The Biggest Meta Advertising Updates of 2025

Yeah, it’s that time of the year when we look back and recap everything that happened. It might be the sign of lazy creativity, but I decided to take this way further.

I recently sat down and went through all 250 or so pieces of content I published. My blog, short form video posts, and yes, podcast episodes.

I then documented every time I discussed a change or new feature. Amazingly, there were 83 such changes in 2025. So if you felt like Meta advertising was constantly changing and you couldn’t keep up, there’s a reason for that.

While a lot of those changes were minor feature updates, there were four that stood out.

First, and it should be no surprise, 2025 was the year of Andromeda.

It doesn’t matter what you think of it. Some advertisers blamed Andromeda for their results in 2025. Others of us thought the hype was a bit overblown. But no matter what you thought of it, Andromeda was the hottest topic of the year.

I can speak from first hand experience that I approach my ads completely different now.

In years past, my ads were an after thought. I was entirely focused on targeting, optimization, and all of the various levers and settings.

So this year, thanks to the Andromeda hype, I spent way more time on my ads. Not just creative diversification, making sure I lean into different formats, multiple text, and different messaging angles.

But, more than ever before, I was focused on the psychology of ads and trying to create good ones.

The second biggest update of 2025 was the creative testing tool.

Maybe I’m in the minority on this, but I’m a huge fan of this new feature. It allows you to allocate a percentage of your campaign or ad set budget to a temporary creative test. And when that test is over, the ads will continue running normally, without forced budget.

I find this approach far superior to the way we did it in the past, and many advertisers continue to test creative today.

Because of the creative testing tool, I’ve changed the way I approach introducing new ads. In the past, I’d publish new ads and leave them to the algorithm gods. Then I’d start asking questions about why one ad wasn’t getting shown.

Now I can run a test on all new ads so I have that data. So then if I turn an ad on or off it’s based on knowledge from those tests, rather than guessing.

And the third biggest Meta advertising update of 2025: Value Rules.

Honestly, this was a surprise addition to the advertiser’s toolbox. While the mostly consistent theme has been Meta taking control away from advertisers, Value Rules was an example of giving control back.

And it actually makes sense when you think about it.

Yes, you should use Advantage+ Audience and trust algorithmic targeting in most cases. But it’s not perfect, and there are specific cases when Meta going for the cheap action can lead to low-quality results.

Instead of manually adjusting your audience by age range or gender, you can keep Advantage+ on. Then use value rules to adjust bids to solve the problem related to information you have but Meta doesn’t.

Another common example of when value rules are useful is related to placements. If audience network leads to cheap and low-quality results, Meta will spend a ton of your budget there. Instead of removing it, you can simply apply a value rule to lower your bid.

So these were the three biggest updates of 2025, but there were a few honorable mentions.

Meta’s automatic translation tools for videos and text are in the early stages, but have the potential of making our ads far more accessible.

Advantage+ Campaign setup may not have added functionality, but it further encouraged advertisers to lock in the default settings.

I’m still not sure what to make of Incremental Attribution, but it has the potential to be something.

While First Conversion reporting was introduced in 2024, the new optimization option came out this year. It’s buggy and I still don’t get why you’d optimize this way, but it was a big change.

And finally, Meta finally monetized Threads, opening up further inventory for advertisers. We’re only seeing basic ad options there so far, but that will change soon.

So here’s the bottom of the glass.

2025 was The Year of Andromeda and a year of dizzying changes for advertisers. If you were able to keep up, you’re ahead of most and you should be proud of yourself.

It would be easy to stick to your old ways and ignore the countless changes and updates. But if you want to remain relevant and effective as an advertiser, you need to be aware of these updates. You need to adjust and make informed decisions about how the changes impact your approach.

If you want to take a trip through memory lane on the 83 changes that happened this past year, read my blog post. Go to jonloomer.com/2025.

Thanks for being along for the ride this year, I’m looking forward to more big things with the podcast moving forward.

Here’s to a great 2026!