• by Colin Kirkland , December 3, 2024

As Meta continues to build out its Advantage+ suite of AI-powered ad tools, the tech giant wants advertisers to understand the inner workings of its processes and AI use within campaigns -- specifically its “Andromeda” ad retrieval system, which it says marks a significant upgrade from its traditional ad-matching engine.

Ad retrieval is the first step in Meta's multi-stage recommendation system. Using a combination of new hardware (NVIDIA and Meta Training and Inference Accelerator chips) and machine learning, Meta designed Andromeda to improve ad personalization and targeting within this initial phase by allowing the system to assess more factors when deciding which ads to show specific users across its family of social media apps. 

“This stage is tasked with selecting ads from tens of millions of ad candidates into a few thousand relevant ad candidates,” the company states in a recent announcement, adding that the following stage involves larger and more sophisticated ranking models that predict people and advertiser value to determine the final set of ads to shown to the user.

Prior to Andromeda’s integration into Advantage+, Meta’s retrieval system delivered limited personalization -- “relying on a process with isolated model stages and numerous rule-based heuristics to manage the vast number of ads,” the company explains.

In general, Meta's original retrieval system was unable to handle the massive volume of ads per request in an efficient way.

According to Meta, the deployment of Andromeda across Instagram and Facebook has achieved +6% recall improvement to the retrieval system, delivering +8% ads quality improvement on selected segments.

While the retrieval stage can be difficult due to scalability constraints regarding the volume of ad candidates and tight latency constraints, Andromeda is built to reduce system complexity by minimizing components and rule-based logic, the company says.

Overall, Meta is making a case for its AI-powered ad tools, which were partly responsible for the company’s record revenue growth in the last quarter.

“When advertisers who did not previously use Advantage+ creative turned on its AI-driven targeting features, they experienced a 22% increase in ROAS from our ads,” Meta says.