Most advice about how long to run a Facebook ad is guesswork dressed up as a rule of thumb. So we stopped guessing and counted.
Between 21 May and 27 July 2026 we tracked every live ad from 19 brands through the public Meta Ad Library — 1,898 ad records, which deduplicate to 560 unique creatives that were still running on 27 July. Then we measured one thing: how long each had been live.
The answer is bleaker than the industry talks about. Only 11% of live creatives make it past 90 days. Just 2.5% survive past 180. The median live ad is 33 days old.
How long does a Facebook ad actually run?
Here is the full distribution across those 560 creatives:
| Time live | Creatives | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Launched in the last 14 days | 88 | 16% |
| Still running past 90 days | 64 | 11% |
| Still running past 180 days | 14 | 2.5% |
| Median age of a live ad | 33 days | — |
Two things fall out of that. The first is churn: 16% of everything running right now launched inside the last fortnight. These brands are replacing creative constantly. The second is that longevity is genuinely rare, which is exactly what makes it worth reading as a signal.
An advertiser has no reason to keep paying for an ad that is not working. So an ad still live after 90 days is not a matter of taste or a nice piece of design. It is a creative that survived a budget-holder's scrutiny for three months. That is the closest thing to validated performance you can observe from outside an ad account.
The longest-running ads we found
The oldest creative still live in the set belongs to True Protein, and it has been running for 467 days. Fifteen months, one video, still spending.
Its opening line is not clever:
💥 FREE GIFT? YES PLEASE! 💥 If you've been thinking about trying True Protein, now's your chance!
No brand story, no lifestyle framing. An offer, stated immediately, aimed at people already circling the purchase.
Oakley holds the next two slots at 412 days, both carousels, both leading with the product line and closing with "Shop now" — one of them adding free shipping. Again: no narrative, just the collection and the reason to click.
This is the pattern that surprised us most. Offer-led copy accounts for 29% of the live set, so it is a minority approach overall. But it dominates the top of the longevity table. The ads that survive longest are the plainest ones.
What Adobe is doing that almost nobody else is
Adobe appears repeatedly at 166 days, and at first it looks like duplicate data. It is not. It is the same creative concept running simultaneously in English, French, Spanish, Polish and Turkish:
"Discover our family of creative apps for everything from photo to video and beyond. T&Cs apply."
"Découvrez notre gamme d'applis créatives photo, vidéo, design, animation, et plus encore."
"Poznaj naszą gamę aplikacji kreatywnych – od zdjęć, przez filmy, po wiele więcej."
One proven concept, localised, then run across image, video and carousel formats. Most brands in our set treat a winning creative as a single asset. Adobe treats it as a template to be multiplied across languages and placements — which is why one idea occupies so many of its live slots.
If you have a creative past 90 days, that is the move worth stealing: stop looking for the next idea and start extracting more surface area from the one that already works.
Which ad format lasts longest?
By share of the live set, video leads:
| Format | Live creatives | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Video | 270 | 48% |
| Image | 227 | 41% |
| Carousel | 63 | 11% |
But carousel is the interesting line. It is the smallest category by a distance, yet it holds the second and third longest-running ads in the entire set. Carousel is used sparingly and, when it is used, it appears to last.
We are not going to overclaim from 63 creatives. Treat it as a prompt to test rather than a finding: if you have written carousel off, the longevity data does not support that.
How we measured this, and what we cannot see
Being straight about the limits matters more than the headline number.
- Source. The public Meta Ad Library, captured through SOCIALFUEL between 21 May and 27 July 2026. 1,898 raw records, deduplicated to 560 unique live creatives by brand and ad copy.
- Longevity is measured from Meta's own start date for each ad, against 28 July 2026 — not from when we started tracking.
- We cannot see spend, and we cannot see impressions. Meta withholds both for commercial advertisers; they were present on 0 and 1 of our 1,898 records respectively. Anyone quoting you spend figures for a non-political brand's Meta ads is estimating. We are not going to.
- Longevity is a proxy, not proof. It tells you an advertiser kept paying. It cannot tell you the ROAS, and a large brand can carry an underperforming ad longer than a small one.
- The sample is not random. These are 19 brands our users chose to track, skewed toward ecommerce, apparel and supplements. It is not a model of Meta advertising as a whole.
What to do with this
Three things we would act on.
Stop killing ads at two weeks. The median live ad is 33 days old. If your testing window is a fortnight, you are cutting creative before it reaches the age at which half the market's live ads sit.
Sort competitors by longevity before you sort by anything else. When you open a competitor's ad library you see dozens of ads with no indication of which ones earned their place. The 11% still running past 90 days are the ones worth studying. The rest may be tests that are about to be switched off.
When something works, multiply it before you replace it. Adobe's approach — one concept, many languages, every format — extracts far more from a proven winner than starting again does.
Frequently asked questions
How long should I run a Facebook ad before killing it?
Our data cannot tell you what is right for your account, but it does give you a benchmark: the median live ad across 19 brands is 33 days old, and 16% of live creatives launched within the past fortnight. A two-week kill window is shorter than how the market actually behaves.
What percentage of Facebook ads run longer than 90 days?
In our sample of 560 unique live creatives, 11% had been running past 90 days and 2.5% past 180 days.
Can you see how much a competitor spends on Meta ads?
No. Meta publishes spend and impression ranges only for political and social-issue advertising. For commercial brands both fields were empty on effectively every record we captured. Any tool showing you a competitor's Meta spend is modelling it.
Does a long-running ad mean it is profitable?
It means an advertiser chose to keep funding it, which is meaningful but not the same thing. Treat longevity as evidence worth investigating, not as a verdict.
What is the best-performing Facebook ad format?
By volume, video is the most used at 48% of live creatives. By longevity, carousel is over-represented at the top of the table despite being only 11% of the set. Neither number tells you what will work for your offer — they tell you where to test.
See this for your own market
Every number here came from ads anyone can look up. The work was in collecting them, deduplicating them and sorting by how long each had survived.
That is what SOCIALFUEL does: search any brand, see their live ads across Meta, Instagram, Google and TikTok, sorted so the long-runners surface first, then decode why each one works. It is free to start, with no credit card and no ad-account connection.
If you are choosing between tools, we have written up how the options compare in best ad spy tools, and there are direct comparisons for Foreplay and Adspo.
We will re-run this study each quarter. The interesting question is whether that 11% holds.
About the author
Joel Helou is the founder of SOCIALFUEL, a growth agency that manages paid social and search campaigns for ecommerce and DTC brands, and the creator of socialfuel.io. He has spent the past decade buying media for brands across apparel, supplements and consumer goods, and now builds the tooling his own team uses to decode why competitors' ads work. This study was run on data captured through that platform.