Meta in 2025: Obvi’s Full Roadmap to Recovery

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

After months of testing, we rebuilt everything from scratch. Today, we're sharing the full roadmap that helped us resurrect our Meta performance in 2025.

📌 Bookmark and share this one with anyone struggling with Meta acquisition right now.

On the Menu:

• What went wrong (the January crash)

• The 5 major changes that turned everything around

• Actionable lessons you can use today

Struggling to reach truly new audiences on Meta — even with strong creative?

We’ve been there. After overhauling our entire creative strategy and campaign structure, performance bounced back… but growth still hit a ceiling.

Then came this shocker from some of our latest tests:

• Standard broad campaigns: 56% new visitors

• Proxima-powered campaigns: 72% new visitors

That’s +16% more fresh eyes on our ads — without changing creative or fiddling with account settings. 

⭐️ More new visitors = more new customers = more opportunity to scale ⭐️ 

Proxima’s AI Audiences use aggregated first-party data and predictive models to guide Meta’s algorithm toward high-intent, high-value buyers that broad targeting simply misses.

Here’s what happened when we first turned it on:

• +12.1% improvement in New Customer CPA

• +7.5% lift in New Customer ROAS

Since onboarding, we’ve scaled ad spend +2.3x — while matching or improving efficiency vs business as usual campaigns.

For a limited time, Proxima is offering an Efficiency Guarantee™.

If they don’t beat your BAU campaign in an A/B test, they’ll cut you a check.

Zero risk. All upside.

Ready to unlock new audiences? 👉 Book your free test here

Quick Recap: The January Crash

For context, here was our Meta playbook in 2024:

• 90% static images, 10% video content

• Rigid cost cap campaigns

• Heavy audience exclusions

• Reliance on organic lift at the top of the funnel

This helped us reach $1M/month in ad spend... until Q4, when we hit a brick wall.

Organic momentum slowed. Some key influencers stopped going viral. Most importantly, Meta's algorithm evolved with the Andromeda update.

By January, it was clear: the world had changed, and we had to change with it.

🔧 The 5 Major Changes That Turned Everything Around

1. Rebalanced Our Creative Mix

We shifted from 90/10 static/video to 50/50.

We had become over-indexed on a single format. When our organic lift disappeared, we had nothing to support top-of-funnel awareness.

So we scrambled for video content:

• Doubled down on whitelisting by reaching out to every past influencer for whitelist permission

• Created mashups from existing content

• Partnered with multiple agencies for fresh UGC

But format was only half the equation — we also diversified our messaging strategy.

We mapped our funnel stages and matched creative accordingly:

• Problem-unaware: Educate

• Problem-aware: Connect

• Solution-unaware: Introduce

• Solution-aware: Differentiate

• Product-aware: Convert
  

We’d always considered these stages, but now we build and analyze with them in mind. 

Tip: If your ads mostly serve engaged audiences, you’re not feeding top-of-funnel enough — and your results will suffer.

Also: Monitor frequency. High frequency + flat results = you’re just hitting the same people over and over.

Bottom line: Format and messaging diversity became our lifeline.

2. Reduced Audience Exclusions

This required completely rethinking our approach to audience targeting.

We used to exclude everything:

• Entire customer list (emails)

• All website visitors (pixel - 180 days)

• All past purchasers (pixel)

The goal was to FORCE Meta to find new customers and people who weren’t aware of our brand.

That used to work. But as signal loss increased, this approach started strangling performance. It also clashed with our creative mix, which was heavily static-focused (statics tend to appeal to mid-funnel audiences). 

We experimented with the opposite extreme—removing all exclusions entirely. But we found this was targeting too many existing customers.

🛬 Where we landed: Only exclude purchases from the last 180 days.

That balance allows us to:

• Re-target churned customers

• Preserve signal

• Avoid wasting budget on recent buyers

Your recent buyers should be nurtured with retention (email + SMS + community. After six months, we consider our customers lapsed, so it makes sense to try to re-acquire them.

3. Changed Our Campaign Structure

Our old flow: ABOs for testing → CBO for scaling → Hard cost caps everywhere

What’s working now:

• Weekly ABO testing (1 ad set per angle)

• Promote winners to ASC+ broad targeting with auto-bidding (no caps)

• Scale spend up/down based on traction

• Targeting: broad audiences

• Exclusions: 180-day purchasers ONLY

Some other changes we made:

Attribution Window: We were testing 7-day click, 1-day view, but shifted to 7-day click, 1-day engage view (for videos only). 

Why? We found some ads were driving up to 50% view-through “conversions”, which wasn't giving us an accurate picture of performance.

Bidding Strategy: We've moved from rigid cost caps across the board to ASC with auto-bidding for our scaling campaigns. We have maintained CC’s on our ABO testing campaigns. 

What this boils down to is we're giving more control to Meta.

Instead of micromanaging, we're focused on feeding the system:

• Creative volume & variety for all funnel stages

• Balancing our content types

• Removing (most) artificial restrictions

4. Built a Creative Engine That Doesn’t Stop 🚂

To maintain velocity, we now work with:

• 4-5 different agencies for video content

• Multiple sources for static ads

• Creators and partners to expand our whitelist network

In 2024, statics crushed for us — but that was situational. When Meta’s priorities changed & our organic impressions fell, our results tanked (no matter how fast we tested.)

Old winners died. New formats didn’t stick.

Because we were still playing by last year’s rules.

But we're back on track now. We're spending more on testing, but we're also finding way more winners.

👀 Looking for a killer creative agency? Let us know what you need, and we’ll make a recommendation → Click for an intro 

5. Testing Different LP Types

We have always leaned into landing pages as a post-click destination in our paid media. But as part of this recalibration, we started trying out new types of LPs.

Rather than our tried and true structure of Product > Benefits > Social Proof > Features > How To Use (etc.) we’ve added quiz and advertorial-based LPs into the mix. 

💪 The big winner so far → Advertorials. 

We’ve already seen a +10% lift based on some initial results. 

So now we’re going to roll out additional pages based for different offers and personas. 

These haven’t worked for us in the past, but we’re pretty bullish given tests so far. With our improved creative dev and account structure, this is helping to compound our gains. 

🔑 Reminder to test your post-click destinations. Advertorials may appeal to segments of your audience who may be more curious than eager to buy, for instance.  

👀Want to test advertorials yourself? We can connect you with the partner that’s helping us execute. 

🔗 Click here to get the intro

🧠 The Biggest Lessons (so far)

After months of testing and rebuilding, here are our key takeaways:

1. Meta evolves constantly. What worked six months ago might be holding you back now.
   

2. Give the system what it wants. More variety, less micromanagement.
   

3. Create “trust signals.” Influencers, fans, and whitelisted ads help Meta build confidence.
   

4. Let go of old “best practices.” Some of our previous tactics (like heavy exclusions) became performance killers.

Join us in Miami! 🍹

We’re throwing the official Commerce Roundtable Afterparty next week. Swing by for food, fun, and fabulous conversations with some of the best minds in DTC.

🗓️ April 25
🕦 7:00 pm
🕋 Gekko

Grab your Afterparty invite 👉🏽 here

🧰 Operator Toolbox – Tools in our growth stack

⭐️ Proxima – AI-powered custom audiences trained on 70M DTC transactions that we use to scale efficiently.

Try out their Efficiency Guarantee → 

🔹 Agency & Vendor Recommendations! Need help finding a great partner? Fill out this quick form, and we’ll connect you with some of our favorites. Quick connect →

🔹PDQ – Pretty Damn Quick helps us tailor our shipping and checkout experience. Let us know how much to charge and where to set out free shipping thresholds to maximize both conversion and profit. Optimize your shipping experience with PDQ → 

🔹SARAL – Our influencer management platform. The key to our seeding and UGC growth engine. Evolve your influence program with SARAL → 

🔹 Aftersell – Optimizing AOV post-purchase with smart, flexible upsell offers — critical when margins are under attack. Grow your AOV  with Aftersell → 

Some of these are referral partners. We only share what we actually use or would recommend to a friend.