 2026

Change 3: We size the creative pipeline from the budget

Every Andromeda explainer we read says to make more creative, and none of them says how much. We work it backwards from spend. A new concept needs roughly two times your CPA in spend before we judge it, which matches the read window in our Meta ads creative testing framework.

We then cap testing at about 20% of monthly Meta spend, so proven ads keep most of the budget. At the $49.04 median CPA, a $10,000 month funds about 20 new concepts. A $50,000 month funds about 101, and a $100,000 month about 203.

Treat those totals as ceilings. Few teams can produce 200 distinct concepts a month, and the useful figure is usually the low end. A brand spending $10,000 a month should brief around five new concepts a week and stop there. Thirty lookalike edits of last month's winner cost production money and end up sharing one slot.

Change 4: We let broad targeting do the audience work

Andromeda builds its candidate list from signals about each person, so stacked interests and narrow lookalikes mostly shrink the pool it can search. We moved prospecting to broad or Advantage+ audience in almost every account. The controls we keep are location, age floors for regulated products and existing-customer exclusions where the offer calls for them.

The audience work moved into the creative. A brand that used to run separate ad sets for yoga and running interests now runs one ad set with a yoga-mat concept and a trail-run concept inside it. Retrieval sorts which person sees which. The same logic applies inside Advantage+ shopping campaigns, where the creative mix is the main lever you still control.

One caution. Broad delivery tends to drift toward people who already know you. Watch new-customer share (covered in change 6) so prospecting doesn't slide into retargeting.

Change 5: We brief by persona and problem

Our creative briefs used to start with the product. Now they start with a person and a problem. For a skincare client, one month's brief covered four buyers: a 45-year-old worried about dark spots, a new parent with ten minutes in the morning, a shopper comparing prices against a department-store brand, and someone buying a gift.

Each buyer gets a different hook and proof point, plus a format that suits how they shop. The dark-spot concept runs as a before-and-after with dermatologist framing. For the new parent we film a 15-second routine on a phone. Price comparison works best as a static ingredient table, and the gift buyer sees the packaging first.

If we could keep only one of these seven changes, it would be this one. Distinct buyers produce distinct ads without anyone trying, and distinct ads give retrieval more ways to find a match.

Change 6: We judge creative on blended numbers

As more decisions move inside Meta, in-platform ROAS gets easier to flatter. Broad audiences and automated placements can find existing customers who would have bought anyway. We grade creative changes on numbers Meta doesn't report: blended marketing efficiency ratio (total revenue over total ad spend), new-customer CAC from Shopify, and the share of orders coming from first-time buyers.

The habit started with a luxury bedding account we took over. It ran a handful of ads, mixed prospecting and remarketing audiences in the same ad sets, and showed one hero product in every ad. We split the audiences, spread the range across new concepts and tracked blended revenue every week. Revenue grew about 6x in six months, and the weekly blended read told us which concepts were bringing in new buyers.

For context, our Meta ads benchmark puts median purchase ROAS at 2.96 across 15 brands and $2,464,453 of spend. Use it as a sanity check. Make the decision on your own blended MER.

Change 7: We give new concepts a fair read before cutting them

Andromeda needs time to find who a new concept fits. Cutting ads after two days of high CPA ends that search early. Our minimum read is seven days or two times CPA in spend, whichever comes later, with no edits in between. Meta treats budget, creative and targeting changes as significant edits, and each one can send the ad set back into learning.

Small budgets make this harder. At $100 a day, an ad set with a $49.04 CPA gets about 14 purchases a week. At a $100 CPA it gets 7. Neither will exit learning, so the read has to come from leading signals like hook rate, thumb-stop rate, cost per add-to-cart and click-through rate, checked against your account's last 90 days.

When a concept clears the read, we move it into the scaling campaign unchanged and brief two iterations of it for the next round. When it fails, we write one line on why, usually that the buyer was wrong or the hook lost people in the first two seconds. The next brief then starts from evidence instead of a hunch, and over a quarter that log becomes the most useful creative document the brand owns.

Where to start this week

Start with an audit. Count the distinct concepts in each ad set and check whether each ad set can reach about 50 purchases a week. Next, size your testing from budget: at the $49.04 median CPA, a $10,000 month supports about 20 new concepts when a fifth of spend goes to tests. Last, move the grading to blended MER and new-customer CAC so broad targeting can't flatter the results.

If you'd like a second set of eyes on your account structure, book a growth strategy call. Our Meta ads team runs this concept count on every new account and will tell you which change we'd make first.

Last updated: October 16, 2026

Written by

Jack Paxton

Jack Paxton is the founder of Top Growth Marketing, a DTC and eCommerce growth agency. He works hands-on with Shopify and DTC brands on paid social, Google Ads, and Klaviyo email and SMS.

Founder of Top Growth Marketing · $336M+ managed ad spend · 218+ DTC brands scaled

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