Motion’s 2026 Creative Benchmarks Report

Most ads fail. Not because your team isn't talented, not because the hook wasn't clever, but because that's how Meta works.

Only 5–8% of ads become real winners, and about half never get meaningful spend.

The best teams know this and have built production machines that keep creating (without burning out or second-guessing every launch).

We wanted to quantify what's really working in ad accounts.

So we analyzed $1.3B in ad spend.

This was an anonymized dataset of +550,000 ads launched by +6,000 advertisers, representing roughly $1.3 billion in spend across Facebook and Instagram between September 2025 and early January 2026.

The window spans one of the most competitive promotion cycles of the year: pre-holiday testing, Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM), and the post-holiday reset.

Motion’s 2026 Creative Benchmarks report answers the four questions we get asked most at Motion:

1. How many ads are top advertisers actually testing each week?
2. How many ads typically become winners and where does the spend actually go?
3. Which formats, hooks, and asset types become winners most often, broken down by vertical?
4. How does your creative strategy compare to others at your spend level?

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How to use our benchmark data in your own ad strategy

1. First, read the full report. Or watch the video above to get the main points.
2. Wondering how your account stacks up? The report includes a benchmarks calculator — plug in your vertical and spend tier to see where you stand.
3. Make your LLM read the report. We’ve packaged up all the information that you can share with ChatGPT or Claude. Download this LLM-friendly version and upload it to ChatGPT/Claude.
4. Now, ChatGPT/Claude has rich context into creative benchmarks, formats that work, and what healthy ad accounts look like.
5. Start asking ChatGPT/Claude questions about your own ad strategy, new creative ideas you could try, and brainstorm with this data. This will help the LLM give you sharp and relevant actions to take.

Try this prompt to start - adjust the specifics to fit your brand, industry, and context.

Notice how we’re using the benchmark data for insights around industry, creative testing volume, and giving ChatGPT/Claude key info such as our specific product, team capacity, and monthly spend.

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Sample Prompt - Adjust with your brand’s context

I work at a personal care brand and we sell shampoo for wavy hair, targeting women aged 18-35. We have a monthly ad spend of $100,000 per month, ship 50 ads per month, and optimize for purchases from our Shopify store. We currently have a team of five—a creative strategist, a video editor, a freelance creator who films a lot of ads and social content, a designer, and a media buyer. Using the insights from the benchmark report, help me plan my next 30 days of ad creative. Look for relevant insights for our specific industry of personal care. Also, act as a creative strategy consultant and use the benchmarks data to suggest where our ad volume and testing strategy might be behind or ahead of similar brands at our spend and industry.

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Go even further - use the benchmark data to analyze your specific ads

Using Motion (as we connect to your ad data and we’ve integrated the benchmarks data into our AI system) will dramatically improve the creative insights you get.

Motion’s AI already understands the benchmark data and will ground recommendations against your current performance. It will analyze thousands of ads in your account, apply industry-specific data from the $1.3B in spend we analyzed, and give you some mind-blowing insights.

Even better, Motion’s AI has already categorized every ad in your account with our incredibly accurate AI tags. This is the same AI taxonomy used in our Benchmark report, so Motion’s AI can precisely identify creative gaps, overused ad formats in your account, and the testing depth of your ad strategy.

Open Motion and start an AI Chat. We’ve preloaded Motion with data from the Benchmark report, so you don’t need to upload anything. Motion will automatically reference the benchmark data.

Here are some prompts to explore

Creative Gap Analysis

• First, look at my ad account and tell me how many new creatives I'm launching per week. Compare that to the average testing volume for my spend tier and {your vertical} in this report — and tell me what I'd need to produce weekly to hit the top-tier benchmark for my category.
• Then, pull the top five best-performing visual formats for {your vertical} from the report, combine those with my top-performing messaging angles from the last 30 days, and give me new creative concepts to explore.

That's your creative gap analysis and your next brief, all before your second cup of coffee. ☕️

Account audit prompts

• Look at our current creative portfolio and tell me where we seem underpowered relative to Motion's 2026 benchmark findings: testing volume, portfolio breadth, winner concentration, or diversity across visual format, asset type, and hook/headline style. Call out what is clearly report-backed vs softer exploratory research, ground it in what we're actually running now, and end with the 3 highest-upside creative directions worth exploring next.
• Look at our last 30 days of creatives and tell me which parts of the 2026 benchmark story seem most relevant to us right now: testing volume, narrow portfolio breadth, winner concentration, or lack of diversity. Ground it in our actual recent mix, separate stronger benchmark evidence from softer directional research, and finish with the 3 biggest creative opportunities this suggests.
• Audit what is live in market right now and tell me where our active portfolio looks thin relative to Motion's 2026 benchmark findings. Focus on visual format, asset type, and hook/headline style, keep the benchmark application directional rather than exact math, and end with the 3 most promising areas to expand next.

Now, you have a data-backed analysis of your creative testing approach, an Andromeda-focused creative diversity and visual format audit, and the highest impact creative opportunities to tackle next.