What Competitors Spend on Ads in Your Niche (And Why It Matters)

Testing budgets are usually copied from a guru post. The brands you are competing against in the auction publish a number, and it is a better starting point.

The problem with a borrowed testing budget

Every guide gives the same figure: test with somewhere around fifty to a hundred a day per creative, then scale the winner.

The number is not wrong so much as unattached. It is the same advice for a niche where the leaders run a few hundred ads and a niche where they run thousands, and those two auctions do not behave the same way. Spend too little against a heavy category and a genuinely good creative can fail to gather enough signal to prove itself, which reads on your dashboard exactly like a bad product.

The useful correction is not a different universal number. It is to find out what the category actually looks like before you pick one, and to work the minimum out from what competitors actually spend rather than from a round figure someone published.

Part of the answer is published, by law

Meta discloses ad spend for ads that run in the EU and UK. Brandsearch sums that disclosure per brand and puts it on the brand's own card.

This is Meller, a Barcelona sunglasses brand. Three numbers are doing the work.

EU spend €6.7M. That is the disclosed total, not an estimate and not a model. It is what the advertiser had to publish.

Active ads 6.1k of 17.1k. Roughly six thousand ads live now, out of seventeen thousand the index has seen from this brand. That ratio tells you how much creative a brand of this size burns through.

The curve, and the 6M figure next to it. The line runs from 4.2k in March to 6.1k today, labelled 6M ▲47%. Meller's live ad count is up by roughly half over six months. A brand does not add two thousand concurrent ads while retreating from a channel.

Put those together and you have a picture of the auction you would be entering, built from the advertiser's own disclosure rather than from a guess.

Look up what the leaders in your category disclose

What the number is not

This is where the figure gets misused, so it is worth being exact.

It is the EU and UK slice only. Meller's €6.7M is not its global budget. It is the portion that European disclosure rules require, and everything spent outside that perimeter is invisible here. The real total is larger and nobody outside the company knows by how much.

It is cumulative, not a daily rate. €6.7M is what has been disclosed across the ads in the index, not what the brand spends today. Dividing it by a number of days to invent a daily figure produces a number the product never showed you.

Rank is a separate measurement and it is worldwide. The rank badges elsewhere in Brandsearch are computed across everything a brand runs in every market. So a brand can hold a strong rank while showing a modest euro figure, because the euro figure is a disclosure boundary rather than a performance ceiling. Never read the two as if they were the same scale.

There is one more label on that card worth not misreading: 85 pages refers to Facebook Pages, the advertiser fronts the brand runs. It is not a count of landing pages.

The daily figure, on a brand in a different category

The cumulative total answers "how committed is this brand". For setting a budget you usually want the rate instead, and some Brand Library cards carry it directly.

It.mc2saintbarth.com is tagged Swimwear, is 2 years old, and shows revenue per day $85.2k, up 239% from $17.4k in March. Its live Meta ads read 2.3K of 7.2K, easing down from 3k on 17 August. The card states disclosed spend as a rate: EU/UK ~€39.4k/d.

That is the number to reason from, and notice how large it is next to the intuition most people bring. A single mid-sized swimwear brand discloses roughly forty thousand euros a day in two regions alone. Whatever testing budget you had in mind, the auction it enters is set by advertisers operating at that level, and the brand's traffic is 94% Italy and 1% Germany, so that spend is concentrated rather than spread thin.

None of which means you need to match it. It means you should know it before you decide that a creative failed.

Compare the disclosed daily spend of the leaders in your own niche

How to actually use this

The point is not to match a competitor's budget. Most readers cannot and should not.

It is to know which of three situations you are in before you commit a creative to a test:

1. A heavy, still-growing category, like Meller's: thousands of live ads and a curve up 47% over six months. Expect a creative to need more budget and more time to produce a readable result, and plan fewer, better-funded tests rather than many thin ones.
2. A concentrated category, like the swimwear card: a disclosed rate near €39.4k a day aimed almost entirely at one country. The headline spend matters less than how narrowly it is pointed, because that is what sets frequency in the market you are entering.
3. A quiet category: low live ad counts and a flat curve. This is where a smaller budget can still buy a clear answer.

Which of the three you are in is readable in about a minute per competitor, and it is the input the standard testing advice leaves out.

Method

The figures on this page are transcribed from two Brandsearch captures taken on 13 September 2026: the active ads card on mellerbrand.com, described on its own brand card as a Barcelona sunglasses brand, and the Brand Library card for it.mc2saintbarth.com, tagged Swimwear. Every number quoted appears in the screenshots above.

Brandsearch indexes 223M ads across Meta and TikTok and 13.7M stores (9M of them Shopify). Disclosed spend comes from Meta's EU and UK ad transparency reporting and is summed per brand; it is a real published figure for that region and it is silent about every other region.

Deliberately not stated anywhere on this page: any CPM, any ROAS, any conversion rate, and any recommended daily budget expressed as a share of a competitor's spend. None of those are observable from outside an ad account, and an earlier version of this article asserted all of them.

FAQ

Is disclosed EU spend the same as a brand's total ad budget?
No. It is the portion EU and UK rules require advertisers to publish. The global total is larger and is not disclosed anywhere, so treat the euro figure as a floor for that region rather than a budget.

Can I work out a competitor's daily spend from it?
Not reliably. The figure is cumulative across the ads in the index rather than a rate. Some Brand Library cards do show a daily EU/UK figure directly, which is the number to use when you need one.

Does a low euro figure mean a brand is not a serious competitor?
No, and this is the most common misreading. Spend is disclosed for one region while rank is computed worldwide, so a brand can show a modest euro number and still be winning its category globally.

Is there an equivalent figure for TikTok?
No. Brandsearch carries no TikTok spend and no TikTok ad rank. The TikTok data is organic engagement: followers, hearts, views, videos and the trend on each.