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?
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 ⬇
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.
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.
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.
Wicked Reports data shows that between March and May 2025, the average nCAC for Advantage+ campaigns skyrocketed, going from $257 to $528. This dramatic escalation suggests the AI may be optimizing for easier, immediate 'last click' sales rather than efficiently acquiring new, cold traffic customers, potentially indicating a start of model degradation.
The analysis of 55,661 Meta campaigns reveals that while Advantage+ started the year strong, manual campaigns are now acquiring customers more cheaply as of May 2025. Manual campaign nCACs are actually lower in 2025 than they were in 2024, whereas Advantage+ nCAC has seen a dramatic increase, proving that human-guided manual campaigns can currently be more efficient for new customer acquisition.
The data indicates that Advantage+ campaigns are starting to favor 'last click ROAS' significantly better than 'first click ROAS'. This suggests the AI is optimizing heavily for lower-funnel, immediate conversions. The analysis concludes that the most effective strategy may be to use Advantage+ campaigns for Bottom-of-Funnel (BOF) retargeting and manual campaigns for Top-of-Funnel (TOF) cold traffic acquisition.