How many creatives you actually need each month.
Work the number out from how fast your audience sees everything. Divide your monthly spend by your CPM to get impressions, then compare that against your audience size to find how many times the average person will see you. If that figure passes roughly three within a month, you need new creative monthly. A small audience with a high budget can need weekly. The more useful discipline is that most of what you make should be variations on what already works, with a smaller number of genuinely different ideas, rather than a calendar of new concepts nobody tested.
The number comes from arithmetic, not a content plan
Creative wears out at a rate set by how often the same people see it. That rate is decided by two things you already know: how much you spend and how many people you are spending it on.
Divide monthly spend by CPM and multiply by a thousand, and you have impressions. Divide impressions by the size of the audience you are actually reaching, and you have roughly how many times the average person will see you this month. That figure, not a posting schedule, is what sets your refresh rate.
Small audience, high budget, fast burn
A business spending heavily into a narrow audience burns creative quickly, sometimes in a fortnight. A business spending modestly into a broad one can run the same advertisement for months without anything going wrong.
That is why two advertisers with identical budgets can need wildly different amounts of creative, and why the answer somebody gave on a podcast is not your answer. If you want the fatigue point calculated rather than estimated, our ad frequency and fatigue calculator does it from your own figures.
Most of it should be variations, not new ideas
The common mistake is treating every slot as a new concept. New concepts are expensive, they fail most of the time, and the failures teach you very little because too much changed at once.
A better ratio is a majority of variations on whatever is currently working, plus a small number of genuinely different bets. A variation changes one thing: the opening three seconds, the hook line, the format, the first frame. When it wins you know exactly what won, and when it loses you have not spent much finding out.
What to make, in order of what usually works
If you are deciding what to produce next month, this order is a reasonable default.
- New openings for your best performing advertisement. Cheapest thing to produce, most reliable return.
- The same message in a different format. What works as a static image often works again as a short video, and it reaches different placements.
- Customer footage, if you can get it. It outperforms produced work often enough to be worth the awkwardness of asking.
- One genuinely new idea, deliberately different. This is the slot where you test a claim you have never made, and you accept that most of these lose.
Judge them properly or the whole exercise is theatre
Making more creative only helps if you can tell which ones worked, and most accounts cannot because they read differences that are well inside noise.
Give each variation enough impressions to be readable, compare against the incumbent rather than against a target, and check the difference is real before declaring a winner. Our A/B test significance calculator will tell you whether what you are looking at is a result or a coincidence.
How fast is yours actually wearing out
You can answer it this afternoon. Take last month's spend, your CPM and your audience size, and see how many times the average person saw you. Then look at whether results per thousand impressions fell as that number climbed.
If they did, your creative volume is too low for your spend, and that is a specific, fixable problem rather than a vague one. Tell us your spend, your audience and what you are currently producing, and we will tell you the rate you actually need. The enquiry form is the place to start.
Questions we get asked.
How many ad creatives should I make each month?
- It depends on how fast your audience sees everything. Divide monthly spend by CPM for impressions, divide that by audience size, and if the average person sees you more than about three times in a month you need monthly refreshes. Small audiences with large budgets can need weekly.
Should new creatives be new ideas or variations?
- Mostly variations. They are cheaper, they win more often, and when they win you know which single change caused it. Keep a smaller number of slots for genuinely different concepts and expect most of those to lose.
Does more creative always help?
- Only up to the point where each one gets enough impressions to be judged. Beyond that you are splitting the same budget into pieces too small to read, and you learn less than you would have from fewer ads.
How long should I run a new creative before deciding?
- Long enough for the difference to be outside noise, which depends on your conversion volume rather than on a number of days. Run it through a significance calculation rather than calling it after a good weekend.
Is user generated content worth the effort?
- Often, yes. It frequently outperforms produced work on paid social, and the practical barrier is usually the awkwardness of asking customers rather than the cost of making it.
