Why Is My Meta ROAS Dropping in 2026? The Andromeda Update Changed Everything

Meta’s new ads retrieval engine has fundamentally rewritten how your campaigns are delivered. Here is what most advertisers are still getting wrong, and how to get ahead of it.

If your Meta Ads performance has been softer this year and you cannot figure out why, you are probably not looking in the right place. You checked your audiences. You refreshed some creatives. You tightened your bids. Nothing stuck. The real reason your numbers shifted is a system-level change inside Meta itself, and it is called Andromeda.

Most advertisers have heard the name but are not operating differently because of it. That gap is exactly why performance is so uneven right now. The brands pulling ahead have rebuilt their approach around how Andromeda actually works. The ones still struggling are optimising for a system that no longer exists.

What Is Andromeda in Meta Ads

Andromeda is Meta’s ad retrieval engine. It replaced the rule-based logic that used to determine which ads get shown to which users, completing its global rollout in late 2025. Since then, it has been the primary system deciding whether your ads surface in any given auction.

The old system relied heavily on the audience parameters you set. Age ranges, interests, behaviors, lookalikes. It matched ads to users based on those signals. Andromeda works differently. It reads your creative directly, using computer vision and semantic analysis, and then predicts the right audience from behavioral data. The audience definition you built matters far less than it used to. The creative you upload is now doing most of the targeting work.

According to analysis from JetFuel Agency and Confect, the system uses hierarchical indexing and deep neural networks to analyze the visual content of your ad, including hook format, tone, subject matter, and visual context, and then matches it to users who have engaged with similar signals in the past. It is a creative-first retrieval system, not an audience-first one.

Why Creative Is Now Your Targeting

This is the shift that trips up most advertisers. They keep treating creative as a presentation layer and audience as the strategic layer. Under Andromeda, that is inverted.

If your creative is generic, low-specificity, or visually similar to everything else running in your account, the system has weak signal to work with. It will either suppress delivery or serve your ads to a lower-converting pool because it cannot find a strong behavioral match. The result looks like a budget problem or a targeting problem. It is actually a creative problem.

The performance data backs this up. Brands testing 20 or more new ads per month are seeing 65% higher ROAS than brands testing under ten, according to data shared by Logical Position and Confect. The top third of advertisers run roughly 395 live ads at any time versus 296 for the bottom third. That is a 33% volume gap, and it translates directly into delivery quality because Andromeda has more distinct signals to learn from.

How to Audit Your Meta Account

Before restructuring anything, run a structured audit. There are three areas to look at first.

Campaign Structure

If you are running more than two or three campaigns with overlapping objectives, or more than three ad sets per campaign, you are fragmenting the signals Andromeda needs to learn from. The winning structure in 2026 is fewer campaigns, fewer ad sets, and more creatives per ad set. Consolidation lets the system accumulate purchase signal faster and make better delivery decisions across a wider range of placements.

Creative Similarity Score

Meta now reports a Creative Similarity Score. If your ads look and sound too similar to each other, the system treats them as interchangeable and deprioritises delivery across all of them. Keep this score below 40%. If you are above it, you have a creative diversity problem, not a bidding problem. Adding more budget will not fix it.

Signal Quality

Andromeda weighs event quality heavily. If your pixel is firing duplicate purchase events, misattributing conversions, or missing micro-events like Add to Cart and Initiate Checkout, the system is optimising on incomplete data. Fix your event setup before you touch campaign structure or creative. Garbage signal in, garbage delivery out.

What to Change in Your Creative

The practical change is more creative volume and more concept diversity. Not just visual variety within one idea, but genuinely different angles, hooks, formats, and intended audiences, even within the same campaign.

The 50/30/20 Refresh Model

Allocate your creative production as follows: 50% goes to testing entirely new concepts, 30% goes to iterating on your best performers, and 20% goes to long-term evergreen formats that keep the account warm between launches. If your team is producing only slight variations of one or two hero ads, that is the first thing to change.

Brief Differently

Andromeda reads intent signals from the creative itself. A white-background product studio shot reads very differently to the retrieval engine than a testimonial video or a lifestyle photo. Brief your creative team to produce genuinely distinct formats, not more versions of the same concept. Eight to twelve distinct creative concepts per campaign is the target.

Facebook and Instagram Are One System Now

Andromeda operates at a unified model layer. Setting separate bids, budgets, and creative specifically for Facebook versus Instagram adds friction to a system that is optimising across both simultaneously. Let placement optimisation run broad, and let the creative do the work of finding its audience across placements.

For brands running Meta Ads campaigns with manual placement breakdowns and heavy audience segmentation, this is usually the fastest thing to consolidate for a near-term delivery improvement.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Obsessing Over Audience Segmentation

Spending hours carving up audiences by interest and behavior is optimising for a system that Andromeda largely replaced. Broad targeting is not lazy strategy anymore. It is the right strategy, because it gives the retrieval engine more room to find its own signal matches. Lookalikes still have a place but they are no longer the primary lever.

Blaming Budget First

Most advertisers conclude that low spend is limiting performance. Sometimes it does. But when delivery is suppressed under Andromeda, the problem is almost always a weak creative signal or a fractured account structure. Adding budget to a structurally broken campaign just accelerates poor performance. Fix the structure, then scale spend.

Ignoring the Creative Refresh Cadence

Creative fatigue used to show up slowly, over weeks. Under Andromeda, when a creative stops delivering signal, it gets deprioritised quickly. Brands that update creatives reactively, only when performance tanks, are constantly playing catch-up. Build a monthly refresh schedule and stick to it regardless of whether current ads are still delivering.

What This Means Going Forward

Meta is not rolling Andromeda back. It is the architecture the platform is built on now, and every subsequent update, including the Advantage+ Shopping enhancements and the cross-platform delivery changes in early 2026, is building on the same foundation. The algorithm will keep getting better at reading creative and worse at tolerating the kind of over-structured, audience-heavy campaign builds that dominated strategy in 2022 and 2023.

The teams pulling ahead have accepted that this is a creative production problem as much as a media buying problem. They are building systems to ship creative at volume. They are briefing against audience behavior insights rather than demographic constraints. And they are measuring creative performance with the same rigor they used to apply to bidding strategy.

If your account has been underperforming and you have not audited it through the lens of Andromeda, that audit is the first thing to run. At Incisive Growth, we work with brands to rebuild Meta Ads strategy around how the platform actually functions now, not how it worked two years ago. The playbook has changed. The brands that recognise this first are the ones that win the auction.

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