Turn an ad off when it has had enough delivery to produce a stable result and that result is clearly worse than your alternatives. Turn it off when frequency is climbing and performance is falling. Do not turn it off because it has been running a long time, because you are bored of it, or because a single bad day made the dashboard look ugly.
The two mistakes are symmetrical, and most accounts commit both at once: killing new creative before it has said anything, and protecting old creative that stopped working weeks ago.
The three conditions that justify turning an ad off
1. It has enough delivery and it lost. Not enough hours, enough delivery. An ad needs sufficient impressions and results for its numbers to be stable. Until then, the numbers are noise wearing the costume of data. See how long it takes for Facebook ads to work.
2. Frequency is rising while results fall. This is fatigue or saturation, and it is the clearest kill signal that exists. The people who were going to respond have responded. See what is a good Facebook ad frequency.
3. Something about it is now wrong. The promotion ended, the product is out of stock, the price changed, the claim is no longer true. This is not a performance decision, it is a correctness one, and it should be immediate.
Everything else is a reason to wait.
The reasons that feel valid and are not
It has been running for months. Longevity is a performance signal, not a problem. In the Hello Radio archive, a live archive of real ads from more than 300 brands refreshed every morning, 9.8 percent of ads have been running 90 days or longer, 1.4 percent have passed 180 days, and 0.2 percent have passed a year. Measured August 2026. The longest, a Dr. Squatch ad, has run for more than 900 days. Nobody pays for three years of an ad that does not work.
You are tired of it. You see your ads hundreds of times more often than any customer does. Your fatigue is not their fatigue.
One bad day. Daily numbers swing for reasons that have nothing to do with your ad. Judge on a window, not a day.
A new creative looks more exciting. Test it against the incumbent rather than replacing the incumbent. The whole point of finding something that works is to keep spending behind it.
Long-running ads are rarer than people think
| Ads still running at | Share of all archived ads |
|---|---|
| 90 days | 9.8% |
| 180 days | 1.4% |
| 365 days | 0.2% |
Roughly one ad in ten survives to 90 days. One in seventy survives to six months. Two in a thousand pass a year.
That rarity is the point. When you find one of these, the correct response is to leave it alone and build around it, not to replace it on a schedule.
Category matters enormously here. Travel ads reach 90 days 24.7 percent of the time. Restaurant ads manage it 0.6 percent of the time. If you are in a category built on expiring promotions, short-lived creative is normal and not a sign you are doing anything wrong.
The decision, in order
- Has it had enough delivery to be readable? If no, wait. Nothing else matters yet.
- Is it clearly worse than the alternatives? Compare against what else is running, not against a benchmark you read somewhere.
- Is frequency rising while results fall? If yes, it is fatiguing. Replace rather than repair.
- Is it still accurate? Wrong price, dead promotion, missing stock. Immediate off.
- If none of the above, leave it on. The default is to let it run.
Pause or delete
Pausing keeps the history and lets you restart. Deleting throws away information you may want later.
Pause by default. There is very little upside to deleting an ad, and some real downside: you lose the record of what you tried, which is how accounts end up re-testing the same failed angle every six months.
One caveat worth knowing: restarting a long-paused ad is not the same as it never stopping. Delivery has to settle again, so a restarted ad may take time to return to where it was.
Common questions
How long should I let a Facebook ad run before turning it off?
Long enough for the results to stabilize, which depends on your budget and how often people convert. The wrong measure is calendar time on its own. The right measure is whether the ad has accumulated enough delivery and enough results for the numbers to stop swinging.
Should I turn off ads that are not spending?
Not necessarily. Low delivery usually means the system does not favor that creative against its siblings. If it is genuinely dead across several days while others spend, it is not going to recover, and the slot is better used by a new angle.
Does pausing an ad hurt performance when I restart it?
It can. Delivery has to re-stabilize after a pause, so a restarted ad may perform worse initially than it did before. For an ad you plan to run again soon, leaving it live at a low budget is often better than pausing.
Is it bad to run the same ad for a year?
No. Fewer than one percent of ads in the archive reach a year, and the ones that do are there because they keep producing. If frequency is stable and results are holding, age is not a reason to act.