Key Benchmarks & Insights
1. Spend: Winners vs. mid-rage vs. losing ads
- ~55% of total spend goes to winning ads; ~28% to mid-range; ~17% to losing ads.
- Share of spend on winners rises by tier: micro ~23% → enterprise ~64%.
- ~4–8% of creatives are winners by tier (micro 3.8%, enterprise ~8.2%); 38–46% are mid-range; ~50–53% are losers (discarded before 28 days).
Implication: Most creatives are turned off before 28 days. A small fraction of creatives capture the majority of spend. Plan budgets for many small tests and a few large allocations to outliers.
2. Creative volume by spend tier
- Middle tier account ships ~6–7 creatives/week; top spending accounts ship 12–19+.
- Hit rate increases with tier (4% → 9%); larger brands both ship more and have higher hit rates.
Implication: Compare your weekly creative output to these tier benchmarks. Higher-spend accounts tend to have both higher volume and higher hit rate.
Hit rate by volume
- 10× benchmark: ~92.3rd percentile of ratio-to-median (i.e. 8% of creatives above become winners).
Implication: Don’t expect more than 1 in 10–13 creatives to be winners on average. If almost none of your creatives ever become winners, review creative strategy and product fit. If you’re above the benchmark, ensure you’re testing broadly enough. Set expectations with stakeholders: a handful of ads will scale and drive most results.
Creative Longevity
- Mid-range = 28+ days of spend, not a winner. Loser = turned off before 28 days (or never reached 28 days).
- ~50–53% of creatives are losing ads; ~38–46% are mid-range; ~4–8% are winners, by tier.
- Aggressive testing and fast optimization are the norm: many creatives are retired well before 28 days.
Implication: If your ads typically run much longer, keep them fresh or test new ads more often to avoid fatigue. Consider testing new concepts frequently rather than leaning on a few long-running ads.
Top accounts (top 25% by winner count within each tier)
- Top 25% of accounts within each spend tier have higher creative volume than the tier median.
- Use the tier-level tables (median creatives/week, median winner count, “Top 25% vs All”) to benchmark your account against peers in the same spend band.
Implication: These benchmarks are a reference checklist. Compare your metrics (e.g. “we launch X creatives/week, our hit rate is Y%, our top format is Z”) to the above and to the tier breakdowns to spot improvement or experimentation opportunities.
