Scaling ads: how to find them and tell if an ad is really scaling
LLucas Reda · 23 Oct · 16 min
A single ad can be misleading. It might have been live for 60 days because someone forgot to turn it off. When you look at everything an advertiser is running at the same time, the pattern emerges.
FreeSpy groups ads by page and assigns each advertiser a profile. It comes down to three numbers: how many ads are running, how different they are from each other, and how long they’ve been live on average.
The profiles
Winner. Has 15 or more ads, almost all similar to each other, with an average run time of 45 days or more. This is the advertiser who found a creative that works and is scaling it by making multiple copies. It’s the most interesting profile for anyone looking for a validated offer.
Evergreen. Has at least 8 ads, with an average run time of 90 days or more. They’re not scaling aggressively, but they’ve kept the same ad set running for months. This usually points to a product with steady sales.
Tester. Has 15 or more ads that are very different from each other, and they die quickly (average run time of up to 20 days). This is someone looking for a winner. They’re worth keeping an eye on: if one of these creatives sticks around and starts getting repeated, you’re watching a winner emerge.
Intermediate. Everything that falls somewhere in between. Not bad, just no clear signal yet.
Sample. Fewer than 5 ads. Not enough data to draw any conclusions.
Why “diversity” matters
The number that most clearly separates a winner from a tester is diversity: how different the ads on a page are from each other.
- Low diversity means the same creative, or minor variations of it, appearing in multiple copies. The advertiser has stopped testing and is betting on it.
- High diversity means lots of different angles, images, and copy. The advertiser is still looking.
A winner isn’t someone with the most ads. It’s someone with lots of identical ads running for a long time.
How to use it
In Top Scaled, advertisers are already sorted by this behavior. A good habit is to check out the winners in your niche once a week and note:
- Which creative they’re repeating.
- Which page or store the ad leads to.
- How long the first ad using that creative has been live.
Save the testers for a second list, which you can revisit every two weeks to see who “made the jump.”
The profile is one of four signals; the others are in scaled offers: how to find the ones standing right now. To see who's ahead today, open Top scaled.
