Their Ads Live 56 Days on Average. That Is the Scoreboard

Almost nobody knows what to do once they can see them.

I have been in that meeting. Someone screenshots eleven Meta ads, pastes them into a deck, and says "look what they are doing". Everyone nods. Nothing changes. The deck goes to a folder where decks go to die.

The screenshots are not the insight. Here is the insight.

An ad that has been running for 56 days is an ad that is making money. Nobody keeps paying for a loser.

That is the whole trick, and it is the only honest scoreboard you get from the outside. You cannot see their ROAS. You cannot see their CPA. You can see what they refuse to switch off, and that tells you almost the same thing.

Across the brands we track, the average live ad has been up for 56 days. So when you find one that has been running four months, you have not found an ad. You have found a conclusion someone else paid to reach.

Then there is the part that took us longer to build.

Raw ad counts lie. One brand had 500 ads live at once, which sounds like a monster of a testing operation until you notice that most of them are the same three sentences with a different photo on top.

So we group them into message families: ads that say the same thing in different words. Across 22 brands there are 459 families, and each one carries how many ads are running it, how long the median ad in it has survived, and whether there is an offer inside.

Suddenly "500 ads" becomes "they have six ideas, and this one has outlived the other five".

You can work with that. You cannot work with 500 screenshots.

We also record where each ad sends people, because an ad pointing at a dedicated landing page is a different level of commitment from one pointing at a product page.

What we cannot tell you is what they spent. We can count ads and measure how long each survives. We cannot see the invoice, and any number we invented would be a model wearing a measurement's clothes. Adbeat and Pathmatics measure spend. We do not, and we would rather write that here than let you find out later.

One thing to do next: find the oldest ad your main competitor is running.

Not the newest. The oldest. That is the one they know something about.