How Many Ads a Month Is Enough

Two brands ask us the same question in the same week. One is making four ads a month and wondering why performance has drifted. The other is making sixty and wondering why nothing has a chance to prove itself. Both are wrong for the same reason: they picked a number before they looked at their spend.

Start from frequency, not from a target

The number of new ads you need is set by how fast your audience sees the old ones. A brand spending £8,000 a month against a two million person audience burns creative slowly. A brand spending £80,000 against the same audience burns it in a fortnight. The first needs six to eight new pieces a month. The second needs closer to thirty.

Count concepts, not cuts

Fifteen edits of one shoot is one concept. It will fatigue as one concept, whatever the file names say. We count a month in concepts, then cut each concept into three or four variants for the opening and the aspect ratio. Six concepts becomes twenty assets without pretending it is twenty ideas.

The mix that tends to hold

For most consumer accounts we shoot roughly half the month as creator-led content, a quarter as studio product work, and a quarter as edits of whatever won last month. The last quarter is the cheapest and, more often than not, the best performing.

Signs you are under

Cost per acquisition climbing week on week with no change in the account. Frequency above three on your main prospecting audience. The same two ads taking 80% of spend for over a month.

Signs you are over

Ads that never leave the learning phase. Nothing gets past a few hundred pounds before it is replaced. A shared drive full of work nobody has looked at since it was uploaded.

The right number is the one where every ad you make gets enough spend to tell you whether it works. If it does not, you have not made an ad, you have made a file.