14 Jul When Meta Ads Stop Working: What Andromeda Changed
If you’ve been running Meta ads for years and things quietly stopped feeling right toward the end of 2025 — numbers that don’t behave the way they used to, structures that used to reliably work suddenly underperforming — there’s a specific, identifiable reason, not just bad luck or algorithm mood swings.
What Andromeda Actually Is
Around September 2025 (some reports place it as early as August), Meta rolled out Andromeda, an AI-driven ad-retrieval system built to match the best ad to the right audience intent at each stage of someone’s customer journey. For anyone already running campaigns at the time, it was less like a gradual update and more like the engine being swapped out mid-drive — the vehicle kept moving, but a lot changed underneath.
What Andromeda Requires: Full Advantage+, Across Every Level
For Andromeda to work at its best, especially on Sales, Lead Generation, and App Install campaigns, the recommendation is going fully Advantage+ — not on just one setting, but across campaign level, budget level, audience level, placement level, and critically, ad level.
Ad-level Advantage+ means something specific: putting as many ads as possible inside a single ad set, rather than spreading individual ads across multiple ad sets the way most structures used to.
The New Structure: One Portfolio, Not Many Individual Tests
The structure working for most accounts right now: a single campaign, a single ad set, with ten or more ads inside it as a starting point, for a given offer or product line — retargeting still runs as its own separate structure. This doesn’t mean only one campaign and one ad set total; different offers or product categories can still have their own campaign and ad set. What’s changed is that the old approach — multiple ad sets each testing a single ad against the others — largely stopped being the most effective structure.
Worth being honest about: this isn’t guaranteed to work identically for every account. Some accounts still perform better under the older structure, and the shift is still actively transitioning across the platform, not fully settled.
Build Ads as a Portfolio, Not Individual Pieces
The mindset shift Meta is pushing is to stop optimizing single ads and instead build a portfolio of ads targeting different personas within one target audience.
A simple way to picture this: selling kitchen appliances, with one ad featuring a young man and another featuring a happy family. If Andromeda infers someone is a mother based on her activity (say, engaging with parenting-related content), it can choose to show her the ad featuring a young man, framed as a gift idea. If it infers someone is a father who values family time, it can show him the ad featuring a happy family instead — same product, different ad, matched to a different persona automatically. The goal isn’t picking the single “best” ad; it’s giving the system enough varied creative to match well across different people within your audience.
How to Evaluate Campaigns Differently Now
This changes how performance should be read, on top of tracking the usual metrics like CPM and CTR. An ad featuring an underrepresented persona in your audience — say, an ad featuring a 60-year-old, in an audience with relatively few people in that age group — may show weaker numbers simply because there are fewer matching people to show it to, not because the ad itself is bad. Judging ads individually, the old way, can lead to cutting creative that’s actually working fine for the slice of audience it was built for. Evaluation now needs to happen more at the portfolio level than the individual-ad level.
This Is Still Settling — Don’t Treat Any Single Answer as Final
Given how recently this shifted and how unevenly it’s still transitioning across accounts, the most reliable approach isn’t assuming one fixed structure will work for every account from day one. It’s closer to: rebuild with the current best-practice structure, launch, then evaluate real performance against your specific account’s results — and adjust from there rather than assuming the first attempt is the final answer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did my Meta ads suddenly stop working? For a lot of long-running accounts, the cause traces back to Meta Andromeda, an AI-driven ad-retrieval system Meta rolled out around September 2025 (some reports place it as early as August). It changed how ads get matched to audience intent, and campaign structures that worked well before often stopped performing the same way afterward.
What does Andromeda require to work well? Going fully Advantage+ across every level of the campaign — campaign, budget, audience, placement, and ad level. At the ad level specifically, that means putting many ads inside a single ad set rather than spreading individual ads thinly across multiple ad sets.
Does the old multiple-ad-sets structure still work? In most cases, no — though this is still transitioning, and some accounts do still see better results with the older structure. The structure working for most accounts now is a single campaign with a single ad set containing ten or more ads, treated as a portfolio rather than tested individually, with retargeting kept as a separate campaign.
How should I evaluate individual ad performance now? Less in isolation than before. An ad targeting a smaller persona within your audience may show weaker raw numbers simply because fewer people match that persona — not because the ad itself is underperforming. CPM and CTR still matter, but they need to be read at the portfolio level, not ad by ad.
Reviews are conducted personally by Jason Gan, a Meta Certified Professional and Badged Meta Business Partner who has audited over 1,000 advertiser accounts since 2007. You can see real account breakdowns on the Jason Gan YouTube channel.
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