How to Maximize Meta’s Andromeda Update

If you are a performance marketer, one of the words you have probably heard a lot in the last few months is "Andromeda." There have been a lot of conversations online of late around Meta’s Andromeda update. 

But what does it actually mean, and how do you take advantage of this update to work well for you? I will be covering this and more in today's blog post. Let’s get into it.

What is Meta Andromeda

Andromeda is Meta’s AI system that decides:

• Who sees your ad
• When they see it
• Where they see it (placements: feed, stories, reels)
• Which creative is shown
• How your budget is distributed

It is basically Meta’s next-gen ads delivery and optimization system. Its main goal is to optimize your campaign performance and get you maximum results at the cheapest cost. It is precision marketing in action. 

One of the biggest goals of marketers has always been precision marketing. How can I reach the right audience (targeting) with the right message (creative) on the right platform (placements) at the right time? This is what Meta created Andromeda to help digital marketers solve. 

With Andromeda, you don't need to bother yourself too much about manually controlling each of these variables anymore. You just need to give the control to Andromeda and allow it to do its thing. 

That being said, getting results from Andromeda is not automatic. It's a double-edged sword. A lot of paid ads experts have complained about a decrease in campaign performance since the Andromeda update. 

In the same vein, some performance marketers have seen an improvement in their campaign performance. 

You have to know how to best feed the AI system with the info it needs to effectively maximize your campaign performance. I will be writing about this around the below areas:

1. Audience
2. Placements
3. Event tracking: Pixel and App SDK 
4. Copy on Creative, Primary text, and headline
5. Advantage+ Creative text generation
6. Advantage+ creative image generation
7. Advantage+ Creative enhancements

You need to rightly position your ad campaign around these areas for it to have everything it needs to give you maximum results. 

There is a new way of running ad campaigns on Meta now, and it's called the Andromeda way. Advertisers that choose this way get great results, while those that still insist on the old way of doing things, e.g., manual targeting and manual placements, have found out that they are running against the tide.

When you take back control from Meta in any of the above categories, you are basically telling Andromeda to function only within the parameters you have given it. Meaning you are restricting it from looking at other ways of optimizing your ad campaign outside the given parameters. 

Now let us look at each of the areas I highlighted earlier.

Audience

This is where you indicate the kind of person you want to see your ad. E.g., you run a Meta ad campaign for a fashion store, and you do manual targeting for people with fashion interests. That means your ad will only show to people that are known to consistently engage with fashion-related posts on Facebook, Instagram, or Threads. 

However, this isn't necessarily the best audience for you. On paper it looks on point, but that someone is interested in fashion does not mean they are ready to buy.

 They may not be in the market for the bag you want to sell now, or they may even have something similar already. However, when you give Facebook Andromeda free rein, it looks at a broader audience and then looks at different touchpoints, some of which you can't manually define yourself. 

For example, it checks like this: Ben engaged with this other post about a bag 1hr ago and messaged the brand. What are the other digital habits of Ben on Meta? Then it looks at other people with similar habits and shows your ad to them. 

These can include someone who doesn't typically engage with fashion posts but who has another online behavior that proves to Meta’s AI that he is very likely to buy. 

You would have missed out on that sale if you only limited Facebook Andromeda to your predefined audience of fashionistas.

To take advantage of Facebook Andromeda, use Advantage+ Audience. Don't add any interest. Leave it broad. You are, however, free to add minimum age and location targeting.

Placements

This is where you indicate which platforms and where on those platforms you want your ads to show. To maximize Meta’s Andromeda update, use Advantage+ placements. 

This gives Meta the control to show your ad to an individual on any placement it feels will get that person to take the desired action. E.g Oyin may have higher chances of converting when she sees your ad on Instagram stories, while Ayo may have a higher chance of converting if he sees it on Instagram Reels or maybe on Facebook feed.

 Using Advantage+ allows Meta’s AI to determine the best placement to use for each individual based on available data that it has on similar users. If you, however, restrict by selecting your ad to show only on Instagram, for example, that is a couple of optimization variables gone.

Event tracking

This is a crucial part of maximizing Meta’s AI optimization. A well-setup pixel or sdk app tracking ensures Meta AI is getting the right quality of data for campaign optimization. 

A wrong setup here can mar your ad performance and bring in poor results. You need to ensure you are feeding Meta the right data by making sure your pixel (web) and sdk (app) tracking are accurate. 

It's always a good idea to activate Conversion API as well to ensure you are not missing out on passing conversion data that may not be picked up by the tags on the website.

Copy on Creative, Primary Text, and Headline

This is where the real targeting now takes place on Meta. Your creative is like the most important piece of your ad campaign since the Andromeda update. 

You need to help Meta’s AI to show your ad to the right audience by having the right copy on your creative, primary text, and headlines. 

It helps when you call out your target audience in your creative, primary text or headline. This gives Andromeda the right signal to know who to show the ad to, e.g., "Calling all CFOs" or "Attention Gamers," etc.

Advantage+ Creative text generation

Selecting this allows Meta to generate different variants of your primary copy as ad text and headlines. This ensures different people can see different copies depending on what is more likely to convert them.

Since people are different, you don't want to have just one copy showing to everyone. You want to give the AI enough variables to help optimize your campaign. Advantage+ creative text helps you with this. 

It has also been discovered that using Advantage+ creative text generation improves your ad CTR by up to 3.85%.

Advantage+ Creative image generation

This is where you give Meta the room to use automatically generated images for your ad campaign.

 When you upload your ad, it analyzes it and generates a couple of other images that can fit into your campaign. You can scroll through these generated images and then choose the ones that align with your brand. 

Advertisers that activated this option have seen up to an 11% increase in CTR and about an 8% increase in conversion rate.

Advantage+ creative enhancements

Here you give Meta’s Andromeda the freedom to make some changes and enhancements to your ad assets. Below is a list of some of these enhancements:

• Creative sticker CTAs: Adds AI-generated stickers to CTAs in story ads as a way of customizing ad creatives.
• Translate text: Automatically translates text to other languages in situations where it believes it will improve performance. Translations are more likely to be delivered to people that understand those languages.
• Text improvements: Varies how the text you provide shows. You may see certain phrases from your primary text appearing in headlines or descriptions or see your headlines appearing as primary text. This only happens when Meta predicts it will improve performance.
• Video/Visual touch-ups: Crops video or image to fit all placements.
• Video effects: Enhances color and sharpens visuals on videos when it's likely to improve performance.
• Overlays: Provides text as an overlay on ad creative when it's likely to improve performance.
• Music: Adds AI-generated music that matches a creative’s look and feel. It is only done when it is likely to improve performance.
• Animation: Automatically adds common movements like panning, zooming, rotating, and more to eligible ad images when it's likely to improve performance

I hope the above has proved helpful in helping you see how you can maximize Meta's Andromeda update to your advantage.

However please note that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to all this. It's all dependent on the brand you are promoting. E.g., for a B2B campaign, you may just have to manually set your targeting, but as much as possible, let your campaign align with each of the above to maximize performance.