How many ads do competitors run? Data from 164 UK brands

Search this question and you'll get recycled heuristics — "3–5 ads per ad set", "DTC brands run 30–80 creatives" — with no data behind any of it. We capture the ads of 164 UK brands across Google, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn, and we've captured 144,680 creatives doing it. So here is the actual answer, as a distribution: the median brand in our dataset has 317 ads live at once, the top quarter run more than 648, and the biggest runs nearly 3,000. This guide publishes the full numbers — by percentile, by platform, by industry and by ad age — so you can benchmark your own output against what rivals genuinely do rather than what a listicle guessed.

The short answer: far more than you'd guess

Across the 153 brands in our tracker where at least one ad platform reported an active creative at our most recent capture of that brand, we count 77,404 live ads. Per brand:

• Median: 317 live ads. Half the brands we track run more than this.
• Mean: 506 — dragged up by a heavy tail of very large advertisers.
• Bottom 10%: under ~55 live ads. Top 10%: over ~1,170.
• Largest single portfolio: 2,921 live ads — Pets at Home, counting every creative across Google, Meta and TikTok.

If you're running a dozen ads and wondering whether that's normal: in this dataset it would put you below the 10th percentile. The brands you compete with for attention are almost certainly running an order of magnitude more creative than you think — mostly because of how Google ads accumulate, which we'll get to.

Why most answers to this question are wrong

Nearly every page ranking for "how many ads should you run" answers a different, much smaller question: how many ads per ad set. That number has a legitimate source — Meta's own delivery guidance has recommended six or fewer ads per ad set, a recommendation documented by Jon Loomer and repeated (and rounded to "3–5") across hundreds of blog posts since. It's reasonable advice at the ad-set level.

But it tells you nothing about a competitor's total output. A brand's live footprint is ads per ad set times ad sets per campaign times campaigns per platform times platforms — plus every long-running Google search ad that's been quietly serving since 2024. The per-ad-set heuristic scales to a portfolio of 317 at the median, and nobody writing "run 3–5 ads" seems to have multiplied it out. The portfolio number is the one that matters when you're deciding whether you're being outgunned on creative volume, and it's the one nobody publishes — because you need a tracking dataset, not an opinion, to produce it.

The full distribution of live ads per brand

Here is the spread across the 153 brands with live-ad data, each measured at our latest capture of that brand:

Or, bucketed:

Nearly a third of tracked brands run 500 or more ads simultaneously. The very top of the table is dominated by big retail and marketplace-style advertisers: Pets at Home (2,921), ASOS (2,523), carwow (2,520) and B&Q (2,308). At the other end, a focused challenger like Jollyes was live with just 26 creatives at its latest capture — competing in the same pet-retail category as Pets at Home with roughly 1% of the creative volume.

How the count splits by platform

The platform mix explains most of why these numbers are so much higher than the folk wisdom:

Google carries 70% of all live creatives in the dataset, and the median brand runs twice as many Google ads as Meta ads. That surprises people who think of "competitor ads" as a Meta phenomenon — but it shouldn't. Search ads are cheap to multiply (every keyword theme and product line gets its own creatives), and they don't fatigue the way feed ads do, so they accumulate rather than rotate.

The mix also varies enormously by brand strategy. Gymshark ran 473 live ads at our latest capture — but 262 of them on TikTok, more than Google (98) and Meta (113) combined. Pets at Home is similar: 1,576 of its 2,921 live ads are TikTok creatives. If you only checked one ad library, you'd misread both brands completely.

How long competitors' ads stay live

Counting is step one; the age of what's live tells you how a competitor actually operates. We store each platform's own age figure for every creative (days shown for Google, days running for Meta), and the platform contrast is stark:

Read that Google row again: the median live Google ad in our dataset has been running for well over a year, and more than two-thirds qualify as evergreen (180+ days). Meta is the mirror image — nearly two-thirds of live Meta ads are under a month old, and barely one in sixty has reached evergreen status. In practice most brands run a large, old, stable Google estate and a small, young, fast-churning Meta rotation on top. When you benchmark a competitor's "ad count", you're really looking at two different machines bolted together.

TikTok's numbers come with a health warning. Its Commercial Content Library logs most ads with a shown-window of only a day or two — the median live TikTok ad in our data shows just one day between first and last shown, which says more about how TikTok records delivery than about creative strategy. That's also why TikTok is missing from the age table above: the dates are too thin to support an honest age read. More on its limits in our TikTok ad library guide.

Which industries run the most ads

For sectors where we track at least eight brands, median live ads per brand:

Travel's median of 844 reflects route-level and destination-level ad multiplication — the same mechanic that pushes retailers with big product ranges to the top of the overall table. The spread matters for benchmarking: "am I running enough ads?" has a very different answer at an insurer (median 231) than at a holiday brand (median 844). Compare against your sector, not against the whole market.

So how many ads should you run?

Honest answer: the per-ad-set rules of thumb are fine as far as they go, and this data doesn't overturn them. What it does overturn is any comfort that a handful of creatives constitutes a competitive presence. Three practical takeaways:

1. Benchmark against your named rivals, not an average. The range inside a single category is enormous (26 vs 2,921 in pet retail). What the median UK brand does is less useful than what the three brands bidding on your keywords do.
2. Audit your Google estate separately from your social rotation. If your rivals look anything like our dataset, two-thirds of their Google ads are evergreen workhorses over six months old. A thin search estate is the most common and least visible volume gap.
3. Watch the new-ad rate, not just the total. A competitor rotating creative at Meta's typical pace — nearly two-thirds of its live set under 30 days old — is testing constantly; one well below it is coasting. Our competitor ad analysis guide covers how to turn that into a monthly reading, and our ad-spend estimation guide covers what volume implies about budget.

How to count a competitor's ads yourself

Every number above comes from the platforms' own public transparency surfaces, so you can spot-check any single brand for free:

• Google: the Ads Transparency Center — but note it stops paginating at 900 creatives per query, so one-off manual counts systematically undercount big advertisers. We documented that cap, and how to work around it, in our Transparency Center guide. It's why our accumulated tracking shows Pets at Home at 1,202 live Google creatives when a single manual check can't get past 900.
• Meta: the Meta Ad Library shows every active ad for a page — counting them is manual scroll-work, and the quirks are covered in our Meta Ad Library guide.
• TikTok and LinkedIn: both have public libraries (linked above) with the date and status caveats already noted.

The catch is time: a one-brand snapshot takes an afternoon, goes stale in a week, and the per-platform counts aren't comparable without normalising the date fields. That's the gap AdRival exists to fill — we do the capture and qualification continuously, and our brand pages show a free teaser of what's live for each tracked brand.