The promise of Andromeda’s AI brain sorting through a billion users to find your customers on auto-pilot sounds quite enticing!
I couldn’t help but wonder - is this a good thing for brands?
I say this because I’ve spent 10 years tracking Meta campaign performance against actual orders, and 4 things have remained true the entire time:
- Meta overstates its ability to drive immediate bottom of the funnel sales
- Meta understates its ability to drive TOF cold traffic that leads to new customers
- Meta shows a lot more ROAS when you widen the attribution time window
- Meta’s conversion API is highly optimized for immediate sales if using the default setup
With this push to almost force advertisers to Advantage+, or turn it on behind the scenes if you don’t read the fine print, I feel it is time to use actual data, not opinion, to determine how advertisers should best use Advantage+, and when to stick to their manual guns otherwise.
I had the fearless Wicked DB team pull the data on 55,661 Meta campaigns so I could compare January through May, 2024 vs 2025, and finally get to the bottom of a few things.
⬇ Let’s dive in ⬇
Adoption of Advantage+
There is a 4% swing in budget allocated to Advantage+ over Manual Campaigns.
Forced Advantage+ usage means that advertisers will need advanced Meta CAPI integrations to deal with the trends below.
The Metric That Matters Most: Calculating Your True New Customer Acquisition Cost
When using Advantage+ campaigns, the cost to acquire new customers has skyrocketed in the past 3 months. March through May 2025 is substantially more expensive, with May 2025 vs May 2025 showing a DRAMATIC escalation in nCAC, with the average cost going from $257 to $528 per customer. Ouch.
Meta Manual campaigns are actually acquiring customers more cheaply in 2025 than they were in 2024!
Meta Advantage+ Campaigns were destroying manual campaign performance at the start of the year. Then things took a very dramatic turn and manual campaigns in May are crushing Advantage+ when it comes to lower nCACs.
Meta First Click vs Last ROAS
First let’s benchmark the first click and last ROAS on all Meta campaigns, irregardless of campaign type. I was surprised to see that on average in 2025, first click and last click ROAS are very close to each other.
Next we exclude Advantage+ campaigns. The performance below shows that the manual campaigns track very closely to all campaign’s performance. I was also surprised to see the first and last click ROAS is very similar.
Finally we look at Advantage+ campaign first and last click ROAS performance. The last 3 months show that last click ROAS is significantly better than first click.
Additionally, 1st click ROAS plummeted in May.
Overall, May was a dramatically worse month for performance on Meta. If the nCAC and first click ROAS trends hold up for another month, it will be our recommendation to use Advantage+ for BOF and manual campaigns for TOF.
