Speaker 1: Most of your ads will lose.
Text overlay: "MOST OF YOUR ADS WILL LOSE"
Speaker 1: We looked at over 550,000 ads across 1.3 billion in spend, and most of the ads were losers.
Text overlay: "OVER 550,000 ADS"]
> [VISUAL: A grid of dozens of different ads for various products like Amazon Echo, art supplies, cookware, headphones, shoes, etc.]
> [VISUAL: Text overlay: "ACROSS $1.3 BILLION IN SPEND"]
> [VISUAL: Text overlay: "MOST OF THE ADS WERE LOSERS"
Speaker 1: Absolute tanking failures.
Stock footage of an office where a laptop is on fire. Coworkers look on in shock. A whiteboard in the background is titled "Q3 CAMPAIGN IDEAS".
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a reason why every creative starts foaming at the mouth when they hear the words, "make it go viral."
Text overlay: "MAKE IT GO VIRAL"
Speaker 1: It's fucking hard because when it comes to Meta ads, the algorithm is actively working against you.
AI-generated image of a retro-style robot sitting at a control panel in an office. The robot has glowing red eyes and is about to press a red button labeled "REJECT".
Speaker 1: So in this video, I'm going to answer the question, how many ads it actually takes to win.
Text overlay: "HOW MANY ADS IT TAKES TO WIN"
Speaker 1: And why it actually gets harder the more you scale.
Speaker 1: Our deep dive into Meta showed that roughly 5 to 8% of ads win.
Animated handwritten text on lined paper. "OUR META ADS RESEARCH" is circled with an arrow pointing to "ROUGHLY 5-8% OF ADS WIN".
Speaker 1: Now, in this case, we're defining winner as an ad that spends at least 10 times the median spend of its account.
An arrow points from "WIN" to "DEFINITION OF 'WINNER'". Below that, it says "= 10X OF THE ACCOUNT'S MEDIAN SPEND".
Speaker 1: So if your average creative spends $200, you need an ad to reach 2,000 to consider it a winner.
An arrow points down to "SO... IF YOUR AVERAGE CREATIVE SPENDS $200". An equals sign connects this to "AN AD NEEDS TO HIT $2K TO CONSIDER IT A 'WINNER'".
Speaker 1: Now, the reason the average is a range is because your odds of getting a winner change the more you spend. Sort of. When you're spending more, you're likely launching more ads, and Meta is a numbers game.
Screenshot of a webpage from motionapp.com. A bar chart is titled "Winning ads make up a small share of portfolios, even for higher-spend advertisers." The chart shows the percentage breakdown of "Losers", "Mid-range", and "Winners" across different monthly ad spend tiers (Micro, Small, Medium, Large, Enterprise).
Speaker 1: The more ads you launch, the greater chance you have of finding a winner. Now, if you want to know how many ads you should actually be launching based on your spend tier and industry, check out this video because we found the answer.
A thumbnail for another YouTube video appears in the top right corner. It shows the speaker and has text: "HOW MANY ADS DO YOU REALLY NEED?"
Speaker 1: But back to the chart. Between 40 and 46% of your ads will get mid-range results, while the majority of your ads will lose.
The same bar chart is shown again. The "Mid-range" section (pink) is highlighted, then the "Losers" section (light purple) is highlighted.
Speaker 1: And not just lose, I mean, dead on arrival, never had a chance, lose.
AI-generated image of a retro robot with glowing red eyes opening a cardboard box labeled "New ads".
Speaker 1: This chart shows the amount of money spent by all the ads in our study.
A histogram chart appears in a pop-up window. The title is "Many ads spend very little, a few ads spend a lot". The x-axis is "Spend per ad" and the y-axis is "Total number of ads".
Speaker 1: Over 110,000 ads spent $100 or less, which is basically no spend.
The leftmost bars of the histogram, up to the $100 mark, are highlighted in red.
Speaker 1: Further down the line, if an ad crosses the $3,600 mark, you are in the 90th percentile of spenders on Meta.
The right tail of the histogram, from the $3.6K mark onwards, is highlighted in pink with the text "90TH PERCENTILE OF ADS".
Speaker 1: But your ad still might not be a winner.
Text on a blue background: "BUT YOUR AD STILL MAY NOT BE A WINNER"
Speaker 1: Remember, we defined a winner as an ad that spends 10 times more than the average ad in its account. And often times, big brands will have higher medians, which raises the bar for what's considered a winner.
Logos for Hexclad, True Classic, Huel, and Jones Road appear on screen.
Speaker 1: Why do they have higher medians? Because while only 5 to 8% of ads win, those winners are going to be putting up massive numbers, and that's going to raise the average.
Text overlay: "WHILE ONLY 5-8% OF ADS WIN" and "THOSE WINNERS WILL RAISE YOUR AVERAGES"
Speaker 1: Look at this. As your budget grows, more and more spend gets soaked up by the winners, raising that bar.
A bar chart titled "Ad spend shifts toward winners as accounts grow, rather than spreading evenly across creatives." It shows the percentage of spend going to "Losers", "Mid-range", and "Winners" across different spend tiers. The "Winners" portion (dark purple) grows significantly larger as the spend tier increases.
Speaker 1: This could be an all-star lineup of killer ads, or it could be one of those rare viral ads your boss is always talking about.
A grid of ads fades in and out. Then a single ad on a phone screen replicates into a pattern.
Speaker 1: But is this any better than this? Not exactly, because winners, losers, and mid-tier ads, they all play a necessary role.
The speaker is sitting on a couch. Two glowing bar charts from the previous visual appear on either side of him, one for "Micro (<$10K)" and one for "Enterprise ($1M+)".
Speaker 1: Winners drive growth. That's obvious. We hope every ad becomes a winner, but most won't. They'll become losers.
Text overlay: "WINNERS DRIVE GROWTH"
Speaker 1: They're the cost of doing business and the result of big swings that just don't pan out.
Text overlay on a background of falling poker chips: "LOSERS ARE THE COST OF PLAYING"]
> [VISUAL: Stock footage of a business meeting with text overlay: "AND FAILED EXPERIMENTS"
Speaker 1: You're going to miss a lot. And in those down periods where you're searching for your next big win, you need stabilizers, creative that brings reliable, consistent spend. These are your mid-tier ads.
Screenshot of the Motion webpage with the section "Mid-range spenders and portfolio logic" visible.
Speaker 1: Think of it like a portfolio. Winners are your growth plays, mid-range are your bonds, losers are the cost of placing bets. If you cut everything that doesn't immediately hit your winner threshold, you remove the floor from your account, and it gets volatile.
Text overlay: "MID-TIER ADS: AD ACCOUNT STABILIZERS"
Speaker 1: And when a winner eventually fades, which they always do, you have nothing to catch you. That's my long way of saying, don't cut your mid-tier ads just because they're not doing crazy numbers.
Text overlay: "DON'T CUT MID-TIER ADS WHEN THEY DON'T WIN BIG"
Speaker 1: Now, going back to my original question, how many ads become winners? We have to talk about hit rate.
Text overlay: "HOW MANY ADS BECOME WINNERS?"]
> [VISUAL: Text overlay: "WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT HIT RATE"
Speaker 1: It is not the scorecard people think it is. A high hit rate could mean flawless creative judgment just as much as it could mean you're playing it too safe and not testing enough to actually find your ceiling.
A graphic titled "Why hit rate can be misleading". It compares "Account A" (5 launches, 1 winner, Hit rate: 20%) with "Account B" (50 launches, 5 winners, Hit rate: 10%).
Speaker 1: Account A has the higher hit rate, but Account B has more winners. So, which is better?
On the graphic, "Hit rate: 20%" is highlighted for Account A, and "5 winners" is highlighted for Account B.
Speaker 1: Here's the main takeaway of this video. Most of your ads will lose.
Text overlay: "MOST OF YOUR ADS WILL LOSE"
Speaker 1: That's not the result of bad creative or you being terrible at your job. It's the result of Meta working how it's supposed to.
AI-generated image of the robot holding a plaque that says "Algorithm Corp. Employee of the Month. Unit 725".
Speaker 1: Because of that reality, you shouldn't stress the losers, and you definitely shouldn't be trying to pull insights from them.
AI-generated image of a robot arm dropping the "New ads" box into a dumpster full of old electronics.
Speaker 1: Instead, spend your time dissecting your winners. Iterate on those, run tests, and figure out exactly what's making them tick.
Stock footage of a team of three people brainstorming at a whiteboard that says "What ads are winning".
Speaker 1: Everything I talked about in this video, all the charts I've showed, it's all in Motion's free 2026 Creative Benchmarks report.
Screenshot of the Motion "CREATIVE BENCHMARKS 2026" report landing page.
Speaker 1: It has the answers to all of the questions that keeps creative strategists up at night. So, check it out at the link in the description, and I'll see you in the next video.
A series of screenshots from the report are shown, including a question mark made of dots, a scatter plot, and a data table.
