What makes a winning Facebook ad: longevity, copies and reach

From the outside you never see an advertiser's results. You see their behaviour, and behaviour is a strong signal: nobody keeps paying for an ad that doesn't work. Three things give a winner away.

1. It keeps running

An ad that has run for months has survived every budget review in between. Longevity can't be bought in a day, which is why it weighs most in our score.

2. It gets copied

When a creative works, advertisers run it many times: new ad sets, new audiences, new countries, the same picture or video. Thirty ad ids carrying one creative is an advertiser putting money behind it.

3. It reaches people, and keeps reaching them

Reach, which Meta publishes for ads shown in the EU, says how far the money went. Reach still growing says the ad is still being fed.

How we score it

Whosprinting's Winner score rates every running ad from 0 to 100 on those signals:

• Longevity, 35 points: how long the ad has run.
• Copies, 30 points: how many ad ids use the same creative.
• Reach, 25 points: how many people it reached.
• Reach growth, 10 points: whether that reach is still climbing.

The weights are our judgement, not a measurement, and the line under each score says which signal earned most of it. An ad running for two weeks in thirty-two copies is judged on the copies, not the days.

How to use it

1. Open the Ads library, choose your niche and sort by Winner score.
2. Read the top ten as a set: what do the first three seconds of the videos have in common, and what does the copy promise?
3. Open the page each one sends to. A winning ad usually points at a page that converts, and that page is worth as much as the ad.