Ad CTA Study 2026: We Tracked 13,900+ Ads and 'Shop Now' Is the Worst-Performing Button
We measured how long ads with each call-to-action button stay in market across Meta, Google and TikTok. 'Learn More' ads are 15× more likely to survive 30 days than 'Shop Now' ads. Full data inside.
The question nobody had real data on
Every "best CTA" listicle on the internet is opinion. We wanted the number: which call-to-action buttons do advertisers keep paying for the longest?
Ad longevity is the closest public proxy for profitability that exists. Advertisers kill losing ads fast and keep feeding winners. So if ads carrying one CTA consistently stay live for 30+ days while ads carrying another die within a week, that is real market evidence about what converts — voted on with ad spend, not survey answers.
TrackCreatives continuously scans the Meta Ad Library, Google Ads Transparency Center and TikTok's ad ecosystem — public databases indexing millions of active ads — and maintains a tracked research index of every ad we monitor with first-seen and last-seen timestamps. For this study we analyzed 13,933 tracked ads that carried a CTA button, measuring each one's time in market.
The headline finding
"Shop Now" — the most famous CTA in e-commerce — is one of the worst performers in our dataset. Only 1.1% of "Shop Now" ads survived 30 days. "Learn More" ads survived at 16.7% — a 15× difference.
Full results: 30-day survival rate by CTA
| CTA button | Ads tracked | Survived 30+ days | Avg days in market |
|---|---|---|---|
| Learn More | 6,878 | 16.7% | 10.7 |
| Download | 539 | 15.2% | 14.8 |
| Get Offer | 471 | 13.6% | 8.8 |
| Sign Up | 476 | 13.2% | 8.9 |
| Visit Instagram Profile | 128 | 8.6% | 10.6 |
| See Details | 935 | 2.9% | 3.2 |
| Install Now | 1,371 | 1.5% | 5.7 |
| Shop Now | 188 | 1.1% | 5.6 |
| Watch More | 712 | 0.8% | 7.3 |
| Subscribe | 191 | 0.5% | 1.3 |
Only CTAs with at least 100 tracked ads shown. Survival = the ad was still actively running 30 days after we first observed it.
Why "Learn More" wins
Three patterns explain the gap, and they show up over and over when you read the surviving ads:
1. Low-commitment clicks convert curiosity. "Learn More" asks for nothing. It matches how people actually behave in-feed: they are not shopping, they are scrolling. The ads that outlive everything else sell the click, not the checkout.
2. "Shop Now" concentrates in the most brutal auctions. Direct-response e-commerce is where creative fatigues fastest and testing is most aggressive. A "Shop Now" ad is usually one of dozens of variants an advertiser rotates weekly — designed to be disposable.
3. "Download" ads have durable offers. The second-best CTA belongs to lead magnets, apps and tools — evergreen offers that do not expire the way a product drop or discount does. Their 14.8-day average run is the longest of any CTA.
What this means for your ads
- Default to Learn More unless you have measured evidence your audience is bottom-funnel.
- If you run Shop Now, plan for creative rotation — the market data says these ads burn out in under a week on average.
- Subscribe is a graveyard (0.5% survival, 1.3-day average run). Sell the value first, ask for the subscription on the landing page.
- Watch what survives, not what launches. An ad that has run for 30+ days is an ad that is paying for itself — that is the entire premise our winner-tracking is built on.
Methodology
- Dataset: 13,933 ads with a CTA button, from the TrackCreatives research index of 17,900+ tracked ads across Meta (77%), Google (21%) and TikTok, collected by continuously scanning public ad libraries.
- Metric: days between our first and last observation of the ad actively running. "Survived 30 days" = still active 30+ days after first observation.
- Caveats: longevity proxies advertiser satisfaction, not click-through rate; CTA choice correlates with vertical and objective, so part of each gap reflects the markets a CTA lives in. CTAs with under 100 tracked ads were excluded.
- Data snapshot: August 2026. This page is updated as the tracked index grows.
Cite this study: TrackCreatives Ad CTA Study, 2026 — trackcreatives.com/blog/ad-cta-study.
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