- Andromeda is Meta’s ads retrieval engine: it narrows tens of millions of ads to a few thousand candidates per person.
- Meta reported +6% retrieval recall and +8% ads quality on selected segments (Dec 2024).
- Meta says Andromeda has delivered a 2.4% increase in conversions on Facebook since 2025 (Oct 2026).
- Meta’s guidance: creative diversification, meaning different themes, messages and visuals, rather than near-duplicates.
- Practical effect: simpler, broader account structures and more distinct creative concepts per ad set.
What Meta Andromeda is
When someone opens Facebook or Instagram, Meta has to choose a handful of ads from an enormous pool. It does this in stages. The first stage is retrieval: selecting, in Meta’s words, “from tens of millions of ad candidates into a few thousand relevant ad candidates”. Later ranking models then pick the final ads.
Andromeda is the system that does that retrieval. Meta’s engineering team introduced it on 2 December 2024 as “a personalized ads retrieval engine” running on NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper Superchip and Meta’s own MTIA chips. Meta said the design allowed a 10,000× increase in model capacity for personalisation.
The reason this matters to you: if your ad is not retrieved, it never reaches the ranking stage at all. Retrieval decides which ads get a chance.
What Meta says it improved
| Retrieval recall | +6% (Meta Engineering, Dec 2024) |
|---|---|
| Ads quality | +8% on selected segments (Dec 2024) |
| Inference throughput | Over 3× more queries per second (Dec 2024) |
| Next generation | Surfaces top candidates at over one billion ads per second, about 100× the 2024 system (Meta Engineering, 28 Oct 2026) |
| Conversions | “Since 2025, Meta Andromeda has delivered a 2.4% increase in conversions on Facebook” (Oct 2026) |
These are Meta’s own reported figures. Meta does not publish how each was measured.
Why Andromeda exists: the flood of creative
Meta built Andromeda partly because advertisers now make far more ads. In December 2024 Meta reported that more than a million advertisers had used its generative AI tools to create more than 15 million ads in a month, and expected the number of ad creatives in its systems to “grow significantly”. In October 2026 it said generative AI creative tools had helped advertisers create hundreds of millions of new ads.
More ads means retrieval has to be smarter about matching each ad to each person. Andromeda’s job is to find the right creative for the right person from that much larger pool.
Meta’s advice: creative diversification
On 22 April 2025 Meta published guidance titled “The creative advantage: unlocking the power of diversification with Meta Andromeda”. It defines creative diversification as “creating a wide range of ad creatives” with different themes, messages and visuals for different audiences, and says the focus has shifted from niche targeting to creative diversification as the main lever.
The key word is different. Changing a background colour or a headline does not make a new ad in any meaningful sense. Diverse creative means different:
- Angles: a problem and solution, a testimonial, a product demo, a price-led offer, a founder story.
- Formats: short video, longer video, static image, carousel, UGC-style clips.
- People: who the ad speaks to, such as a first-time buyer, a gift buyer or a business owner.
- Languages: in India, English, Hindi and Hinglish versions can reach genuinely different audiences.
What changes in your account structure
If the ad itself now does most of the targeting, a complicated account works against you. Practitioners such as Jon Loomer, who has written in detail about Andromeda, recommend:
- One campaign per goal rather than many small campaigns splitting the budget.
- Broad ad sets instead of many narrow interest audiences, because the creative tells Meta who it is for.
- More distinct ads per ad set, judged on concepts rather than single winners. Loomer notes Meta dropped its old guidance to limit ad sets to six ads.
- Advantage+ campaigns and placements where they fit, since Meta designs its automation to work with Andromeda. Meta’s April 2025 post points advertisers to Advantage+ sales campaigns and Advantage+ creative.
There is no official “right number” of creatives. Advice from agencies ranges widely. What every source agrees on is that quality and genuine variety matter more than raw count.
What this means for Indian advertisers
Search interest in “andromeda meta ads” in India rose about 120% on Google Trends over the past year, so many Indian advertisers are noticing changes in delivery. In our own work with Indian brands, three practical points follow from Meta’s guidance:
- Budget for creative, not just media. A small business does not need 50 ads, but it does need several clearly different concepts, refreshed regularly.
- Fix tracking before you scale. Retrieval and ranking optimise toward the results Meta can see. Meta Pixel with Conversions API, and correct lead or purchase events, tell it what a good result is.
- Simplify old accounts. Many Indian accounts still run dozens of narrow ad sets from the interest-targeting era. Consolidating them usually gives Meta more data per ad set.
For cost benchmarks, see our Meta ads cost in India guide. For real numbers from an account we run, see our results page, where one e-commerce brand reached 3.7× ROAS with 196 purchases in 32 days.
A simple checklist
- One campaign per goal: sales, leads or awareness.
- Broad audience unless you have a hard reason, such as a delivery radius.
- At least a few genuinely different concepts live at once, across formats.
- New concepts added regularly, not just new versions of the old winner.
- Pixel and Conversions API sending the event you actually care about.
- Judge results at the campaign level over a sensible period, not ad by ad each day.
