What is the Meta Andromeda update, and how should you run Meta ads after it?

Andromeda is Meta’s new system for deciding which ad each person sees. For years, Meta’s ad system mostly answered one question: who should see this ad? Andromeda flips that. It now asks which ad a specific person should see. If you run Meta ads, this means the number and variety of your creatives matter more than how narrowly you define your audience.

Komal Phogat, a performance marketer who has spent close to eight years running Meta and Google Ads for brands like Apollo 24|7 and House of Candy, sums up the change in one line: “It’s no longer about who should see this ad, but now it’s about which specific ad should this person see.”

Here’s what that looks like in a real ad account, how to plan creatives for it, and how to answer the Andromeda questions that now come up in performance marketing interviews.

How Meta ads worked before Andromeda

Before Andromeda, most of the work happened at the audience level. You built a tight group of people who were likely to want your product (say, people interested in music) and showed the same two or three ads to all of them.

The creative had one job: deliver the message. Finding the right buyer was the audience’s job.

What changed with Andromeda

Andromeda tries to match each user, in real time, with the creative they are most likely to engage with.

Take one person shopping for earbuds. Do they care most about long battery life? Clearer sound? Deep bass? Under the old setup, they saw whatever ad the brand had made for “music lovers”. Now Meta tries to work out what this person cares about and serve the ad that speaks to it.

So your creative does two jobs now. It delivers the message, and it gives Meta the signal it uses to find the right person. If you only run two similar ads, the system has very little to match with.

What an Andromeda-ready ad account looks like

boAt is a useful example. A recent look at its page in the Meta Ads Library showed close to 640 active ads. Three of them show how differently one product can be pitched:

• A gifting ad. A 3-second ad offering earbuds customised with a name for an extra ₹69. It’s aimed at people buying a personal gift for a friend, spouse or parent.
• A battery ad. Built around up to 42 hours of playtime, which speaks to daily commuters travelling by metro or cab.
• A sound ad. An Airdopes 311 Pro ad about powerful sound, fast charging and 150 minutes of playback, for people who care most about audio quality.

Same brand, same category, three different buyers. Each ad answers a different “what matters to me?” question, and Andromeda decides which person gets which answer.

How to see any brand’s ads for free

You can do this research yourself in a couple of minutes:

1. Search “Meta Ads Library” on Google and open it.
2. Select “All ads”.
3. Type in any brand name to see every ad it is running right now.

This is a handy step before an interview with a D2C brand or an agency. A brand’s active ads tell you who it thinks its customers are and what it believes they care about. The Ads Library sits alongside the other performance marketing tools worth knowing before your first role.

How to build creative angles for one product

An angle is one reason a specific type of person would buy. Komal explains that since Andromeda, marketers have moved away from running the same old ad again and again. They now build different angles, each useful to a different kind of user.

For boAt, beyond the gifting angle it already runs, she suggests a gym angle, a work-from-home angle and a gaming angle. Each one targets a person with a different daily routine.

For a quick-commerce app like Zepto, Swiggy or Zomato, the angles look different:

• Speed: whatever you need, at your door in 10 minutes.
• Value: the same products at a lower price than other platforms.
• Midnight: it’s 11pm, you want chips or a cold drink, and delivery is still on.
• Party: you’re short on party supplies at the last minute and can get them in under 10 minutes.

Each of these is a separate creative written for a separate moment in someone’s day. More options give Meta more ways to find the people who would actually watch and buy.

A simple way to practise: pick a brand, write five angles for one of its products, then check the Ads Library to see which ones the brand already uses. The gaps you find make a strong talking point in an interview.

Broad targeting or narrow targeting after Andromeda?

Meta keeps suggesting broad targeting, and many marketers resist it because a smaller audience feels more precise. Komal calls this one of the common interview questions for performance marketing roles.

The weak answer is that broad targeting reaches more people for less money. The stronger answer is that, after Andromeda, creatives do much of the targeting work. You keep the audience broad and give Meta a larger set of creatives, each with a different angle, so the system can match the right angle to the right person. As Komal puts it, it’s about “the right ad angle reaching the right audience.”

That doesn’t mean audiences stop mattering. Komal points out that showing a ₹2,000 product to people who aren’t willing to spend that much will hurt results, however good the ad is. And if you only have two tired ads, broad targeting just spreads a weak message across more people.

In an interview, structure your answer in two parts. First, say what changed: Meta now matches creatives to people. Then say what you’d do: keep the audience broad, add more angles, and track which angles win. For more questions like this one, see our list of digital marketing interview questions and answers.

Want to practise this on real ad accounts? In Kraftshala’s Marketing Launchpad, a digital marketing course with placement, you plan creative angles, run Meta Ads campaigns on live projects and get coached for performance marketing interviews.

Your CTR suddenly dropped. What should you check?

Say your boAt campaign’s click-through rate (CTR, the share of people who click after seeing your ad) suddenly falls. A new marketer’s first instinct is to pause the campaign. Komal’s view is that pausing is a solution picked before you know the problem.

Check these four causes first:

1. Creative fatigue. If someone has seen your ad 3, 10 or 15 times in seven days, they stop noticing it. Look at the Frequency column in Ads Manager. Komal remembers seeing the same 15-second Nykaa ad five to six times a day on YouTube, until her mind learned to skip it.
2. The wrong audience. A product meant for Gen Z will not get clicks from people aged 35 and above. Break down your results by age to see who is actually seeing the ad.
3. The wrong placement. If your audience is mostly on Instagram but your ads are mostly serving on Facebook, CTR drops. Break down results by placement to check. (If you’re new to the platform, here’s how Instagram works for marketers.)
4. An algorithm update. When Meta rolled out Andromeda, many advertisers saw their CTRs fall even though nothing in their campaigns had changed.

Each cause needs a different fix, which is why diagnosis comes first. Creative fatigue and the Andromeda shift both push you towards more, fresher creatives. Audience and placement problems sit in your campaign settings.

This kind of thinking is what employers pay for. Komal’s view is that companies pay more for problem solving than for execution, because AI is taking over more of the execution work every year.

Wrapping up

Andromeda moved the effort in Meta advertising from picking audiences to building creative angles. If you can explain that shift, open the Ads Library and decode a brand’s angles, and diagnose a CTR drop before reaching for the pause button, you have the problem-solving answers Komal says recruiters look for in 7 to 10 LPA marketing roles.

Meta Ads is one of the modules in Kraftshala’s Marketing Launchpad, a digital marketing course with placement. The program runs online (6 months full-time or 11 months part-time) and also covers Google Ads, SEO, content, e-commerce and programmatic advertising, with live projects where you run real campaigns. If you’d rather learn on campus, the PGP in AI-Led Marketing is a 9-month, full-time program at Kraftshala’s Gurugram campus. Both publish batch-wise placement reports, so you can check outcomes before you apply.