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Social Media Marketing Podcast
Facebook Ad Algorithm Changes for 2026: What Marketers Need to Know
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- [00:02]
A
December isn't just about closing out 2025. It's about deciding what kind of marketer you'll be in 2026. Will you be reactive, always scrambling to catch up with algorithm changes and the AI tools? Or will you be visionary, the marketer who sees what's coming and prepares for it? That's why I created so Social Media Marketing World. Here's what Jennifer Morton said after attending quote, it was solid gold. I spent an entire day organizing all of my notes and running everything through AI to help me come up with a fantastic game plan to move my business forward. Now, the marketing landscape in 2026 will reward the prepared head to social media marketing world.info right now. The decision you make this month will echo through all of 2026. Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner.
- [01:11]
B
Hello. Hello, Hello.
- [01:12]
A
Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner and this is the podcast for marketers and entrepreneurs who want more exposure, more leads and more sales. If you are actively running ads on Facebook and or Instagram and you've noticed they've tanked and they're just not performing as well, you're going to want to pay attention to today's interview. If you are thinking about running ads on the platforms that I just mentioned, you're also going to want to pay attention. We're going to be joined by Tara Zircher and I think this is going to be very eye opening. With that, let's transition over to this week's interview with Tara Zerker, helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Tara Zerker. She is a Facebook ads strategist and consultant. She's the founder of the successful ads accelerator, a done with you program that helps marketers launch and scale their ads rapidly. She's also the co founder of the studio grow agency. Tara, welcome back to the show. How you doing?
- [02:22]
B
Thank you, Mike. It's so good to be here.
- [02:25]
A
Awesome. Well, today Tara and I are going to explore Facebook ad algorithm changes and what it means for marketers in 2026. So let's start with why, Tara, is it so important to pay attention to Facebook and Instagram's new ad algorithm?
- [02:39]
B
Yeah. Well, Mike, the number one complaint I have heard, especially in the last few months has been I feel like ads are wasting my money. I don't know if they're working. Something changed. I'm not sure what it is. I don't know what to do. And the truth is, under the brand new algorithm, we'll talk about kind of what happened. But a lot did change and a lot of advertisers are falling behind very quickly and they will continue to do so if they don't upgrade their system to match the new algorithm.
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A
I love it. Okay, so what does that really mean though, if they do pay attention to what we're going to talk about today, what's the upside?
- [03:15]
B
I mean, they're going to see a much better cost per result. I mean, their ads might start performing and I'm going to share kind of a quick case study a little bit later. Their ads might start performing in a way that they've never seen or haven't seen in years. I've heard a lot of folks saying is they've kind of upgraded their creative mostly to match the new algorithm's demands. They're just seeing numbers that they haven't seen in a long time. So that's really exciting. Not to mention you're going to future proof your ads. You know, right now, between Google and Meta, these are the two largest advertising platforms that we have available to us, right? You have TikTok and Pinterest and all these other platforms. They don't even come close to the amount of spend that happens on these two platforms. And so you really, really want to know and kind of keep yourself updated on what's going on and how you need to adjust and shift to these newest algorithm updates. Because let me tell you, if you're not advertising, your competitors will be. And so you want to make sure that you're in the game and that you're reaching your ideal compet customers and clients in the right way.
- [04:17]
A
Love it. Okay, let's describe like the algorithm changes. Maybe we can talk about how it used to be and how it is or wherever you want to go.
- [04:25]
B
Okay, so at the end of 2024, Meta dropped us a pretty big bombshell on their engineering blogs. So this is often where they start leaving breadcrumbs about things that are going to change. I've got a really big breadcrumb that I'll share at the very end about know what's going to happen next. But they shared with us that they were launching actually not an update to the algorithm, a brand new algorithm, like completely new. And this was going to be instead of like, you know, the old way of advertising which was you would have your creative and you would tell meta who you want that creative to be put in front of. So targeting, right, you'd put in your manual targeting and all that stuff. This would be such a huge algorithm update because Meadow is going to fully control the targeting and they wanted you, based on your ad creative, to tell them who should be receiving these ads and where they're at in the buyer journey. And then they were going to use their AI machine learning to be able to match the ads with the creative. So it's a really big update. I was listening to Ben Heath talk about this and he said, you, you know it's kind of like Netflix, right? It used to be that Netflix would say, oh, you like cooking shows? Then we're going to put you in this group of people who like cooking shows. And then we'll show all the cooking show people this, you know, feed of all the optional cooking shows. That's how they used to categorize. Now the Netflix algorithm is so advanced that essentially they say, oh, you liked cooking shows, but then you also liked name your favorite Netflix movie. So we're going to customize this feed to what we think you will like next based on your past preferences. And so now that newsfeed is so customized to you specifically, it's not just this big category dump. And so that's kind of what the new algorithm has done for advertising. So it's a huge update and it redefines how we think about ads, how we think about strategy, and especially how we go about doing our ad creative. So really, really big, I mean, huge bombshell kind of update.
- [06:33]
A
Okay, let me ask you a couple questions about this. You said they hinted about it. We're recording this near the end of 2025. They hinted about it almost a year ago. Was the rollout slow?
- [06:43]
B
Thank you. Yes. Okay, so 2024, they tell us, hey, we've got not just an update, we got a brand new algorithm. We're going to pop in everybody's ad accounts over the course of the next year. And we know they let us know that they completed that rollout in October of 2025. And so this is very recent that it is globally installed. Every single advertiser now has the new algorithm in their account as of October 2025.
- [07:14]
A
And there's no going back. It is what it is.
- [07:15]
B
No going back. Nope.
- [07:17]
A
Okay.
- [07:17]
B
This is what it is. There's still ways to work around it and there's definitely use cases where the new algorithm is not going to benefit every single business model right now. We'll get into some of that nuance. So there's ways that you can kind of not be in that algorithm, so to speak, but for most advertisers, you're going to want to start using it, getting used to it, and also warming up that algorithm to your account so that Meta starts learning those signals and starts developing, you know, this new algorithm around your account. So it's very important that you understand it, start using it. Even if you don't use it as your predominant strategy, you definitely want to be giving Meta some of those signals so they can begin learning for you.
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A
Okay, when we were prepping for this, you said Andromeda. Andromeda, I think, is the word.
- [08:06]
B
Andromeda. You got it.
- [08:07]
A
AI powered ad algorithm. Is that what this thing is effectively called?
- [08:11]
B
Yes. Huh. And it's going to get even crazier because we're going to talk about the GEM update that they just announced on the Engineering Blog in November of this year. So we have a really good idea of where this is going. I would say that this algorithm is kind of almost the middle ground between, like, all the Advantage plus updates that happened. Now we've got Andromeda and we're headed for gem, and so we'll talk about that as well.
- [08:37]
A
Okay, so in summary, where we're at with this Andromeda AI powered ad algorithm is it is effectively a algorithm that tries, and I'm echoing back what I heard you say, tries to match your ad creative to whom it thinks is the best target audience. I mean, is that the effectiveness? I mean, is that it?
- [09:01]
B
You got it. And there's a few more layers to it as well. I mean, simplified. That's exactly what it is. Michael, I was just reading through I love Jason Yim's Twitter account, or X account, I guess, and he kind of. Yeah, he heads up some of the client solutions at Meta, and he was talking about consider it like this. Okay. So with the Andromeda update also came a few other things, including sequence learning and Meta's new lattice system. But let me kind of simplify this. Basically how he describes it, and I thought this was a really good description. Let's just say that Meta knows that you bought a reservation, you've had a reservation at a ski resort, and now your algorithm is going to respond to that by making sure that you see ads for ski equipment, lift tickets, ski luggage. I mean, the whole kit and caboodle.
- [09:56]
A
Sweaters, hats, gloves, everything. Right?
- [09:59]
B
You got it. So it's taking this kind of intent like, oh, you know, if Meta can discover that you just booked a vacation or you booked a vacation through an ad or something like that, let's give them everything they might need, some new swimsuits, you know, I mean, it's just going to deliver the whole kit and caboodle versus just this random, you know, selection of ads. So it's really customizing that to intent to what you've previously looked at and purchased, especially purchased, and what you might need next. I mean, can you imagine this is like pretty significant. And I think a lot of us thought that ads did that before and that is not true. Advertisers really tried to control that experience, you know, by saying, hey, we want to target people who may have just done these certain behaviors and hopefully, you know, we're going to win some of these consumers, you know, over with our products. So now the algorithm is doing this all by itself, which is pretty insane and incredible.
- [10:59]
A
Okay, then I want to talk about targeting. Is there any kind of targeting at all that we have and other certain applications where it does make sense to do certain things and not do other things? Like, I'd love to talk about that a little bit.
- [11:12]
B
Yeah, for sure. Okay. So when it comes to targeting, we are seeing if you're E commerce, if you are digital courses, you know, things like that that are kind of more have broader targeting potential. We are seeing the new algorithm is really, if it's not outperforming on every account yet, I would assume that it definitely will be within a short period of time once it learns your account and you give it enough signals. But there are certain business models that are not as responsive to Andromeda. So we want to think about particularly brick and mortar. If you've got a business that is tied to geography, okay then you're probably very likely still going to do manual targeting. If you've got an E commerce business that has super specific niche product matching, it's likely that you're going to want to experiment with Andromeda. But we're still seeing that, you know, very, very niche sort of products sometimes do better with manual targeting. That means you're still feeding Facebook and Instagram, you know, meta, you're still feeding them the signals on who they should be targeting. Likewise, if you're like a really niche service provider with like regulated boundaries or things like that. But I would say mostly, mostly if you need to be targeting within a certain geography, we've seen it time and time again where advertisers, you know, maybe it's a spa out of Milwaukee and they give meta the zip codes that they want to be targeting. That's their preference. They're, you know, using the Advantage plus and all of that. But then all of a sudden they're getting calls from New York or la and so you really, really have to take it out of the Andromeda algorithm, meaning you're doing the manual targeting and you're really setting the parameters. Now what I want to say is a lot of people are going to say that well, I'm special and my account, you know, never would they ever find my ideal target audience.
- [13:14]
A
I was going to go there because there's a lot of people listening right now who are media buyers and they're like, no, it's not going to be as good as me. Right?
- [13:20]
B
So go ahead 100% and you know, I'll use ourselves as a use case. We started opening up to broad targeting back when Advantage plus was kind of coming online. We decided to start experimenting. At first it didn't do well and now, I mean it definitely outperforms most interest based targeting that we can give it. And so, you know, we just say just go to town. I mean, here's the entire country we want to target and no age selection or very minimal age selection, no gender selection, no interests, just go to town. And you know, we're looking for. Small business owners typically are spending less than 5,000 per month on their ads. I mean it's a very specific, specific niche and meta does it better than we could ever do at this point. So the, the machine learning is just, it's beyond what, you know, we used to be able to gamify so many things and I would say we're well beyond that at this point, again with the exception of, you know, genuinely super specific niches or like geography based businesses.
- [14:19]
A
Now I'm asking this question not as someone who does ads, so I'm, I'm ignorant, okay? So anybody who does ads, forgive me for this, but you said that once it learns your account and you give it enough signals, it's very good. What does that mean? How does it learn your account and how do you give it signals?
- [14:34]
B
So how do you use this algorithm, I guess is also kind of a foundational question we should answer. And basically that means you're using the Advantage plus toolkit, right? You're Advantage plus targeting, you're doing all the Advantage plus placements, just kind of like that. You're just giving the algorithm full control behind the scenes. What happened to Advantage plus is it got this massive upgrade with the Andromeda update, or not even update Andromeda algorithm. Okay. And so if you're using that, you're already using the algorithm. And some people will say it took a little bit of time. Oh, gosh, I wish, Mike, that I had a specific dollar amount. For some people, they start seeing results, you know, in as soon as a few hundred dollars, like three to five, six hundred bucks for others. And, you know, for some of our bigger accounts, it definitely has taken several thousand dollars, even, you know, up until like 10,000, $15,000 before we really started seeing the algorithm outperforming anything that we could do manually. So I wish there was something specific I could tell you, except, you know, I would say start with 10 to 20% of your budget, and if you're not already using some of these Advantage plus, that's kind of how you access it, right. If you're not already using some of these Advantage plus features, then start doing that and be patient with it and give it more time than you normally would before you call something a loser and turn it off and just see if it starts to pick up. And I can almost guarantee eventually it will.
- [16:04]
A
Interesting. Okay, so what I'm hearing you say is split test it, right? Create a copy, for lack of better words, of the very same thing. Except turn on this Advantage plus thing that you were talking about, which comes with Andromeda, and just see if it outperforms. And if it's not outperforming, you need to give it a little bit more time. So I would imagine if you spend a lot of money, it's probably going to take a decent amount of money to kind of get it, but. But once it outperforms, it kind of becomes a benefit, right, because you'll. You'll end up saving money in the long run, right? Is that what I'm hearing you say?
- [16:36]
B
A lot, A lot of money. Yeah. And we'll kind of. Especially as we get into the gem update that's coming next. I'll tell you what some of those early performers are. But we are seeing, you know, when the algorithm does kind of pick up in your account, it can be a significant cost savings for sure.
- [16:53]
A
Let's talk about creative, because I know this is really a big part of this. Kind of explain why the creative matters now more than ever.
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B
So creative is the heart and soul of wasted money right now on meta. So if you are wasting money, it is from your creative. It's not your targeting. It could be a little bit of your strategy, but I would say 90% of cases, it's probably going to be from your creative, which actually is your strategy, or it should be 90% of your strategy right now. You know, the way you're setting up ads, I would say as long as you're setting up for leads or sales, you know, as long as you're following the basics of kind of good ad setup protocols, the algorithm is very flexible with how many campaigns. You know, one thing I'll, I'll share, there is like a more simplified structure. We're seeing work really well. Even some advertisers have been able to stop retargeting altogether and just kind of pull it all into one campaign. Because meta is just getting that good, they can tell if they should be retargeting or if they should be delivering ads that would be geared more towards retargeting and things like that. So a more simplified structure. But most of the time, the problem with wasted money at this point is creative. And so what do you need to know about Andromeda is you need a diversity of creative. So, Mike, you know how we used to create an image, let's just say a static image, and then we would swap out the, you know, the headline on that image, and we'd swap out the, the colors and all of this. Or you would have somebody, you know, make a, a selfie talking head video or, you know, maybe like ugc. Right. And then you would just swap out the hooks and the first few seconds of that video and you would diversify your creative portfolio that way. Meta is actually punishing that system now. Okay, so your CPMs are going to go up if you're not giving it enough creative diversity. So that means, you know, the single image I just described, where we're just swapping the headline, they're going to view that almost. It's not exactly this way, but they're kind of viewing it as one image. Like they're saying there's really nothing here that's different or unique.
- [19:04]
A
Just so we're clear. So if you have an image, let's say a beautiful shot of someone with your product, and you just change the text on the image, as far as the model is concerned, it's exactly the same, 100%.
- [19:19]
B
And so even though those are different. Right. And you do need to continue to test those hooks in terms of how the algorithm is rewarding accounts, it's rewarding creative diversity, not slight tweaks on creative with this kind of same central theme, if that makes sense.
- [19:40]
A
You know, I think I know why I'm gonna Hypothesize here. The human eye is really good at recognizing pictures, and when it feels like it's seen that image before, it's going to discount it. Could that be what's going on? Because I know I love it. I'm seeing ads over and over again and like, when they're different, they feel new, but when they're not, they feel old. Could that be part of what's going on here?
- [20:03]
B
I think you're spot on with that and playing. So if you kind of think through that, right, you want to be thinking about a whole library of categories here. Number one, you want to be thinking in different angles, right? So you want to, when you're thinking about your copy or your creative angles of your ads, you want to be thinking about pain points, pleasure, testimonial curiosity, questions, right? When you think about variations of like copy length, you want to be thinking super short, short, medium long, even blog in length, right? So really, really long. Last year I was sitting in the audience. I love social media marketing world, both as a presenter and also it's just wonderful to learn from colleagues and everything. I remember Molly Pittman saying, you want to think of your copy as, you know, with your ads, as kind of how we used to do SEO blogging, right? So that algorithm is picking up on those signals of what is in your ad, what are the keywords in there, and where is that person in the buyer's journey. And so this is becoming very sophisticated, right? Thinking about all these different angles. And now when you think about your images and your videos, you want to be thinking static imagery, short form, raw videos, UGC founder, selfie type videos, polished videos. So a little bit of production quality. GIFs, carousels, by the way. Carousels. There's a breadcrumb for everybody. Carousels are very hot right now. Memes, you want to think about static imagery. Remember that 60 to 70% of conversions on meta still happen with static imagery. People are always shocked when they hear that stat. They think everything is surely switched to video. But meta's own reporting is showing that you know what's really trending right now. And the end of, you know, here we are 20, 25 is we're back to carousels. And so that's also trending in ads. Text only Creative, right? Where maybe you don't even. You skip the image and you just have a static image with just pure text. And so these are things that we see really trending. But the most important piece there to note is you want a diversity of these things. So you don't just want to fill your account with, you know, tons of static photos, even if they're different, because Meta doesn't view that as a full enough library. You know, one stat that we saw was, would it have been Q1, I believe of this year. And I'm kind of just pulling this from memory, but Meta had shared that they had 1 million advertisers that had created with the new kind of AI tools that they had been releasing 50 million variations of ads. And the reason this is so important for Andromeda is it needs a very rich and diverse library to pull from so that it can match again. If it's trying to match somebody's exact buyer's journey, then it can't just have two or three angles that are servicing someone who you know has very high intent and they're. They're ready to buy right now. It needs to service other angles, such as maybe somebody who isn't even problem aware. So we gotta make them problem aware before we can even let them know what the solution is. Right? And so it's, it's targeting all of these different points of the buyer's journey. And you gotta give Meta a lot to work with so you make sure you're getting that whole journey represented in your creative library.
- [23:26]
A
You know that feeling when you see someone else's success and think, I could have done that? That nagging regret of watching opportunities pass you by because you just weren't quite ready? Here's what I've learned from thousands of marketers over the last 12 years. The ones with the fewest regrets aren't the ones who played it safe. They're the ones who invested in themselves when it mattered. Here's what Emily Ray Shutty said after attending Social Media Marketing World quote, I came away incredibly empowered and reinvigorated for my work. At the time, I was fighting imposter syndrome. My business has since doubled in size and I'm much more confident. Now is your decision point the moment you stop reacting and start leading, when you become the expert instead of asking experts, when you master the AI skills that make you indispensable. A year from now, you'll look back at this moment, head to social media marketingworld.info and make a decision that changes everything. We're going to share an example here from one of your clients in a minute, but for those of you that run agencies, this should be music to your ears. Because while you might not have a lot of work to set up all the targeting and stuff, you an incredible Opportunity to create all the creative, am I right? Because this is overwhelming task for a lot of businesses, right?
- [24:53]
B
100%. I would say that is where you want to position your value right now as an agency owner, freelancer. If you're, if you're working on ads, you want to be thinking about, you know, something that we're talking about a lot is what is the avatar. And then many businesses often have a couple different avatars and then what are all of the points of their journey. And you want to be designing ads and you know, again, using that diversity of your creative library, you want to be designing ads for every single point of that journey. So really thinking through that is going to give your clients so much additional value.
- [25:32]
A
And I would think where this could get really, really interesting is for those of you that do email marketing and you have some winners there, you've got some great copy that you could potentially like use like your best performing emails, especially if they have images inside of them, could be very, very valuable to add to the fodder, like if you send a lot of emails. In addition, AI, I would imagine could be exceptionally valuable here, like if you set up a really good cloud project and, or you use Gemini. Nano Banana Pro is ridiculously good. I mean, like just little aside, I took my logo for AI Business World, which is our conference, and I uploaded as a PNG into Gemini. You have to have a workspace account and I asked it to add it to a coffee cup in a cafe. First iteration looked beautiful, had a spoon there, a little reflection coming on the thing. Then I said animate and it created a little 10 second and it had a guy get up and walk away. That was in the background. I had a minivan kind of come by in the window. I mean I totally could have just used that as an ad if I wanted to and nobody would have known. And I would imagine Meta has no problem with you using AI in your ad, image creation and videos. Am I right or wrong on that?
- [26:44]
B
You're right. And I saw that image, Mike, and I couldn't believe you posted that, I think on your, your Facebook. Right?
- [26:51]
A
Yeah.
- [26:51]
B
I was like, this is a first draft. I mean so unbelievably good and 1000% meta is not only hoping you'll do that, they're encouraging you with their own AI tools on platform too. And that is literally to produce more creative because the new algorithm, it's not going to function well without enough creative. So they had to kind of solve that pain. Point of, you know, we want to, who Was it. It might have been Jason again, who, you know, kind of. He made a point that this new algorithm is like, if you're just walking through a mall, you know, just browsing through a mall, who can predict which store you're going to go into and which product you're going to buy? And this is what the new algorithm is trying to do. It can only do it. And so if it has enough creative. And so the solution there was to add to the platform all of these creative iteration tools, all the AI generated tools that we have.
- [27:51]
A
You have an example of someone that you're working with. Let's hear that story.
- [27:54]
B
Yeah. So this is actually one of my good friends, Karina Gardner. She owns a training company for creatives, like folks who, you know, have art degrees and amazing creative talents who want to turn their art into a business. And she's always done. And she does her own ads. You know, she and I are always nerding out about ad stuff. And she has always done these, like, awesome paid design boot camps. And so in October and September, October, by the way, we have heard anecdotally across the industry, including from some of our favorite Facebook people, were really rough months inside of the platform. I think as the algorithm, you know, finally did get installed on everyone's accounts, there's always an adjustment period. And I can't tell you how many just conversations I've had with so many colleagues saying they were experiencing the same thing. So she had experienced a spike in her costs on, you know, numbers she hadn't ever really seen on her account. And she said, listen, I had my top performing video reels, same copy. She sent me a couple of voice memos, we talked back and forth, and I gave her one of my recipes that has been exceptionally responsive to the new algorithm. I'm going to share it with everyone here today too. And she said her costs went from $86 per conversion. This is for a paid bootcamp ticket. And she said it was within, like 24 hours. She added one carousel, three images. She used a lot of the generative AI options that meta gave her, and she had, you know, she just added a total of eight creatives. So we're not talking like dozens of creatives here. She just diversified her creative library and she used a specific formula that I'm going to share, and her costs went down to $13.87. In fact, that was one of her records. And she was like, I can't believe it. I thought the ads were completely broken for me forever. Like, the algorithm doesn't like my account, it, you know, like, what is going on? Can I fix this? And this was, you know, a two minute thing it took her to do. She had to create the things, but setting up the new, her new kind of campaign structure took her just a couple of minutes and saved her so much money. And so we're kind of seeing that across the board. You know, when you really play with this algorithm in the way it wants us to work with it, you're going to experience some really good things on there.
- [30:23]
A
I love it. Feel free to share that formula that you were talking about.
- [30:26]
B
Okay, so this is, we call it our dcp, our Dynamic Creative formula. Funny enough, this is a formula that we actually, you know, kind of, we always, you know, as we create these recipes or formulas, it's, it's based on, you know, typically hundreds of thousands of dollars of ad spend. So we're ab testing a b testing, you know, kind of putting together what's working. And then of course you can't just do that on one account. You've got to test this across a variety. You know, our training company, we serve a variety of industries and business owners and things like that. So then you gotta test this stuff and make sure there's consistency across different industries and sectors and funnel types and all the things. And so we created this for quite a while ago for one of the newest algorithm updates. When everything started switching to Advantage plus, we started seeing some really strong trends with how the algorithm was reacting. And now that we're here with Andromeda and we're going towards gems, we actually only see this formula getting better and better with age, which is really cool because that doesn't usually happen. Usually you have to, you know, rework things quite a bit. So when you are setting up for leads, you're going to select at the ad set level, something called the Dynamic Creative. It's a little toggle switch and that is in your ad set. And if you're doing this for sales, then you are going to click at the ad level something called Flexible Creative. Okay, so they're called different things, but they kind of react the same way. But basically what it allows you to do is to combine a bunch of creative into one ad. So instead of testing creative individually, you're combining it all into one ad. So you're, you've toggled that on and now you're going to add in and you can experiment on your account. We see this formula being, you know, pretty consistently fabulous across again, a huge diversity, different account types, different business types, etc. But you can experiment here with what's going to work for you. But basically you want to max out the images, videos and GIFs. Okay. And I always recommend, you know, 50% images. 50% videos is kind of a good mix there if you can do it. If you don't have enough videos, then that's fine. You just want to put as many images as you can. And ideally these are top performers. So you can do creative testing this way. In fact, we have you set it up in a way that, you know, kind of reflects this pretty closely. If we're just kind of experimenting with this new feature, I would highly recommend that you just do your top performers. If you've got that many, then from there you're going to put in two variations of primary text. I recommend something that is short and medium in length. Okay, so that's going to be your starting kind of experiment. Two of your top performing headlines and then whichever call to action makes the most sense. And then from there you can read through and select any of the generative AI that suits your brand. And of course you can edit any of those and whatnot. I always say you want to really look at those AI iterations and just make sure that they're on brand.
- [33:34]
A
Explain what that is for people that don't know what you're talking about.
- [33:37]
B
Okay, so when you put in your copy, meta is going to give you a bunch of different variations of both your primary text as well as your headlines. And so they'll give you like 10 variations and you can select which ones kind of work for you. And remember, you can always edit those, but always read through them because sometimes, especially if you're in a sensitive category, not a formal sensitive category. Well, anyways, there's formal sensitive categories with meta, but you know, anything that is highly regulated and things like that, sometimes the AI generated copy can, you know, doesn't always suit compliance and things like that. So just make sure you read through it makes sense, that sort of thing. And then from there, so then you're going to go ahead and launch that. So this is like you just took all of these, ideally top performers, you put them into one, you know, kind of delivery rocket ship, and now meta is going to go and test all of these different combinations. And here's the thing that you want to know is that it's not going to spend equally across your creative variations there. So just know it's going to pre select which ones it thinks is going to be the winner. People always get super bugged by that. It's just kind of the, the way it goes. You can always do your own A B testing that is much more, you know, you have the constraints of you have to force this amount of budget to this ad and things like that. But I will tell you that this typically outperforms anything that you'll do manually at this point. So we call that our dynamic creative formula, the dcp, our dynamic creative protocol. It is so, so good and it's only getting better with time.
- [35:15]
A
Couple clarifying questions on the AI front, is it mostly text or do they actually create AI images also?
- [35:20]
B
Yeah, so that is, that is where things are headed for sure. So right now when you upload that creative, it will give you. And depending on your account, there's a lot of beta testing I see all the time across all the different accounts that we have access to. But right now there is generative AI that will, you know, crop things for you, it will place headlines, it'll animate things. And we, at this point, we recommend turning all of that on. So when you upload your images and, or your videos, all of that, you're going to see those options, turn those on. Those are fabulous. Just know you, you lose control over that. So if you see an ad floating around that has, you know, one of your headlines that's put on top of an image, you don't get to control that. Right. So give up the control. Let the algorithm just kind of do its thing. It's good. And then where we're going is going to be exactly what you're describing, Mike, where you pop in an image and it's just going to go to town. It's going to do all of your creative iteration for you through its AI tools and that's going to be a wild new world. But that's where it's headed for sure.
- [36:25]
A
How often do we need to replenish our creative because is this a one one and done or is this like what's, what's your thoughts on this?
- [36:33]
B
Probably faster than you would think. And a lot of this depends on your budget. Right. I don't headed into the territory of some of these platforms that are like TikTok for example, just very creative, demanding. But I do think that we are going to have to refresh more frequently. So we used to be able to let ads run for a long time. If you're thinking talking like a smaller account, maybe spending a couple thousand a month, some of those ads could run, you know, months, sometimes years. I mean, they start to decline over time. But, you know, you're still kind of getting good enough results to just let it keep going. And on bigger accounts, of course, you're. You're definitely, you know, refreshing creative much more frequently. But what we know is that Andromeda is going to reward fresh creative and it is going to punish accounts with higher CPMs where creative is fatiguing. In fact, we can talk about this too. They're releasing new metrics. I haven't seen this broadly across accounts, but you know, they're going to. There's new metrics that will be launching around this, but basically creative fatigue, creative similarity, and top creative themes. Okay, so this is where we're understanding things like is our account most responsive to humor, nostalgia, or, you know, things like that. Social proof, you know, those are going to be new metrics that supposedly are coming to the platform. So. So we're going to have a lot more insight into that as well. And I don't want to give anything that is too formulaic here because I think we're just going to have to wrap our arms around this a little bit more before we understand you have.
- [38:13]
A
A general rule of thumb like once a month, add new creative or what?
- [38:17]
B
Yeah, I mean, if you are on a smaller account, that's always our rule of thumb is you want to be a refreshing creative monthly. So again, you're spending a couple thousand a month, you should be refreshing creative monthly. Not to say your creative won't last longer, but that's where you should be. And then of course, if you're working on, you know, much higher budget account, you should be refreshing creative weekly. And those are general rules of thumb that will probably keep you pretty healthy. And we may be updating those recommendations as we kind of see how things play out.
- [38:48]
A
Okay. Ad placement, you know, you've got reels and stories and all the shapes and sizes and stuff like that. Do we need to worry about that anymore?
- [38:58]
B
Yeah. So Meta will be in large part now kind of do the adjustments and the croppings and things like that. You know, it used to be that we had to upload all these different sizes and things of that nature. And now it will definitely take the right sizing and put it on the right placement. So that doesn't mean that it's always going to use those placements. You know, if your ads are meant for the feed, it might have a really hard time with the sidebar placements. And so it's not always going to place. There's so many placements at this point. That selection menu has Grown quite large. And so you're just going to place your creative and let the algorithm kind of do its thing. It will figure out the right size for the right placement and what should go where. And it's very good at it. So the big takeaway there is don't try to gamify it. I see a lot of kind of rookie mistakes in this. I mean, you're talking 2019, 2018 kind of techniques when you're trying to say only newsfeed or only Instagram. A lot of people too, they only want to do Instagram ads. Mike, I see this quite often. And you should just know from what we usually see, about 60 to 80% of your quote unquote Facebook ads, your meta ads, are automatically going to be served on Instagram. But it really does you no benefit to say, I don't want Facebook. You will get a much better result and cost if you say, put it wherever. And just know that most of it is, generally speaking, going to go to Instagram.
- [40:29]
A
Are threads even available as a placement yet?
- [40:32]
B
There are some, yeah.
- [40:33]
A
Okay, interesting. Okay, so let's talk about this gem thing. You brought it up many times. What is this gem thing you've been hinting about that's coming?
- [40:40]
B
Yes, the Generative Ads recommendation model. Meta. So again, we see a lot of these big updates that kind of get released as initial breadcrumbs or hints on the engineering blog.
- [40:52]
A
By the way, that spells germ. Just for the record. Generative.
- [40:55]
B
I know.
- [40:56]
A
How do they get GEM out of that if it's actually, that's jarm.
- [40:59]
B
Yeah, I. I was trying to figure that out myself. I was. Anyways, keep going.
- [41:03]
A
For anybody who's like acronyms. Wait, how do they get.
- [41:05]
B
Right. Yeah, I did. I was like, yeah, what in the heck? But basically. Okay, so jam, this is where things are going. Okay. This is the new super brain. Okay. And this is the comparison. All right, so imagine this can read an entire library of books in seconds. It understands the relationships between all the characters, remembers every single detail, and you connect all the details instantly. This is the algorithm that is going to be layered on top of these other algorithms that we talked about. And this is going to be how we've heard leaders and even Mark Zuckerberg himself talk about this. Where things are headed is they essentially want you to be able to upload an image and tell them your budget and it will do all of the rest. It's going to generate all of the ad creation, it's going to titles everything.
- [42:03]
A
Wow.
- [42:04]
B
All the text, everything. It's going to animate. It's just going to create that entire ad library by itself. And so this is kind of where things are headed, which is a wild world when you think about it. And what Meta wants us doing as marketers then is really focusing on what happens after the click. Right. So this is offer customer journey. It wants that. It's going to reward whatever happens after the click very powerfully because that's going to give it all the signals it needs to find our buyers and iterate and create the correct creative for this group of people. So this is kind of where it will go. I mean, it's not going to go there overnight, but that's the direction of where Meta is trying to head. So it's kind of wild when you start thinking about it. And you know, I saw again Jason Lim, who heads up the client solutions I'm just trying to pull up, he had some really great stats on their beta testing of this. Let me just find that really quick.
- [43:09]
A
Yeah, While you're looking at that, there's a lot of people who are listening right now that are probably freaking out because maybe their career up to this point has been doing all of these things. I would imagine there's a window of opportunity for us that are really good with AI. Like I have a whole show dedicated to this and I use Claude and I'm, I swear by it right now that it's the best writer that's out there. And I would imagine if you can give really good quality copy and you can generate very high quality images with whatever platform you know right now, as of this recording, Google Gemini Nano Banana Pro is top of class. You can be slightly ahead of all of your competitors who are using Canva and you know what I mean, and just, just the very basic stuff. But the good news is eventually the ads are going to be less about the ad itself and more about the journey. And I like that because there's still an opportunity for marketers because you still have to convert and in the end you've got to drive somewhere. Right. And that's where a marketer could come to the table. You can respond to that. And after you share the Jason quote, if you found it, what's your thoughts?
- [44:14]
B
1,000%, Mike. I think the value right now, if you're in this space, I think the value is increasing your AI skills exponentially would be kind of a good place to start. And I would say really understanding the customer journey and the creative that's going to lead someone to purchase. So kind of what we talked about creating those client avatars, becoming more sophisticated about how we're thinking through those creative angles, creative targeting and things like that. And then also, you know, really developing out your strategy muscles so, you know, thinking about the value that you can add. Post click. That is where most of the value is going to be as these algorithms evolve. We're not getting there overnight. I don't think we're getting there, you know, within months. I think there's time. But if you know where things are headed, then you can start to plan appropriately and start to think about, you know, how these platforms are changing. And there's always going to be space for excellent marketers who can help drive revenue. So if you kind of just think about what can I do with my skills that help drive revenue, you're going to find all the solutions that you need. And I'm going to share, too. You know, when they've layered all of these algorithms together and updates and beta testing with gems, they said in Q2, so they kind of started beta testing. We talked about Andromeda. There were a couple other updates that came with Andromeda. When they layered all four of these updates together, they it delivered a 5% increase in ad conversion on Instagram and 3% on Facebook. But then listen to this. That was Q2. Okay, so beta testing in Q3, we doubled that. So within three months, it doubled efficiencies. When you think about how fast this is moving, this is a rocket ship. You want to get on that ship, right? And so this is going to move very, very quickly. It's going to evolve fast. I still think there's, you know, plenty of time to kind of get on board and start testing through some of these new features and things like that. But this is where things are going, and it's going to move very fast, folks.
- [46:26]
A
Tara will be one of five speakers on the paid social side and one of 24 speakers on the social track at Social Media Marketing World. Plus, we'll have another 20 speakers on the AI side of things. I can assure you this world is changing faster than we can ever imagine. And it's being fueled ultimately by the AI, in this case, algorithms, Creative, and all these other things. There's never been a more important time for you to study these things. I cannot wait to see you in April in Anaheim. Tara, if anybody wants to connect with you or potentially work with you in the various programs you've got going on, where do you want to send them?
- [47:05]
B
Yeah, start@successfuladsclub.com or you can find me on Instagram. Ara Zuercher thank you Tara so much.
- [47:12]
A
For sharing your insights with us.
- [47:13]
B
Thanks Mike.
- [47:14]
A
Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com 697 if you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. Us. If you've been a listener for a while, give us a review. We would love that. Also, check out our other shows, the AI Explored podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner Foreign this episode is brought to you by Social Media Marketing World happening April 28th to 30th, 2026 in Anaheim, California. For the first time ever get two world class conferences under one roof. Social Media Marketing World and AI Business World. Master social marketing strategies. Deep dive into AI. Connect with thousands of fellow marketers all in one incredible experience. Plus, you're walking distance to Disneyland. Turn your professional development into a family vacation. Ready to level up your marketing? Grab your tickets now at socialmediamarketingworld Info.