The Maths on Static Ads

I was an accountant before I was a designer, so forgive the order of this post. Before we get to what makes a good static, let’s work out what one is worth.

Cheaper to serve, cheaper to make

Two things are true of statics that aren’t true of video.

The first is that they’re cheaper to serve. Static placements generally deliver at lower CPMs than video in the same account. Not always, and some categories with compliance constraints are the exception, but as a rule you buy more eyeballs per pound with an image.

The second is that they’re cheaper to make, and by a wider margin than most people think. One good 60 to 90 second video costs about the same, in time and money, as three good statics. A decent UGC video runs to a few hundred pounds before editing; a produced shoot day runs to thousands. A static from a good designer is a fraction of that, and AI-assisted production is pushing the floor lower still, with the usual caveat that cheap and good are not the same word.

The obvious objection is “fine, but statics are bottom of funnel, so who cares how cheap they are”. If they’re bottom of funnel, it doesn’t matter. They don’t have to be. I’ve written separately on how to make one that works on cold traffic; assume for the rest of this post that you can.

Expected gross profit per ad

Here’s the number I’d put in front of any founder deciding how to split a creative budget.

Gross profit per ad = revenue per ad, minus ad spend, minus production cost.

Take an account where the average ad returns £1,000 of revenue over its life. Say a static costs £75 to make and a video £400. Now run it at three different returns.

At a 10x return the static makes 65% more profit per ad. At 2x it makes more than four times as much. The gap widens as returns fall, which is exactly when a brand is looking hardest for margin.

Two things to notice. First, ROAS alone hides this entirely. ROAS is a media metric; it doesn’t have a production line. Gross profit per ad does. Second, the table assumes a static and a video return the same revenue. That’s only true if your statics aren’t all sitting at the bottom of the funnel, which brings us back to the point above.

Statics as the cheap end of research and development

Because a static costs a fraction of a video, it’s the right place to test the expensive questions. Which angle. Which persona. Which offer.

Offer testing in particular belongs in statics. Split £10 off against a free gift against a bundle on a warm audience, read the gross profit per offer, and only then commission a shoot around the winner. A £75 static that kills a bad idea has saved you the £400 video and every pound of spend that would have gone behind it.

How many statics a month?

The answer is not “as many as possible”. Every ad needs enough spend behind it to be read properly, so volume is capped by budget. £10,000 a month across 40 statics is £250 each, which is not enough to judge most of them. Back into the number from two directions and take the lower one.

From churn. Say you have ten winning ads live and two stop working each month. That’s a 20% churn rate, so you need two new winners a month to stand still. Hit rates in most accounts sit between 5% and 15%. At 5%, it takes 20 ads to find one winner, so you need 40 new statics a month. At 10%, it’s 20.

From revenue. Take your monthly revenue target from Meta and divide by the average revenue a live ad produces per month. That’s how many winners you need running. Then apply the churn maths above to work out how many new ads that takes.

A worked example: you need £60,000 a month from Meta and the average live ad does £3,000 a month, so you need 20 winners running. At 20% churn you replace four a month. At a 10% hit rate that’s 40 new statics. At £10,000 of spend, you can’t read 40 ads, so either the hit rate has to improve or the volume comes down to what the budget can test properly.

Plug your own numbers into the creative volume calculator on the statics site. It does the arithmetic and, more usefully, shows you which assumption is doing the damage.

Where the time should go

The build means nothing without a good concept, so if the first thing you open is Canva, you’ve started in the wrong place. The cheapest place to start costs nothing at all: the Meta Ad Library.

An ad another brand has kept running for months is very likely making them money, because nobody pays to keep a loser live. Longevity isn’t proof, but it’s the best free signal there is. It means someone else has already paid for the testing. The job is to translate it properly: the same structure and the same kind of hook, rebuilt around your product, your customer and your offer. Lift the other brand’s claims or assets and you’ve got a compliance problem. Translate the idea and you’ve got a head start.

AI helps with most of this and shouldn’t be trusted with all of it. It’s quick at sorting through ads and reviews, and it speeds up the build. Where it falls down is judgement: knowing which winning ad suits your brand, and which one would cheapen it. Automate everything and you get slop with good spacing.

The recap

• Statics are cheaper to serve and roughly three times cheaper to make than video.

• Judge creative on gross profit per ad, not ROAS. ROAS has no production cost line.

• The profit gap between statics and video widens as returns fall.

• The comparison only holds if your statics can work above the bottom of the funnel.

• Test angles, personas and especially offers in statics before you spend on video.

• Work out monthly volume from churn and hit rate, then cap it at what your budget can actually read.

• Start with what’s already working. A long-running ad in the Ad Library is a concept someone else has paid to test.

If you’d like statics built this way, from ads with the testing already paid for, get in touch.