"How often should we refresh our creatives?" is one of the most common questions in paid social, and one of the least answerable in the abstract. The honest answer depends on the category, the audience size and the budget. Generic rules of thumb ignore all three.
There is a better source: the brands already competing for your audience. Every one of them has been making this decision for months, and the result is public. In our article on spotting a dead ad we looked at the end of an ad's life — when it gets switched off. This article looks at the other end: how often new ads are born.
Why the birth rate is easier to read
An ad disappearing from the library is an ambiguous event. It could be fatigue, a finished campaign, a budget cut or a country change. You need context to tell them apart.
An ad appearing is much less ambiguous. Somebody made a creative, approved it and paid to put it live. Count how many of those happen in a period and you have a direct measure of how hard a competitor is working on creative. We call that the creative refresh rate.
Measuring it in a single scan
Start with an active-only search for the competitor or the category in the side panel, then let Auto Scan load the full list. Then:
- Set Sort to Newest Published. The ads that started most recently move to the top.
- Open the Analytics tab. Under Market Signals, the Creative refresh row counts the cards that started running recently; the panel shows the exact window next to the label.
- Apply the New tests preset chip to see only young, active ads on the grid.
That gives you a number and a list. The number tells you the pace; the list tells you what the new creatives have in common.
Market Signals only appear once enough cards are loaded. Below that, percentages and distributions would be noise, so the panel leaves them blank.
Two kinds of refresh
Not every brand refreshes by launching new ads. Many keep the same ad and keep adding versions of it. Both are refresh; they just look different in the library.
- New ads show up as a high Creative refresh count and many young cards.
- New versions show up in the variation count on each card and in the Average variation row of Market Signals. A brand with few new ads but a high average variation is refreshing inside its existing ads.
A third row ties the two together. Scaling candidate counts ads in the middle of their life — no longer new, not yet long-runners — that already carry several variations. These are ads their owners seem to be feeding.
If you want to filter by variations directly, the variation range filter is in the Pro plan. We show how to read a scaled creative from its variations in our competitor scaling signals article.
Reading the age distribution
The Ad age distribution histogram in the Analytics tab shows the scanned ads grouped by how many days they have been running. Its shape tells you the rhythm of the category at a glance:
| Shape | What it suggests |
|---|---|
| Tall on the left, almost no tail | Constant testing, few survivors. Nothing is sticking yet. |
| Tall on the left, a solid tail | Heavy testing on top of proven winners. A mature, competitive category. |
| Low on the left, a solid tail | Few new ads, long-running winners. They found something and are riding it. |
| Flat | No clear rhythm. Often a mix of very different advertisers. |
The tail is where you look next. Sort by Longest Running and open the oldest live ads: on the card, Winner means an ad that has been running 45 days or more and is still active, while a stopped ad of the same age is Ended. Those are the ads every new launch in the category is up against.
Turning one scan into a trend
A single scan tells you the pace this week. The pace over time is what you actually want. Two habits make that possible:
- **Keep the search as a link and the filters as a preset.** The same competitor, the same country and the same filters every time. If any of those change, you are measuring something else.
- Write down the number. Keep the Creative refresh count and the Average variation in a simple table, one row per check. Four or five rows are enough to see whether a competitor is speeding up or slowing down.
If you save ads with a double-click on the creative, the Starter plan can send them, with the date they were sent, to a spreadsheet the extension creates in your Google account, so the creatives behind each row stay attached to it.
Using it for your own calendar
Once you know the pace of the brands you compete with, you can place yourself against it:
- If competitors launch new creatives much faster than you, your ads are likely competing against fresher material than your own. That is a reason to plan production earlier, not to panic.
- If competitors launch slowly but run many variations, the category may reward iterating on a proven ad more than replacing it.
- If one competitor suddenly launches far more than usual, look at what the new ads have in common before you react. It is often a new offer or a new product, not a creative strategy.
The point is not to match anyone's pace. It is to stop guessing what "normal" looks like in your category.
Four ways to misread it
- A campaign launch is not a refresh habit. A brand that launches many ads on the same day is starting a campaign. Compare several checks before you call it a pattern.
- Seasons distort everything. A busy sales period inflates the refresh count for every brand at once.
- One advertiser can dominate the count. Group cards by advertiser and check Top Advertisers before you conclude anything about a whole category.
- Countries differ. Keep the country fixed between checks; the same brand can run a completely different calendar in another market.
Cost
The free plan scans 2,000 ads a day and asks for no card. If you track several competitors every week, compare the limits on the pricing page.
To do this with the extension: Spotting creative fatigue