Meta Ads 2025: What’s changing and what it means for smaller, high-consideration brands.

📌 TL;DR – What’s Changed or Is Changing

Meta’s advertising platform has shifted into a new phase: one that’s AI-led, automation-first, and increasingly focused on maximizing performance with less manual control. This benefits high-volume, high-budget advertisers—but it impacts everyone.

🧱 New Ads Manager Experience

1. A unified campaign creation flow that dynamically switches between manual and Advantage+ setup depending on your inputs.
2. Legacy objectives, placements, and breakdowns are getting deprioritized, while automation-first defaults are being nudged in.
3. Campaign structure simplification is now the norm: fewer campaigns, broader targeting, and less granularity = better performance under Meta’s new AI model.

🧠 Andromeda: Meta’s New Ad Ranking System

“Andromeda” is Meta’s new ad retrieval and ranking engine, which powers how ads are selected and served to users. It's optimized for campaigns with:

• Broad inputs
• Rich conversion signal (pixel/CAPI events)
• Large creative asset sets In other words, the system performs best when you give it more flexibility and volume, which creates a challenge for smaller brands.

Source: Meta Engineering Blog – Andromeda

📥 Advantage+ Expands to Lead Gen

Meta is expanding its Advantage+ framework to include lead generation campaigns—an opportunity that’s especially relevant for smaller eComm brands with longer purchase cycles or limited conversion volume. Why this matters: You can now run fully automated lead gen campaigns (using in-platform forms) with:

• Broad targeting
• Optimized budget distribution
• Automated creative testing

Lead forms help warm up your audience, build retargeting pools, and generate conversion signals—even if you don’t have high purchase volume.

🔎 Example:

One of our clients uses an in-platform lead form to collect emails for "Notify me about limited drops". Even though they’re not optimizing for purchases directly, they’re building:

• High-intent remarketing audiences
• Custom audiences for future product launches
• Signal data that helps Meta better profile their ideal customer

This approach is crucial for smaller brands that can’t generate 50+ purchases per week to sustain Advantage+ Shopping.

🧠 Creative & Campaign Inputs Matter More Than Ever

While dynamic creative and Advantage+ Creative aren’t new, they’re now far more relevant because:

• Meta’s delivery system is doing the matching—you need to give it enough variety to work with.
• Consolidated campaign structures require fewer ads with broader relevance, not highly siloed variations.

Dynamic Creative lets you upload multiple headlines, images, and text options into one ad unit. Meta then:

• Mixes and matches combinations
• Delivers the best combo to each user
• Optimizes delivery in real-time ❗This doesn’t prevent overspending—but it prevents fragmentation of spend across too many underpowered ads. It helps maximize efficiency, not increase budget.

📊 Measurement Is Changing: Modeled Conversions & Opportunity Score

🧪 Modeled Conversions:

• Meta is increasingly relying on statistical modeling to estimate conversions, especially in the wake of signal loss (iOS14+, cookie deprecation).
• These are not user-level tracked conversions but predicted outcomes based on aggregate behaviors.
• Advertisers are seeing discrepancies between Meta’s reported conversions and actual backend data (Shopify, GA4, etc.).

This doesn’t mean the data is wrong—but it’s a probabilistic view, not a literal count.

Source: Meta Business – Modeled Data & Attribution

📈 Opportunity Score: Rolling out gradually to ad accounts Uses a 0–100 score to indicate how well your campaign setup aligns with Meta's automation best practices

Takes into account:

• CAPI integration
• Campaign consolidation
• Use of Advantage+ features
• Audience and creative setup

Use it to prioritize optimizations at a glance—like a health check on account structure, not performance. Source: Opportunity Score Overview

🤔 What About Retargeting?

Let’s clarify: Retargeting itself isn’t “mid-funnel”—it’s a tactic that can support any funnel stage. What’s being deprioritized:

1. Behavioral audiences based on micro-engagements like “Page View,” “Engaged with Instagram Page,” etc.
2. Smaller pools are increasingly ineffective due to privacy constraints and shrinking attribution windows.

Instead, we recommend building higher-quality retargeting pools via:

• Lead forms (especially in-platform)
• High-intent actions like quiz completion or “Add to Wishlist”
• CRM-based audiences that include LTV or segment data

💡 POV: What This Means for Smaller, High-Consideration eComm Brands

Your clients aren’t Sephora. They:

• Don’t have an unlimited budget
• Don’t get 100s of purchases/day
• Have longer decision cycles and premium price points

So while Meta is clearly designing its future for scale, that doesn’t mean smaller brands can’t compete. But they do need to approach it differently.

✅ What We Should Do (Agency POV)

Be Selective With Automation

Not every client should dive headfirst into Advantage+ Shopping. We’ll use:

• Advantage+ Lead Gen where it helps build signal and email lists
• Manual conversion campaigns when we need control over audiences or placements
• Retargeting + warm prospecting using first-party data, lead forms, and on-site actions
• We’ll test automation—not default to it.

Use Lead Forms as Strategic Signal Builders

• Collect intent early (e.g., “Notify me about new arrivals” or “Get early access to drops”)
• Build full-funnel remarketing based on people who engaged without converting
• Feed Meta better signals than just “Add to Cart” or “Page View”
• Bonus: improve CAPI match rates through form-fill user data

Elevate Creative as Our Primary Lever

• Test multiple messages in Dynamic Creative to find the right hook
• Include short-form video, Reels, and carousels—formats that help Meta personalize delivery
• Emphasize objection handling, trust-building, and product education, not just promo

Shift How We Talk About Results

• Acknowledge the role of modeled data in reporting
• Use platform data as a directional signal, not the full picture

Supplement with:

• Shopify post-purchase surveys
• GA4 engagement metrics
• Email opt-ins and lead form submissions
• Blended ROAS and CAC where possible

Final Thought:

Meta Ads in 2025 is less about toggles and more about orchestration. Our job is to build strong inputs—great creative, smart signal structure, and sharp strategy—and let Meta’s AI deliver the results.

But when volume is low or purchase cycles are long, automation needs help. That’s where we step in.

Read our deeper dive on the topic here.

Disclaimer: This blog post was crafted using human prompts and editing in Chat-GPT Pro. We used Chat GPT's Deep Research tool to gather data from more than 12 sources to inform our point of view, and then our media strategist reviewed the recommendations and refined them to align with our expertise and experience as human operators.