Facebook Ads in the Netherlands: 330 Long-Running Ads
What 330 Meta ads that ran 60+ days in the Netherlands show: the fewest emoji in Europe, numbers and questions up front, and home ads that keep running.
adthief.ai · · 5 min read
The Netherlands is a small country with a busy online market, and its long-running Meta ads look different from those of its neighbours. Dutch winners use the fewest emoji of any market we measure, lean on numbers and questions, and the ones that last longest are not in the categories you might guess.
This post looks at 330 ads from 217 brands whose main market was the Netherlands.
How we built the data
- Source: Meta’s public Ad Library, collected by adthief.ai every night. Snapshot: 31 October 2026.
- Which ads: ads that ran for 60 days or more in Europe, in six industries: supplements and health, beauty, fashion, home, pets, and food and drink.
- Main market: the country where the ad reached the most people, from the EU reach figures in the Ad Library. A Dutch-language ad that reached more people in Flanders than in the Netherlands counts as Belgian, not Dutch.
- The whole archive: 9,839 ads from 5,185 brands.
Every ad here already ran for two months, so this is a study of survivors: it shows what winners look like, not how many ads win. Meta doesn’t publish spend or sales for commercial ads, so a long run stands in for a profitable one. With 330 ads overall and 60 to 100 per industry, the industry numbers below are hints, not measurements.
Finding 1: Typical median, few long runs
| The Netherlands | The UK | Germany | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ads | 330 | 4,519 | 1,448 |
| Median days running | 66 | 66 | 79 |
| Ran 6 months or more | 12% | 17% | 18% |
| Longest ad | 356 days | 464 days | 766 days |
| Median words | 51 | 66 | 54 |
The median Dutch winner ran 66 days, like most of Europe. Fewer passed six months (12%) than in the UK or Germany, and the longest Dutch ad had run just under a year. Copy is short, at a median of 51 words.
Copy length made no real difference in the Netherlands: ads under 30 words had a median run of 65 days, ads of 30 to 99 words 66 days, and ads of 100 words or more 66 days.
Finding 2: The fewest emoji in Europe
| Main market | Ads with emoji | Emoji in the first line |
|---|---|---|
| The Netherlands | 56% | 40% |
| The UK | 60% | 39% |
| Belgium | 61% | 50% |
| Germany | 71% | 52% |
| Austria | 79% | 53% |
Of the 15 markets we measure, the Netherlands has the lowest share of ads with emoji anywhere in the text. Close to half of Dutch winners use none at all. Compare that with Austria or Poland, where around four in five do.
What to do with it: don’t assume emoji are required to win in the Netherlands. Clean text with short lines and clear benefits is common among Dutch winners. If you use emoji, use them as bullets, not decoration.
Finding 3: Numbers and questions up front
| First line contains | The Netherlands | Whole archive |
|---|---|---|
| A number | 22% | 20% |
| A question | 19% | 16% |
| An emoji | 40% | 47% |
| A percentage | 4% | 4% |
The patterns that don’t depend on language show a clear style: Dutch winners open with a number or a question more often than average. A number in the first line (a price, a quantity, a result, a time) is a direct way to say what the ad is about.
We leave out two rows we show for other countries. Our tests for “you” and for urgency words look for English, German, French, Italian and Spanish words, not Dutch ones (“je”, “jouw”, “nu”, “vandaag”). So the Dutch scores (11% for “you”, 3% for urgency) only catch ads written in one of those languages and say little about Dutch copy. We would rather leave them out than draw a conclusion from a gap in our method.
What to do with it: lead with something concrete. A number or a direct question about the reader’s problem fits the Dutch winners better than a slogan.
Finding 4: Home and food last, health and beauty don’t
| Industry | Dutch ads | Median days | Ran 6 months+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supplements and health | 98 | 66 | 7% |
| Beauty | 92 | 65 | 8% |
| Food and drink | 77 | 65 | 19% |
| Fashion | 67 | 65 | 7% |
| Home | 61 | 71 | 30% |
| Pets | 19 | not enough data |
An ad can belong to more than one industry. The biggest Dutch categories, supplements and beauty, rarely produce long runners: under one in ten passed six months. Home is the reverse: 61 ads, a 71-day median and 30% past six months, the highest home share of the eight countries we can measure for home ads. Food and drink is also well above the Dutch average at 19%.
The samples are small, so don’t build a strategy on one row. But the direction is useful: in the Netherlands, a good home or food ad may run for half a year, while a supplement or beauty ad may need replacing after two or three months.
Among the brands with the most long-running ads in the Netherlands are Carber (12 ads), European Pet Pharmacy (8 ads), HiCurlies (8 ads), Skinome (7 ads, the longest at 73 days), Nuvibody (7 ads) and PILLAR Performance (7 ads). For most of them, the longest ad in the archive was at about two months.
Finding 5: Facebook and Instagram together
96% of Dutch winners ran on both Facebook and Instagram, with 3% on Instagram only and 2% on Facebook only. As everywhere else, brands that keep an ad running let Meta place it.
What this means if you advertise in the Netherlands
- Be concrete. Numbers and questions open more Dutch winners than in the rest of Europe.
- Go easy on emoji. Many Dutch winners use none.
- Plan refreshes in health, beauty and fashion, where winners rarely pass six months.
- Invest in fewer, better ads in home and food, where a winner can last.
- Treat Flanders separately. Dutch-language ads can reach Belgium too; check where your competitors’ ads actually reach in the Ad Library’s country breakdown. Our Ad Library guide shows where to find it.
See the Dutch ads
Browse long-running home ads in the Netherlands, or run a free competitor check to see which ads your competitors keep running.