Six months ago Meta Andromeda quietly replaced audience targeting as the primary signal on the platform. Six months in, three new patterns have emerged across our Q2 portfolio. Audience targeting has continued to flatten. Entity ID diversity now matters more than concept count. And format mix has become the single biggest CPA lever available to a DTC brand on Meta.

A few months ago we wrote about Meta Andromeda and what it meant for creative strategy in 2026. The headline at the time was straightforward. Creative had quietly replaced audience targeting as the primary signal Meta uses to decide who sees what. Advantage+ had eaten the targeting layer. The work of "finding the right person" had moved out of the audience setup and into the asset itself.

That post is still pulling traffic. So when we looked at the Q2 portfolio review last week and started spotting patterns we did not see at launch, it felt worth coming back to it. Same algorithm. New behaviour. Fresh quarter of account data.

What we have actually seen testing across the portfolio in Q2

Three patterns have emerged that we did not predict cleanly six months ago. None of them invalidate the original Andromeda thesis. All of them sharpen it.

Audience targeting has continued to flatten, not stabilised

When we wrote the original piece, the working assumption was that Advantage+ would absorb most of the targeting work and then settle into a new equilibrium. That has not happened. What we are seeing across accounts is that the gap between manually built audiences and broad Advantage+ targeting has continued to close, quarter on quarter. Lookalikes still work in some categories, but the lift is shrinking. Interest stacks are now barely competitive against pure broad in most of our portfolio. The trajectory is clear. By the back half of 2026, audience construction will look more like a guardrail than a strategy.

Entity ID diversity matters more than concept count

This is the one most operators are missing. Meta classifies every asset against an internal Entity ID, which is essentially a fingerprint of what the ad shows visually. Two ads that feel different to a human (different copy, different hook, different angle) can still share an Entity ID if they share the same product shot, the same hand model, the same staging. We have watched accounts ship 30 new "concepts" in a fortnight and only register as 4 or 5 distinct Entity IDs in delivery. Reach plateaus. Frequency climbs. CPMs follow. The fix is not more concepts. It is more visual variety inside the same concepts.

Format mix has emerged as the single biggest CPA lever

Of all the levers we have tested across the portfolio in Q2, the one that has produced the most consistent CPA movement is format diversity. Not creative volume. Not bidding strategy. Not landing page work. Mix of static, video, carousel, and reels inside the same campaign. Brands that ship a format-balanced creative stack are pulling material CPA improvements over brands shipping single-format stacks, even when the single-format work is objectively higher quality. Andromeda has a clear preference for format variety. It allocates spend toward the mix that lets it serve the most relevant unit to each user, and a single-format stack starves it of choices.

The two reports that moved from useful to essential

When the Andromeda update first rolled out, Meta released a handful of reports that most operators glanced at once and never returned to. Two of them have moved from useful to essential in Q2.

The first is the similarity scoring report, which surfaces how visually similar your assets are to each other based on Entity ID grouping. Six months ago this read like a curiosity. Now it is the cleanest single diagnostic for whether your creative engine is producing real diversity or just rebriefing the same shoot under different headlines. If you are checking one report this quarter, this is it.

The second is the theme insights report, which now classifies creative against roughly 150 tags spanning subject matter, format, message structure, and presentation style. The strategic value is not in the per-tag performance numbers, which can be noisy. It is in the spread. Brands with strong theme spread are insulated against fatigue cycles. Brands with narrow theme spread are operating on borrowed time, even when the headline ROAS still looks healthy.

What Meta's own data says about format mix

Meta's own data, cited in the original Andromeda blog, points to a 7.3 percent CPA reduction when ads are run as a balanced format mix versus a single-format stack. That number was true six months ago. What has changed is its weight in account performance. With audience targeting flattening, format mix has gone from a useful optimisation to one of the biggest performance levers available to a DTC brand on Meta. If you are running single-format campaigns in 2026, you are voluntarily giving up the kind of CPA improvement most brands would happily pay an agency to find.

What to action this week

If you are a DTC founder reading this and want a short list of practical moves before next Friday, here are the three that have moved the needle most consistently across our Q2 portfolio.

Audit the Entity ID spread on your last 30 active assets. Pull the similarity scoring report and look at how many distinct Entity IDs you are actually serving. If it is fewer than 8, you have a diversity problem dressed up as a volume problem. The fix is not more briefs. It is shooting the same products with different staging, different talent, different environments, and different hooks.

Rebalance your format mix inside your top-performing campaign. If 80 percent of spend is sitting on a single format, you are leaving CPA on the table. Build a mix that hits all four formats (static, video, carousel, reels) inside the same ad set, even if the secondary formats feel weaker on isolated metrics. The system gets to choose, and the system rewards choice.

Switch your reporting from concept count to Entity ID count. This is the most important shift in measurement we have made internally this quarter. "We shipped 24 new concepts" is a vanity metric. "We shipped 18 new Entity IDs" is a leading indicator of fatigue resistance. Most of your team can probably already pull this. Almost none of them are looking at it.

Where this leads

The original Andromeda post argued that creative had become the targeting layer, and that is still true. But the version of creative that wins under Andromeda is not just volume or quality. It is variety, format mix, and structural diversity. The brands that get this right in Q2 will compound. The brands that keep shipping high-quality, visually narrow creative will quietly watch their CPMs climb without being able to name why.

If you want a sharper view on where the leverage sits in your own account, the Founder's Profit Dashboard playbook (live this week) walks through the four numbers we use to diagnose performance across acquisition, creative, retention, and contribution margin. It is built for founders running $5M to $30M DTC brands and tired of agency dashboards that talk in ROAS and stop there. We also wrote about this gap in Six Things Your Agency Dashboard Will Not Show You, if that is closer to where your head is right now.

If you would rather just have the conversation, book a call and we will walk through your Q2 numbers with you.

Frequently asked questions

What is Meta Andromeda?

Meta Andromeda is the underlying machine learning system that powers ad delivery on Meta. It is the layer that decides which creative is shown to which user, based on engagement signals, Entity ID classification, and format relevance. Since 2025 it has effectively replaced manual audience targeting as the primary signal for ad delivery on the platform.

How has Andromeda changed in 2026?

The system itself has not changed in any single dramatic update. What has changed is the behaviour around it. Audience targeting has continued to flatten quarter on quarter, format mix has emerged as one of the largest CPA levers available, and Entity ID diversity has overtaken concept count as the single most important indicator of creative fatigue resistance. The reports Meta released alongside Andromeda (similarity scoring and theme insights) have moved from useful to essential.

What is an Entity ID?

An Entity ID is Meta's internal classification of an ad asset based on its visual fingerprint. Two ads that look different to a human (different copy, different angles) can share an Entity ID if they share enough visual elements, such as the same product shot or staging. Brands often produce dozens of "new concepts" that collapse into a small number of Entity IDs in delivery, which is why Entity ID count is now a more useful measurement than concept count.