Sokol SystemsResearch
Half the local businesses we checked had a Meta ad running for over a year
We checked the live Meta ads of 35 med spas, restaurants and gyms. Half had an ad running for over a year, and most small advertisers had nothing new beside it.
In October 2026 we looked up 35 local businesses in Meta’s public Ad Library: 24 med spas, 6 gyms and fitness studios, and 5 restaurants. For each one we counted the ads running that day and noted when the oldest of them had started.
The short answer: 18 of the 35 were still running an ad that started more than a year earlier. Among the 14 businesses with only one or two ads live, 11 had left the same ad up for over a year.
What we found
- 18 of 35 businesses (51%) had a live ad that started more than 12 months ago.
- 14 businesses were running only one or two ads. For 11 of them, that ad was more than a year old.
- The typical business had 6 ads live (the median). The median age of each business’s oldest live ad was 452 days, about 15 months.
- The oldest ad we found belonged to a restaurant and had been running since September 2018. A med spa ad from November 2020 was also still live.
| Business type | Businesses | Median live ads | Median age of oldest live ad | Oldest ad over a year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Med spas | 24 | 8 | 97 days | 9 |
| Gyms and studios | 6 | 4 | 761 days | 4 |
| Restaurants | 5 | 2 | 1,064 days | 5 |
Formats were mixed. 18 of the 35 ran at least one video ad, 10 used Meta’s dynamic creative format, 5 used carousels, and 8 ran static images only.
A year-old ad isn’t automatically a problem
An ad that survives a year is often the best one an account has. If it kept bringing in customers, keeping it live was a reasonable call.
The risk is when it’s the only one. If results slip, there’s nothing tested and ready to take over, and starting from scratch is a long shot. In Motion’s 2026 creative benchmark of 578,750 ads, about 1 in 20 became a winner.
That’s why we think the better move is to build on the ad that already works, rather than replace it with something brand new.
How to check your own ads in two minutes
- Open the Meta Ad Library. You don’t need to log in.
- Pick your country and “All ads”, then search for your business’s page name and select it.
- Filter to active ads only.
- Each ad shows the date it started running. Count how many are live, and note the oldest.
If one old ad is doing all the work and nothing new is running beside it, that’s the pattern we saw in most of the small advertisers here.
What to do with a long-running ad
- Keep it running. Don’t switch off your best ad to make room for something untested.
- Make versions that change one thing. A new opening line or first three seconds, a new headline, a new format (a static ad turned into a short video or a carousel), or a new visual with the same message.
- Run them beside the original and keep the ones that do better.
- Repeat with the new winner. Each round starts from something your customers already responded to.
How we did this
- 12 med spas in Orange County and Los Angeles came from our own prospect research and were checked on 28 September 2026. The other 23 businesses, across the US, were found through Ad Library keyword searches such as “med spa”, “happy hour” and “gym membership” and checked on 15 October 2026.
- We looked at active ads shown in the US only, counted the ads live that day, and took the start date of the oldest.
- This isn’t a random sample. Keyword searches tend to surface long-running ads, so the share of year-old ads is likely higher here than across all local businesses. The 12 med spas we found another way had a median oldest ad of 35 days.
- Meta doesn’t publish spend or results for these ads, so we can’t say how much each one spent or how well it performed.
- We’re not naming the businesses. The point is the pattern, not any one of them.
Sources
- Meta Ad Library, active US ads, checked 28 September and 15 October 2026
- Motion, Creative Benchmarks 2026: winners are rare