Meta Ads in 2025
The Meta Ads platform has changed more in the last three years than in the previous five. Advantage+ campaigns, AI-generated creative variations, the post-iOS 14 attribution environment, and the dominance of Reels as a placement have collectively rewritten the rules. Strategies that worked in 2021 β highly segmented manual audiences, rigid campaign structures, heavy reliance on platform-reported ROAS β are now actively counterproductive.
What Works Now
Creative is the new targeting. Meta's algorithm reads your creative, identifies who responds to it, and finds more of those people. A video that speaks directly to a specific pain point will self-select its audience better than any interest-targeting combination. We now spend 60% of our Meta strategy time on creative direction and 40% on campaign structure β nearly the reverse of how we operated in 2021.
For e-commerce clients, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns outperform manual structures in the majority of our accounts, typically by 15β30% on ROAS. The condition is sufficient conversion data β at least 50 purchases per month. Below that threshold, manual campaigns with tight audience control perform better.
Attribution
We do not trust Meta's reported ROAS at face value. We implement incrementality testing β holdout groups that let you measure the actual causal impact of your Meta spend β and reconcile platform data with your CRM and revenue data. The true incrementality is typically 60β80% of what the platform reports, which is still strongly positive for most clients.