Video vs Static Ads on Meta: What 26 Million Ecommerce Ads Show

Between January and September 2026, ecommerce brands launched 25,988,966 Meta ads that reached at least one person in the EU. 13.39 million contained video. 12.60 million were statics: single images or image carousels. If video really were the better format, it should show up as soon as you split those 26 million ads by how far they travelled. It does show up, but much later than the advice suggests.

The belief, and the test

The belief is everywhere in creative strategy threads: "video outperforms static", so the serious accounts should shift their budget to video and keep statics for retargeting. The evidence usually offered is a CTR benchmark with no stated source, or a vendor's sample of its own customers' accounts.

We tested it on something Meta publishes for every ad delivered in the EU: reach, the number of people who saw it. We took every ad in the Brandsearch index that started between 1 January and 30 September 2026, came from a store classified in one of 19 ecommerce niches, and reached at least one person in the EU. Then we asked a simple question at each reach tier: of all the video ads, what share got there, and of all the statics, what share got there?

Reach is not revenue, and this is not a controlled experiment. More on both further down. But reach is the one outcome Meta discloses for every advertiser, so it is the only way to compare 26 million ads from thousands of brands without relying on anyone's account dashboard. (If you want the detail on what that reach number counts, we unpacked it here.)

Below 10,000 people, statics hold their own

The first surprise is at the bottom. 53.7% of ecommerce statics reached 1,000 people or more in the EU. For video ads, it was 50.9%. At 10,000 people the two formats are level: 21.3% of statics, 21.5% of videos.

That bottom tier is where most ads live. Almost half of all ecommerce ads launched this year never reached 1,000 people in the EU. Those are tests, small budgets, ads switched off after a few days, localised variants. In that zone the format makes no visible difference, and statics are slightly more likely to get any distribution at all.

That matters because the cost of producing the two formats is not equal. A static takes an hour; a usable video takes a shoot, an edit, or a creator fee. If your account mostly runs ads that will never pass 10,000 people, you are paying a video premium for no measurable reach advantage.

Where video pulls ahead: the last 4%

Above 100,000 people, the picture changes. 3.98% of ecommerce video ads crossed that line, against 3.35% of statics: video is 1.19 times as likely to get there. Above one million people, it is 1.55 times as likely, and 62.2% of the ads at that tier contain video, up from 51.5% of all reached ads.

So the belief is true, but only in the tail. Video does not make the typical ad perform better. It makes the rare, very large ad slightly more common.

Put in absolute terms, the gap is small. For every 159 ecommerce ads launched, choosing video over static bought one extra ad past 100,000 people. For every 1,265 ads, it bought one extra ad past a million. That is real for a brand running hundreds of creatives a month, which is the kind of account that writes the "video wins" case studies. For a store launching ten ads a month, it is a rounding error.

Eight niches, two exceptions

Split by niche, the advantage is far from uniform. We ran the same 100,000-reach comparison on eight large ecommerce niches in the index.

In health and supplements and in food and drink, a video ad was about 1.6 times as likely as a static to pass 100,000 people. Those are categories where the product does not explain itself in a photo: a powder, a gummy, a coffee blend. A face talking to camera, a pour, a before-and-after carries the claim.

In fashion the edge nearly disappears (1.10). A garment photographs well, and the static is the format the category has always bought from.

Then the two exceptions. In home and garden, and in electronics and tech, statics crossed 100,000 people more often than videos did: 5.07% against 4.49%, and 4.97% against 4.15%. These are the categories where every playbook says to demo the product on video, and both niches already run more video than average (59% and 57% of their reached ads). When everyone in a feed demos a gadget, a clean static with one claim is the ad that looks different.

The example below makes the point. Harvest Right sells home freeze dryers, a product you would expect to need a demo. The most-reached static started in 2026 by a home and garden brand in our index is a single image with a four-word headline, "Now Available in Europe". It ran from 25 June to 1 October 2026 and reached 16.78 million people in the EU.

See this ad in Brandsearch

The scatter hints at a pattern, loosely: the niches where video is already the majority format get the least extra reach from it. Beauty breaks it (59% video, still 1.32), so treat it as a question to check in your own niche, not a rule.

Two limits on what this proves

Two caveats limit what these numbers can say, and the first one flatters video.

First, who makes the video. Video costs more to produce, so it is likely to be over-represented among brands with large budgets, and large budgets buy more reach. Part of video's lead above a million people may simply be that the accounts able to buy a million people are also the accounts with a production team. Our data cannot separate the two, and neither can anyone else's benchmark built from pooled accounts.

Second, what reach measures. Reach counts people who saw the ad, not people who bought. A video can reach 2 million people on a brand-awareness objective and sell less than a static seen by 200,000 people on a conversion campaign. The tiers above tell you which format Meta's delivery took furthest, which is a fair proxy for what advertisers chose to keep funding, and nothing more.

The first caveat means the true format effect at the top is probably smaller than 1.55. The second means none of this is a sales result. Neither rescues the claim that video wins in general. At the tiers where most ads live, the format makes no difference to reach.

What to do with your next ten creatives

Test on statics. Angles, offers, hooks written as headlines, price points: a static gets the same distribution as a video at the reach most tests reach, at a fraction of the cost. You will learn more from twenty statics than from four videos. How many ads to run for your niche is the next question once you commit to volume.

Spend your video budget on proven angles. Video earns its cost when an ad is meant to go past 100,000 people. Turn the static that won into a video, rather than shooting videos to find out which angle wins.

Check your niche before you follow the advice. In supplements or food, the case for video at scale is strong. In home goods or electronics, the data says the opposite of the usual playbook. The quickest check is to look at the ads in your niche that are scaling right now and count formats; here is how to tell whether a competitor's ad is actually scaling.

In Brandsearch, filter the Meta ads library by your niche, set a minimum EU reach of 100,000, and compare video ads with image ads. If the statics hold their share at the top in your niche, you have your answer for Q1 creative planning.