Transcription
Everybody is talking about Facebook's new Andromeda update because it is killing return on ad spends across the board. So, if your ads have been struggling recently, today I'm going to show you exactly what this update means for you, why it's been so bad for certain advertisers, and most importantly, I'm going to break down how you can actually fix it.
So, first things first, this update has changed a lot of how the algorithm functions, how ads are delivered to the right people at the right time, at the right place, and ultimately is one of the biggest algorithmic changes that we've seen since 2021. What I want to start with is an actual look at the white paper. Now, I'm not going to read this word for word. I'm just going to highlight the two to three things in here that everybody needs to know.
Now, right off the bat, the first thing you need to understand is that this post came out on December 2nd of 2024. And even though this officially hit all accounts just about 30 days ago, it was actually rolled out incrementally to different accounts. And on top of just different accounts, it was rolled out to Advantage Plus campaigns versus non-advantage plus campaigns and audiences. So this white paper is completely public. I'll make sure we pin it down in the description. You could also just search Meta Andromeda and it's the first thing that's going to come up.
So the first part that's really important for us to understand is why did they even build Andromeda? Because you need to know how they built it before you could actually find the solution to what you need to do. So in this case, they're addressing their challenges and opportunities in this new era of advertising automation with generative AI. Now, big tip here, this is something that's not released publicly. I was just at a Meta conference and they are pushing this generative AI approach very hard. I believe it's the thing they're going to stand on the most in 2026 and beyond.
So in the white paper they're evaluating two main problems. The volume of ad candidates being a problem and then the tight latency of constraints. Now what does this even mean? The really short version of this is that the volume of ad candidates is what ads apply to a specific person? So of the thousands of advertisers out there, who deserves to get my impression? Who deserves to get my view? The next piece is the tight latency of constraints. This means that there's a very short time window for when my ad can be delivered to the right person at the right time. So with these two bullet points, what they're alluding to is that more creative volume is necessary. We need to have more active ads than ever before.
Now, as we dig further into this white paper, you can see that there's a huge investment that Meta is taking and they're actually using very clear words like high return on investment. They really want to show that they are putting a lot into this to get the best ROI for advertisers and that while even though Facebook's getting more competitive, updates like this should make the platform even better.
Now, the key thing you need to understand about Andromeda and why it is so different is in short, it is matching the ad creative at the right time to an individual. We are no longer in the audience sector of matching. This has completely completely shifted. Now, there are some caveats here which I'm going to break down, but what you should read here is very important. Meta's new personalized ads retrieval paradigm. Before Andromeda, Meta's retrieval systems were only able to apply limited personalization. They relied on isolated model stages and numerous rule-based heruristics to manage a vast number of ads. And the big difference with Andromeda is it is able to efficiently scale retrieval models by designing a highly customized deep neural network. Let me just say that in very simple terms. It can do what old meta cannot do. It can match one-to-one right time, right place. That is a massive update. And now we need to make sure our structure and strategy is adapting to exactly what Andromeda is allowing us to do.
So now that we've gone through the white paper, some of the key issues that they're tackling with Andromeda, you need to understand something that's actually been going on in the background in many, many ad accounts, if not all ad accounts over the last four to five months. I mentioned at the beginning that the white paper I just went through released in December of 2024. So they have been working on this obviously for a long time. They've been rolling it out for the course of the entire year. And now in this case, how has Andromeda already applied into ad accounts? From my understanding, from the whispers of Facebook and from basically everyone in our community, I've grown to understand that the Advantage Plus algorithm is the Andromeda algorithm. And prior to the full sweep of Andromeda, where it is everywhere now, any audience that had Advantage Plus on was using the Andromeda algorithm. In previous setups of days, even six months ago, this was known as ASC, right? Classic ASC uncontrollable campaigns. Now I have generally pushed to use manual campaigns in many cases which are now using the Andromeda algorithm. But if you had or were using anything with Advantage Plus on that would indicate you are actually using that Andromeda algorithm. There's a good chance you've been running this already. And if you've been using manual everything then you're swapped over to it.
Now just so I'm super super clear. If your audience looks like this where we have Advantage Plus on and in many cases we are not clicking further limit the reach of your ads then you were already running on the Andromeda algorithm. If you were selecting further limit the reach of my ads and you had Advantage Plus up here off then you were not on the Andromeda algorithm. This is a very key distinction so you could see if you were forcefully swapped over or if you were manually swapped over.
Let's talk about solutions here. How on earth do we fix this? How do we approach ads now with this new update where basically everything was ripped from under us? Okay, it is actually really simple. There is one core concept and two mechanisms that we need to apply. The core concept is we need to give everything a shot and we need to have volume of giving everything a shot. So when I say give everything a shot, I mean every single ad that gets uploaded needs to have an equal opportunity to actually spend. Now, what that means is we can't have any heavy restrictions in our ad account that we may have had previously. That means is completely completely dead because as we just read in that white paper, it has never been a better time to allow all of your ads to have a shot at serving to an individual. We are in an individual matching system. So, if you are grouping things together and restricting those things together with specific budgets or even worse, forcing budgets on ads that don't deserve spend, then Meta is going to have a harder time matching the right person to your ad. And in many cases, you will get lower ad rank, higher CPCs, higher CPMs, and of course, a worse ROI.
What do we do? First, let's talk structure. I have shared this exact structure for the last year and it's almost like I had a feeling this was coming. It's almost like I've done some of my research. This exact structure where we are focused on a scale campaign, a prospecting campaign, which is the most important part of this, a retargeting, and a retention campaign. Those are all still critical.
Now, let me just get the easy ones out of the way. Your retargeting campaign and your retention campaign. This is where you're hitting your engaged and existing customers. Andromeda does not apply as hard here. And the reason is very simple. That is a very tight group of customers that you are specifically targeting and you are okay with forcing spend on that group. Where Andromeda is going to have the most value is for acquiring net new customers for your business so you can actually scale. So what we want to focus on specifically is the prospecting campaign.
Now the prospecting campaign is the campaign that we are launching individual broad packs every single time we upload new creatives. So the workflow here is very straightforward. We run a single prospecting campaign on a CBO structure. The reason the CBO structure works here more than ever is because Andromeda is built in a way where it needs to have the flexibility to spend the cash on whatever is working the best or wherever it can match the most relevant ad to the right person.
The next piece and the rest of this is essentially organizational pieces. It's still very important to have organization in the ad account because it's no longer about breaking things out and setting budgets. It's way more about making sure you're understanding what packs apply where, when packs need to be paused or restarted, and even making sure you're limiting the learning phase of many, many, many packs that you may launch. Each of these packs that we've been running for over a year now with this exact setup host anywhere from one creative to as many creatives as you need, but you only launch those on a specific day. So, if I have ads ready today, they get launched in a pack. If I have ads ready by the end of this week, then they get launched in a new pack, right? And you can see here, I like to date my packs. So, if this was the first day of the year, I'd say broadpack one. If this was the 15th day of the year, I'd say broadpack number two. Okay?
So, when we build this core system, which we have right here, this exact core system that I have on my screen right here, we're going to have a lot of ads, which is very, very important. We want to have creative diversity. We need to have creative diversity so that Andromeda could show the best ads to the best people at the right time. That time factor only comes into play if you go wide. Meaning you run CBO, campaign budget optimization, and you don't have a dozen different campaigns in your ad account. So, if your ad account has 20 different campaigns in it, all active, all with little individual budgets, you are going to get crushed because you are essentially force-feeding this massive algorithm that is meant to do the exact opposite thing. That is meant to work slowly and allow the best ads to get served to the best people at the best time. That is the key.
Now, for loyal listeners out there, I know you want to talk about the graduation process. The graduation process remains the same. You do two things in graduation. Graduation is just a place to host your best of your best of your best ads. You should really only do this when you're at least spending $10,000 per month. Otherwise, just ignore this step completely and just continue to run broad in interest packs. When you graduate, you do two things. First, you take your best of your best ads and you graduate them into a scale campaign. So, you take that ad. I'll show you in Ads Manager right here. You take your ads from prospecting that are the best of the best. You duplicate them and you push them into the scale campaign. The second thing that you do is you take that same top performing ad. So let's say it was creative number five was our top performing ad and we graduate that into an interest ad set. Now the reason we push this into an interest ad set is because we want that hyperco competitive environment that allows Andromeda to spend money where it's most likely to make money back. And we want to target lightly with interest groups. The key of interest groups is that they expand the broad audience. So, if you look at your broad audiences, you'll notice that you might only reach 10,000, 20,000 people, 100,000 people, 200,000 people, but you're not anywhere near the 150 million people that you could be targeting. And what often happens is you get stuck. My broad audience can only reach this many people. And maybe you could push it really hard, but it gets higher and higher in cost. So, when you run interests that are successful with your best ads, your broad audience actually finds new pockets of potential success and therefore expands over time. This is a very important concept that basically everyone needs to understand.
By the way, if an update like this is absolutely blowing your mind, then go to the moonlighters.com/apply to actually see if you're fit to work with us so that you can be months and months ahead of this, right? We want to be at the cutting edge of any update that's happening because days and days of waiting to apply the right structure, strategy, system, and actually have hands-on help could cost thousands of dollars. That said, this Andromeda update is a huge one. And if you want to go into way more detail about the structure that I just detailed out, then click this video right here where I break down my exact structure in extreme detail, probably five times as long as you just heard, so you can understand exactly what campaigns, ad sets, and even ads to set up. Don't forget to triple down on your creative volume right now. It has never been more important, especially as we head into the fourth quarter. And lastly, if you got value out of this video, let me know in the comments below.