How long does a Meta ad last before it stops working for a newsletter?

Everybody says you may have a great ad for a week. I've used the same ad for three months in places, and it's still pretty darn good.

"It slowly degrades over time, but for way longer than you think."

Why do costs rise after launch?

Because Meta finds the easiest people first. In the first two to four weeks you get people who love events, are on Facebook or Instagram a lot, and like signing up for things. Numbers are usually really good.

Once those are gone, it gets a little harder and costs go up a bit. Every local market has a capped audience, so the primary campaign's cost drifts up as the reachable audience gets used up. A guest on my podcast warned that in a small area you can burn out the audience quickly, so you have to keep fresh creative coming.

When should I refresh the creative?

When the numbers say so. The pattern on my event-angle concept: cost per subscriber starts amazing, creeps up, and stays in a good place for a long while, even on brands I've run for a year. When it gets closer to a dollar plus, I push new variants.

• Refresh the creative before you change anything else.
• Don't widen the radius first.

How often should I make new ads?

For local media, shoot for new creative once a month, maybe every other week. The real crazy marketers do a hundred or even five hundred ads a week, but that's national e-commerce spending $50,000 a week. Better video and better text take real manpower, so I wouldn't push it.

How else can I slow fatigue?

• Rotate small elements. On one news brand I planned a female-voice version of the ad's song to rotate creative.
• Run two copy variants at once over the same video.
• Exclude existing subscribers once your list is big enough, so you stop paying to reach them.
• Bring a second, different concept to reach the next tier of people after the eager signers are gone.

If the cost suddenly blows up instead of creeping, that's a different problem. See what to do when Meta ad costs spike.