How Meta Andromeda picks your ads (and why creative is now your targeting)

If your Meta results feel less predictable than they used to, Andromeda is a big part of why. It changed what decides who sees your ads, and it moved a lot of that weight from your targeting settings onto your creative.

This guide explains what Andromeda is, what Meta has actually said about it, and what it means for the ads you make next.

What is Meta Andromeda?

Andromeda is the system Meta uses for ad retrieval: the first step in deciding which ad a person sees. Meta’s engineering team introduced it in December 2024 and described the job like this: retrieval “is tasked with selecting ads from tens of millions of ad candidates into a few thousand relevant ad candidates” for each person.

Only the ads that survive retrieval move on to the later stages, where Meta’s systems score them, rank them and run the auction. So if your ad isn’t retrieved for someone, it never competes for that person at all.

Meta reported that Andromeda brought a +6% recall improvement to retrieval and an +8% improvement in ads quality on selected segments, built on a 10,000x increase in model capacity for personalization. It runs on NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper hardware and Meta’s own MTIA chips.

Why creative became your targeting

Andromeda didn’t arrive alone. It came with Meta’s push toward automated campaigns, such as Advantage+ sales campaigns, where the system rather than the advertiser chooses most of the audience.

In April 2025, Meta spelled out what that means for advertisers:

“With the rise of AI-enabled advertising tools, the focus has shifted from niche targeting to creative diversification as the best lever to find the most relevant audiences.”

In practice, your ad is now one of the strongest signals the system has about who it’s for. An ad about saving time on weeknight dinners tells Andromeda something different from an ad about cooking for a big family, even if both sell the same meal kit. Each one gives the system a different set of people to find.

That’s why Meta also says Andromeda exists to handle more creative: as advertisers upload a larger volume and diversity of ads, the system has to process more options when deciding who to show an ad to.

Concepts, not variations

Meta defines creative diversification as “creating a wide range of ad creatives with different themes, messages, and visuals to cater to diverse audience segments.”

The key words are different themes, messages and visuals. Many accounts read “diversify” as “make more versions”, and end up with a dozen near-identical ads. Those give the system very little new to work with.

	Variation	New concept
What changes	The hook, color, headline or call to action	The idea: the story, angle or customer motivation
What the system learns	Almost nothing new about who the ad is for	A new signal about a different group of people
Example (meal kit)	Same “quick dinners” ad with a new opening line	“Cook for a big family without the stress”

Meta’s own guidance on fatigue points the same way. When an ad wears out, its first recommendation is a new ad with “a new image or video that is materially different from the original creative.”

What Meta hasn’t said

Andromeda has attracted a lot of confident advice. Two claims come up often and aren’t from Meta’s published material:

• A fixed number of ads. You’ll see ranges like “10 to 50 creatives per ad set” or “5 to 10 new ads a week”. Those come from agencies and tools, not Meta. The one number Meta has given predates Andromeda: at least 20 diversified ads per Advantage+ shopping campaign, in November 2024. Its current guidance is directional: run a wide range of genuinely different creatives.
• A similarity score cut-off. Some guides claim ads above a certain “similarity” percentage, often 60%, get suppressed. Meta hasn’t published any such threshold; it only shows a high, medium or low indicator.

What Meta has shared is a clear direction of travel, plus examples. In its April 2025 post, Dribbleup’s head of ecommerce described ramping “from 3-4 new creatives a week to almost 50 on average” while keeping performance steady, by putting “many new, diversified concepts into market.”

What to do about it

1. Start from customer motivations, not formats. List the different reasons people buy from you: saving time, saving money, status, worry, a specific occasion. Each one is a potential concept.
2. Make each concept materially different. Change the story and the opening visual, not just the words on screen. If two ads would look the same with the sound off, they’re probably one concept.
3. Cover the placements. Reels, Stories and Feed behave differently. Make each concept work in 9:16, 4:5 and 1:1.
4. Keep winners running and keep adding. Meta notes that keeping an original ad active instead of pausing it may maximize results. Add new concepts alongside it, rather than swapping everything at once.
5. Watch for fatigue. Ads Manager will tell you when an ad’s audience has seen it too often. Our guide to the signs your Meta ads are fatigued explains what to look for.
6. Give the system room. Andromeda can only choose between the ads you give it. A steady pipeline of new concepts matters more than any single winner.

The bottom line

Andromeda didn’t make targeting irrelevant. It made your creative part of your targeting. The advertisers who do best aren’t the ones with the most versions of one ad. They’re the ones who keep giving Meta genuinely new ideas to match to new people.

Sources

• Meta Engineering, “Meta Andromeda: Supercharging Advantage+ automation with the next-gen personalized ads retrieval engine”, December 2, 2024
• Meta for Business, “The Creative Advantage: Unlocking the Power of Diversification with Meta Andromeda”, April 22, 2025
• Meta Business Help Center, “About creative fatigue recommendations in Meta Ads Manager”
• Apogee, “Meta Andromeda: What It Changes for Your Ad Creatives”, on similarity thresholds and creative counts not coming from Meta