Facebook Ads in Spain: What 367 Long-Running Ads Show
In Spain, long-running Meta ads rarely pass six months, and beauty is the biggest category. What 367 ads from 239 brands mean for your creative plan.
adthief.ai · · 5 min read
Spain is the fourth biggest market in our archive of long-running Meta ads. What stands out is not how long Spanish winners run but how few of them keep going: Spain has the lowest share of ads past six months of the 15 European markets we measure.
This post looks at 367 ads from 239 brands whose main market was Spain, and what that means if you advertise there.
How we built the data
- Source: Meta’s public Ad Library, collected every night by adthief.ai. 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.
- The whole archive: 9,839 ads from 5,185 brands.
This is a study of survivors: every ad here already ran for at least two months. 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.
367 ads is a useful sample but not a big one. When we split Spain by industry, the groups drop to 70 to 140 ads, and pets to 25. Read those as hints.
Finding 1: Spanish winners are replaced sooner
| Main market | Ads | Median days | Ran 6 months+ | Longest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spain | 367 | 66 | 10% | 309 days |
| Italy | 498 | 66 | 17% | 564 days |
| France | 354 | 66 | 13% | 390 days |
| The Netherlands | 330 | 66 | 12% | 356 days |
| The UK | 4,519 | 66 | 17% | 464 days |
| Germany | 1,448 | 79 | 18% | 766 days |
The median Spanish winner ran 66 days, the same as nearly everywhere. The difference is at the top: only 10% of Spanish winners passed six months, against 17% in Italy and the UK. Spain’s longest ad, at 309 days, is the shortest “longest” of the six biggest markets.
So in Spain an ad that works seems to get two or three good months, and few go much further. We can’t see why from public data. It could be creative fatigue, seasonal offers, how Spanish advertisers work, or simply that many Spanish winners started recently and haven’t had time to reach six months yet. The practical lesson is the same either way.
What to do with it: budget for creative more often in Spain. If your plan assumes one winner will carry the account for half a year, it probably won’t. Have the next round of ads in testing before the current winner reaches its third month. Our post on ad fatigue signs covers what to watch.
Finding 2: Beauty is the biggest category
| Industry | Ads with Spain as main market | Share | Median days | Ran 6 months+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beauty | 141 | 38% | 65 | 10% |
| Supplements and health | 109 | 30% | 65 | 12% |
| Home | 91 | 25% | 66 | 3% |
| Food and drink | 73 | 20% | 65 | 8% |
| Fashion | 68 | 19% | 66 | 12% |
| Pets | 25 | 7% | not enough data |
An ad can belong to more than one industry, so shares add up to more than 100%. 38% of Spanish winners are beauty ads, the highest beauty share of any market in our data. Beauty ads in Spain also write long: a median of 80 words, against 27 for Spanish fashion ads, and 75% of them use emoji.
Home ads are the odd group: 91 ads, but only 3% past six months. With so few ads, that may be chance, but if you sell home products in Spain, don’t count on a long life for any single ad.
Among the brands with the most long-running ads in Spain are Frøya Organics (10 ads), Jarmino (9 ads), NIDA Skincare (7 ads, the longest at 77 days), Mindsparkl (7 ads) and Dragon Kitchen (6 ads, the longest at 124 days). For most of them, the longest ad in the archive was between two and three months, which matches the market as a whole.
Finding 3: Copy length made no difference
| Ad text length | Spanish ads | Median days running |
|---|---|---|
| Under 30 words | 97 | 66 |
| 30 to 99 words | 170 | 65 |
| 100 words or more | 100 | 65 |
In Spain, short, medium and long ads all ran about the same time. The median ad text is 57 words, longer than in Italy (51) or France (50), and 69% of ads use emoji somewhere.
What to do with it: pick the length the product needs. A skincare routine or a supplement may need 80 words of explanation; a jacket doesn’t. Test both when you are unsure.
Finding 4: How Spanish winners open
| First line contains | Spain | Whole archive |
|---|---|---|
| An emoji | 53% | 47% |
| “Tu” or “you” | 26% | 30% |
| A number | 19% | 20% |
| A question | 13% | 16% |
| An urgency word | 10% | 10% |
| A percentage | 4% | 4% |
Spanish first lines look a lot like the European average, with a little more emoji and a few fewer questions. Our “you” test catches “tu” but misses many Spanish verb forms that address the reader without a pronoun, so the real share of direct openings is higher.
Finding 5: A bit more Instagram
93% of Spanish winners ran on both Facebook and Instagram, and 6% on Instagram only, more than in the UK (1%), Germany (4%) or France (2%). That still leaves Facebook and Instagram together as the default, but Instagram-first creative (vertical video, Reels-style editing) has a place here, especially in beauty.
What this means if you advertise in Spain
- Plan for shorter creative life. Two to three months is a normal run for a winner.
- Keep a testing pipeline. New ads should be ready before the current winner fades.
- In beauty, expect crowded feeds and longer, emoji-structured copy.
- Make vertical versions of your best ads; Instagram-only placements are more common here.
- Research Spanish ads, in Spanish. Set the Ad Library country to Spain and search with Spanish keywords; our Ad Library guide shows how.
See the Spanish ads
Browse long-running beauty ads in Spain, or run a free competitor check to see which ads your competitors keep running.