What 834M in Meta ad spend across 3,000+ advertisers actually taught us about the Andromeda update
Hey gang, GG from Confect here. We recently pulled data from 3,000+ advertisers and over $834M in ad spend to look at what actually shifted after Meta's Andromeda update.
Real behavioral data from real brands, not recycled takes.
Three things stood out that I think are worth sharing.
1.The update hit broad audiences harder than retargeting, which is the opposite of what most people assumed.
A lot of the early Andromeda commentary was about retargeting becoming less reliable. '
What our data actually shows is that broad prospecting took the bigger hit in terms of efficiency variance.
Why?
Andromeda relies more heavily on creative signals to decide who to show an ad to.
In retargeting, the audience signal is strong enough to compensate for weak creative.
In broad, the creative IS the targeting signal. I
f your creative doesn't encode who it's for, Andromeda has less to work with and efficiency drops.
The accounts that maintained stable CPAs in broad after the update were almost all running creative with clear product specificity and audience context built into the frame itself.
- Catalog ads with brand assets in the creative are outperforming generic product-only frames by a significant margin.
Before Andromeda, a clean product-on-white worked fine. Andromeda's ranking model weights predicted engagement much harder now. Generic frames don't generate the scroll-stop signal the algorithm needs to distribute efficiently.
What we're seeing across the dataset: ads that carry brand context (a logo, a color system, a price badge, a background that isn't white) are getting meaningfully better delivery at the same bid.
The algorithm is essentially charging a tax on creative that looks like every other retailer. Not a design opinion. Showing up consistently across verticals in our data.
- Frequency tolerance went up, but only for creative that earns it.
Accounts running varied creative sets are seeing higher frequency thresholds before performance degrades.
Andromeda appears to be better at distributing across a creative set and avoiding the same person seeing the same ad repeatedly.
The practical implication: the "refresh creative every 2 weeks" rule of thumb is too blunt now. Accounts with 4-6 distinct creative variations are sustaining performance at frequencies that would have killed a single-creative setup pre-update. The cadence that matters now is distinctive variation count.
These are 3 patterns from the data. Not universal laws, different account structures will see this differently. But across 3,000+ advertisers and $834M in spend these were consistent signals.
Happy to go deeper in the comments, or share the report if you interested in 30+ more findings
Again this is aggregated data from 3000 ecom advertisers so might not be exactly as you experience things in your own ad account 😃