How long should you run an ad? Data from 143,006 UK creatives

Across 143,006 UK ads with platform-reported run dates, half of the ads that stop are stopped within 30 days — but the ads still serving have a median age of 159 days, and a quarter of all tracked ads run past a full year. In practice, advertisers kill fast and let winners run for years. That's the measured answer; the "3–4 days minimum" and "refresh every 4–6 weeks" rules you'll read elsewhere are guesses, and the data below shows where each one breaks.

How long do competitors run their ads?

The median ad on Google runs 129 days; on Meta, 18 days; on TikTok, about 1 day (per the platforms' own run dates across 143,006 UK ads we track). A third of Google ads pass a full year; only 0.1% of Meta ads do. So "how long do competitors run ads" has no single answer — it has a channel answer: search ads are infrastructure that accumulates, feed ads are tests that churn, and the rare long-runner on either channel is the closest thing to public proof an ad is working.

Two different questions hiding in one

"How long should you run an ad" is really two questions, and most advice answers only the first:

1. How long before you judge it? The minimum window before performance data means anything. This has a semi-official answer: Meta's learning phase typically ends once an ad set generates around 50 optimisation events within seven days, so judging before that is judging noise. The blog consensus — 3–4 days minimum, seven days to cover a full weekly cycle — is downstream of the same logic.
2. How long can a working ad keep running? This is the question nobody answers with data, because answering it requires tracking thousands of ads over months. The standard line is "refresh every 4–6 weeks or fatigue kills you". Our data says that line is wrong for at least one major channel — and that the best advertisers run winning ads for years.

The pages ranking for this query are vendor blogs working from either no dataset or a tiny one. We'd rather show our working: everything below comes from creatives whose run dates were reported by the ad platforms themselves — 110,145 on Google, 16,689 on Meta, 16,172 on TikTok. (We track LinkedIn too, but its ad library doesn't report run dates, so it's excluded from the lifespan numbers.)

How long do ads actually run? The UK distribution

First, the headline spread. Across all 143,006 creatives, the recorded run length — time between an ad's first and most recent appearance — breaks down like this:

The shape matters more than the median (59 days). This is a barbell: a big cluster under a month, a big cluster over a year, little in between.

But the honest way to read lifespan data is to split ads that have finished their run from ads that are still serving — a live ad's clock is still ticking, so lumping them together understates how long winners really last. Split that way, the barbell explains itself:

• Completed runs (65,602 ads): median 30 days. Half of all ads that stop are stopped within a month; 22.1% last a week or less. Only 10.3% of completed runs made it past a year.
• Still serving (77,404 ads): median age 159 days — and still counting. 48.3% of the live estate is already past 180 days; 38.1% past a full year.

That is the real answer to "how long should you run an ad": professionals kill fast — most discards die inside a month — and then let the survivors run for a very long time. Nobody we track is refreshing winners on a 4–6 week calendar.

Ad lifespan by channel: three different games

Averaging across channels would hide the most useful finding, because the channels behave nothing alike:

Google: ads are infrastructure

Nearly half of Google creatives in our tracker pass 180 days and a third pass a full year. The completed-versus-live split is stark: Google runs that have ended lasted a median of 41 days, but the median still-serving Google ad is 407 days old. Search and Performance Max assets don't fatigue the way social creative does — they serve against intent, not against a feed-weary audience — so brands build them and leave them. Dunelm is the clearest example we track: across 2,008 Google creatives with run dates, its median ad has been live for 678 days. The longest-running ad in our entire dataset is a Next Google creative reported at 1,969 days — well over five years.

Meta: a fast-churning estate

The median Meta creative we capture is just 18 days old. Because Meta's Ad Library mostly lists active ads, read that as the age of the live estate: it turns over so quickly that at any moment 41.1% of a brand's Meta ads are a fortnight old or younger, and only 1.5% have survived six months. The tail exists here too, though — at our latest capture, an iwoca Meta ad had been running for 675 days, and Wren Kitchens had one at 492. When a Meta ad survives past a year, that is the strongest buy-signal competitor data can give you: nobody leaves a Meta ad running for 16 months unless it pays. (How often brands add new creative alongside these survivors is a separate question — we've published the launch-cadence data in how often should you refresh ad creative.)

TikTok: bursts, not campaigns

TikTok is the extreme: 96.2% of tracked creatives show for 30 days or fewer, and the median recorded run is a single day. That isn't a live-ad artefact — among TikTok ads whose runs have ended, the median is still one day. It reflects genuine strategy (high-volume creative testing with brutal early kills) plus the short delivery windows TikTok's library reports. The practical read: on TikTok, longevity is so rare that any ad still serving after a month is remarkable. Project Solar holds our TikTok record at 1,110 days.

How long before an ad counts as evergreen?

We flag a creative as evergreen at 180 days, and the distribution supports that threshold: 50,280 of 143,006 ads (35.2%) reach it. Past 180 days an ad has survived multiple budget reviews, seasonal cycles and creative refreshes — it isn't running by accident — and the live-estate numbers show ads that get there mostly keep going.

The contrast between brands is as wide as the contrast between channels. Dunelm's median Google ad is 678 days old; Gymshark's, across 1,536 Google creatives, is 18 days — a drop-driven brand rebuilding its ad estate constantly. Neither is wrong. But if you're benchmarking yourself, you need to know which game your competitors are playing, which is why we surface longest-running ads on every brand page.

So how long should you run yours? Four rules from the data

1. Never judge before seven days on social. The learning phase plus a full weekly cycle is the floor. Below roughly 50 optimisation events you're reading noise, and weekday/weekend swings mean even a strong start can be a mirage.
2. Match your kill speed to the channel. On Meta, half of all discarded ads are cut within a month — if yours hasn't earned its keep in 2–3 weeks, the brands we track would already have cut it. A Google search ad killed at three weeks never got a chance: the channel's median recorded run is 129 days, and the typical still-serving Google ad is over a year old.
3. Don't refresh a winner on a schedule. The "4–6 week fatigue" rule is contradicted by a quarter of all tracked ads — and a third of Google ads — running past a year. Fatigue is an observed metric (frequency up, CTR down), not a calendar date. If the numbers hold, let it run; the brands we track do.
4. Read your competitors' survivors. An ad a rival has run for 180+ days is a proven concept: proven hook, proven offer, proven audience. Their kill-list is equally useful — ideas they've already paid to disprove. Longevity is the one performance signal ad libraries leak for free.

How to check how long competitors' ads have run

You can do this manually: the Google Ads Transparency Center shows first- and last-shown dates per creative, Meta's Ad Library shows start dates for active ads, and TikTok's library shows first/last shown. The limitation is scale — the median brand we track runs 317 live ads at once, and the libraries won't sort any of them by age for you.

That sorting is the part we've automated. AdRival captures every live creative a brand runs across Google, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn, keeps the run dates, and qualifies each ad for hook, offer and urgency — so "show me every ad this competitor has kept alive for six months, and what those ads have in common" is one view rather than an afternoon of clicking. The brand pages on this site (for example Compare the Market or Pets at Home) show a free teaser of that data; reports are £99 one-off and trackers £99/month via the contact form.

However you do it, do it with dates. The question "how long should you run an ad" has been answered for years by people who never measured a single ad's lifespan. The ads themselves — 143,006 of them — answer it better: kill fast, and then let winners run far longer than the blog posts dare to suggest.