The Biggest Meta Ads Shake-Up in Years: Your Guide to Thriving in 2025

The world of digital advertising is always moving ...

The Paradigm Shift: From Who You Target to What You Show

For years, the key to a successful Meta Ads campaign was intricate audience targeting. We would spend hours layering interests, behaviours, and lookalike audiences to tell Meta exactly who to show our ads to.

The Andromeda update flips this model on its head.

Powered by a far more sophisticated AI, Meta’s system is now better at finding your ideal customer than any manual targeting could ever be. The single most important factor for success is no longer the audience you build, but the ad creative you provide.

In short, your creative is the new targeting.

You feed the machine a diverse range of high-quality images, videos, and ad copy. The AI then analyses these assets and intelligently finds the right people for each specific message, often uncovering new customer segments you didn't even know existed.

How to Adapt Your Strategy (and Win) in 2025

So, how do we adapt to this new reality? It comes down to two key strategic shifts.

1. Embrace Radical Creative Diversity One or two ads in a campaign won't cut it anymore. To give Meta's AI the fuel it needs, you must focus on producing a variety of ad creatives. This doesn't mean just changing the button colour. It means testing:

• Different Hooks: Start your videos or headlines with completely different opening lines.
• Different Angles: Address different customer pain points or desired outcomes.
• Different Formats: Use a mix of static images, carousels, and videos (especially Reels-style short-form content).

The goal is to give the system a rich library of options to test and learn from.

2. Simplify Your Campaign Structure The days of dozens of granular ad sets are over. The new best practice is to simplify and consolidate. A modern, high-performing campaign structure often looks like this:

• One Campaign: Focused on a single objective (e.g., Leads).
• One Ad Set: Using broad targeting (e.g., just location, age, and gender).
• Many Creatives: Housing all your diverse ads (8-15 or more) inside that single ad set.

This simple structure gives the algorithm maximum flexibility and data to find your winners, rather than restricting it with narrow, pre-defined audiences.

Budgeting for Success: What Does It Really Cost for a Local Business to run Meta Ads?

For a local business in 2025, here are our recommended daily starting budgets: eg, you are in a city like Ipswich QLD, with a catchment of 280,000 to 300,000 people.

Leads or Sales (Conversions): $20 - $50+ per day

While there are options for brand awareness and traffic campaigns, we do not recommend these for local service based business campaigns where you want to attract leads.

That $20-$50 daily budget for a leads campaign isn't an arbitrary number. It’s a strategic investment designed to overcome Meta's "learning phase." The budget works alongside your creative (so your creative is very important).

This is the critical initial period where the algorithm needs to gather enough data to learn how to deliver your ads effectively. To exit the learning phase and achieve stable, predictable results, the system needs to generate around 50 key events (in this case, leads) per week.

A budget under $20/day often fails to generate leads quickly enough, trapping your campaign in a state of permanent "learning limited," leading to wasted spend and inconsistent results.

A budget of $20-$50/day gives the system enough fuel to secure those conversions, exit the learning phase, and begin scaling your campaign efficiently.

The Future is Creative

The Andromeda update is a clear signal of where digital advertising (performance marketing on Meta) is headed. Success is no longer about outsmarting or gaming the algorithm with complex targeting; it's about empowering it with brilliant, diverse creative.

By simplifying your campaigns, investing in a variety of ads, and budgeting for data, you can leverage this powerful new system to drive incredible results for your business.

Need a hand with with your Meta Ads? Or would like some training so you can manage within your own business? Reach out to In Cahoots Co today.