How often should you refresh ad creative? Data from 164 UK brands

The standard answer is "every one to four weeks", usually from a design subscription service or an agency blog with no dataset behind it. We capture the ads of 164 UK brands across Google, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn — 145,987 of the creatives we've captured carry platform-reported launch dates — so instead of a rule of thumb, here is what refresh actually looks like: the median brand puts out new creative every 3 days on Google, every 4 on Meta, and roughly daily on TikTok. Refresh isn't a calendar event where you swap old ads for new. It's a drumbeat of additions layered over winners that keep running. This guide publishes the real cadences by channel and by sector, so you can benchmark yours against brands that actually compete with you.

The standard advice — and what it's based on

Search this question and you'll find a consensus: refresh every 1–2 weeks on high-spend campaigns, monthly on smaller ones, or staged by funnel — top-of-funnel every 1–2 weeks, retargeting every 4–6. The better pieces add the right caveat: watch frequency and CTR, not the calendar. Almost none of it is built on observed behaviour — the datasets are tiny, American, or absent.

There's also a definitional muddle. "How often should you refresh" is two questions wearing one coat:

1. When should a running ad be retired? That's a lifespan question, and we've answered it separately with the full distribution in how long should you run an ad. Short version: half of discarded ads die within 30 days, while winners run for years.
2. How often should new creative enter the account? That's a rhythm question — about the brand, not the ad — and it's the one this guide answers, because our data lets us watch 164 brands' launch dates in aggregate.

Getting the distinction right matters: the brands we track do not replace their estates on a schedule. They add constantly and prune ruthlessly, which is a very different operation from "refresh every fortnight".

How often do UK brands actually launch new creative?

Our dataset: 147,699 creatives captured from 164 UK brands, of which 145,987 have a platform-reported first-shown date — 112,230 on Google, 17,559 on Meta, 16,198 on TikTok. (LinkedIn's library shows run dates per ad, but we don't yet capture them, so its 1,712 creatives sit this guide out.) For the cadence numbers below we only count brands we captured within a fortnight of each channel's latest run, so stale coverage can't masquerade as a slow refresh rate.

The gap figure is the median brand's median interval between days on which at least one new creative appeared, over the trailing twelve months. On Google and Meta the middle half of brands sits between 2 and 7 days; on TikTok a quarter of brands launch something every single day. Nobody in this dataset behaves like the "one new ad every few weeks" advice. Even the 25th percentile Meta brand shipped over 20 new creatives in the last quarter.

If that volume sounds unreachable, remember these are variations, not campaigns: the same offer re-cut as five hooks, three formats and two aspect ratios counts as ten creatives — and that is precisely how the volume gets made.

Creative refresh rate by channel: three different rhythms

Google: add slowly, keep forever

Google is the slow channel, and deliberately so. Of the 55,114 Google creatives currently live in our tracker, only 3.4% launched in the last 30 days and 10.4% in the last 90 — while 55.3% have been running for over a year. The median live Google ad is 476 days old. Search and Performance Max assets serve against intent rather than a feed-weary audience, so brands treat them as plumbing: Toolstation has 1,112 live Google creatives with a median age of 688 days and added exactly one new creative in the last 90 days. Wickes runs 746 with a median age of 835 days and added 23. If you're "refreshing" Google search assets monthly, you're doing work the market doesn't do.

Meta: a constant drip — or a monthly batch

Meta is where the refresh question actually bites. Half the live Meta estate we track (50.4%) launched within the last 90 days, and 16.7% within 30. The median active brand shipped 69 new Meta creatives in the last quarter. But how they ship splits into two visible styles:

• Drip: Auto Trader launched 257 new Meta creatives across 31 distinct launch days in 90 days — new ads roughly every third day, continuously. Butternut Box ran 391 across 24 launch days.
• Batch: Nectar launched 268 new creatives on just 6 launch days — big monthly drops. Cult Beauty shipped 256 across 12 days.

Both styles work; what they share is volume. The drip suits always-on testing programmes, the batch suits promo calendars. Pick one on purpose.

TikTok: refresh is the strategy

TikTok barely has a "refresh" concept because almost nothing is old: 92.1% of the live TikTok ads we track launched within the last 90 days, and the median active brand put out 123 new creatives in that window. The median gap between launch days is about a day. On TikTok the question isn't how often to refresh — it's whether your creative production can sustain a daily cadence at all, which is why fewer of our tracked brands (27 active launchers) play there seriously.

Refresh cadence by sector: beauty ships 5× more than B2B

Channel sets the rhythm; sector sets the tempo within it. Median new Meta creatives per brand over the last 90 days, for sectors where we track at least four recently-captured brands:

The spread is nearly five-fold, and it tracks how fast creative decays in each market. Beauty creative dates visibly — trends, shades, faces — and the category's median brand (think Charlotte Tilbury, who launched 127 new Meta creatives across 22 launch days last quarter) rebuilds constantly. B2B SMB tools sell the same promise to the same decision-makers all year, so 26 new creatives a quarter — two a week — is the going rate. If you're a fintech benchmarking against a beauty brand's cadence, you'll burn production budget for nothing; the useful benchmark is the rival who shares your audience.

So how often should you refresh?

1. Set the floor by channel. Meta and TikTok estates we track turn over in weeks; Google estates in years. A monthly Meta refresh puts you behind roughly four in five of the active UK brands we measure; a monthly Google asset rebuild is wasted motion.
2. Set the tempo by sector. Divide the table above by three for a monthly target: ~42 for beauty, ~9 for B2B. Treat it as the market's revealed norm, not a law — then check your actual nearest competitor.
3. Add, don't swap. Refreshing by pausing winners and launching replacements resets Meta's learning phase and throws away proven delivery. The brands above layer new creative alongside long-running survivors — our lifespan data shows winners routinely run past a year on Google and past six months even on Meta.
4. Let metrics retire ads, not the calendar. Genuine creative fatigue is rarer than the refresh industry implies: one recent 48.5-million-impression Meta study found 80% of creatives never reach 100,000 lifetime impressions — most ads are killed for underperformance long before an audience could tire of them. Rising frequency with falling CTR is a refresh signal; a date on a calendar is not.

How to measure a competitor's refresh rhythm

Every number in this guide comes from data the platforms publish: the Google Ads Transparency Center shows first- and last-shown dates per creative, Meta's Ad Library shows start dates on active ads, and TikTok's library reports first/last shown. So you can audit one rival by hand — open their library page weekly, note what's new, log the dates. The problem is scale: the median brand we track runs hundreds of live ads at once, and none of the libraries will tell you "launch days per month" or "share of estate under 90 days old".

That's the part we've automated. AdRival captures every live creative a brand runs across the four channels, keeps the launch dates, and qualifies each ad for hook, offer, discount and urgency — so a competitor's refresh rhythm, and what they refresh towards, is one view instead of a spreadsheet habit. The brand pages on this site show a free teaser per brand; full reports are £99 one-off, with monthly trackers available via the contact form.

The honest answer to "how often should you refresh ad creative", then: more often than the blogs say, less destructively than they imply. The UK brands we track add new creative every few days, scale what survives, and never confuse shipping new ads with killing old ones. Set your cadence against your channel and your sector — both are measurable — and spend the time you save on making the next variation better than the last.