Strategy 24 min read

What ads are Series A companies running in 2026? A study of 7,819 companies

We took every Series A round Crunchbase recorded between September 2024 and August 2026, 7,819 companies, and looked up the 4,930 we could check (live site, outside mainland China) in the public Google, Meta and LinkedIn ad libraries. 51.4% have ads. Here is who does, on which platform, how it changes with the size of the round, and what the ads and landing pages look like.

The short version

  • 51.4% of Series A companies have ads in the public libraries: 2,533 of the 4,930 companies we checked on all three. If every company we could not check turned out to run no ads, the figure would still be 46.6%.
  • Google 38.1%, LinkedIn 32.2%, Meta 10.6%. Same order as the Y Combinator portfolio. For companies selling to other businesses, LinkedIn (36%) and Google (33.6%) are close to equal.
  • Website traffic predicts advertising better than anything else we measured: 23.9% of companies under 1,000 monthly visits run ads, 88.9% of those above 200,000. Headcount is next: 35.6% at 1 to 10 people, 69.7% at 101 to 250.
  • Companies that raised $10-20M advertise most, 61.8% of them, against 37.9% of those that raised more than $75M and 15.1% of those that raised under $1M.
  • Most Series A ads point at a page that already existed. Of the companies advertising on Meta and LinkedIn, 17.6% send most ads to their homepage and 1.9% to a page built for the campaign. Only 3.7% lead with a demo button.

51.4% of Series A companies run paid ads, and Google is the most used platform

Of the 4,930 companies we checked on all three libraries (raised a Series A between September 2024 and August 2026, live website, still operating, headquartered outside mainland China), 51.4% have at least one ad in the Google, Meta or LinkedIn ad libraries.

The libraries only show ads that are running or were running recently, so a company that ran a launch campaign after its round and stopped reads here as a non-advertiser. Every number in this piece is a minimum, not a count of everyone who has ever bought an ad.

The platform order is clear:

  • 38.1% have Google ads
  • 32.2% have LinkedIn ads
  • 10.6% have Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram)
Share of Series A companies with ads in each ad library
Google38.1%
LinkedIn32.2%
Meta10.6%

Look at how many companies rely on a single channel and the order is the same. 12.8% have only Google, 11.8% only LinkedIn, and 1.1% only Meta. The most common pairing is Google and LinkedIn (799 companies), then Google and Meta (260); 184 companies run all three. That is the distribution you would expect when 77.7% of these companies sell to other businesses.

Share of companies using one ad platform and no other
Google only12.8%
LinkedIn only11.8%
Meta only1.1%

Meta rarely stands alone. It shows up on top of Google, mostly at consumer companies, rather than as a starting point.

Series A companies advertise more than Y Combinator companies

Two months ago we ran the same method over the Y Combinator portfolio, 4,767 companies with a live site, using the same libraries and the same rules.

Series A companies compared with Y Combinator companies
Any platform52%44%
Google38%34%
LinkedIn32%24%
Meta11%8%
Series A companiesY Combinator companies

Series A companies come out ahead, 51.5% against 44.5%, and the platform order is the same. Most of that gap comes from the kind of company in each list rather than from the round itself: a Series A company is bigger and more likely to sell to businesses than the median Y Combinator company, and company size predicts advertising in both studies. The two lists also overlap, since Y Combinator companies that raised a Series A in the window appear in both.

The clearest difference is LinkedIn: 32.2% against 23.6%. Y Combinator has a long tail of consumer and marketplace companies, while a 2025 and 2026 Series A list is dominated by business software, infrastructure, security and health, which are the buyers LinkedIn reaches. Meta is higher here (10.6% against 8.3%).

Companies that raised $10M to $20M advertise most, and the biggest rounds advertise least

Crunchbase records the amount for most Series A rounds, so we can ask whether a bigger round means more advertising. It does, up to a point, and then it stops. (This is the size of the Series A round itself. Crunchbase does not publish total money raised for these companies, so we cannot cut it that way.)

Share of companies running paid ads, by size of their Series A round
<$1M (251)15.1%
$1-5M (680)40.6%
$5-10M (865)55.4%
$10-20M (1,317)61.8%
$20-40M (856)60.5%
$40-75M (270)47.4%
$75M+ (177)37.9%
Undisclosed (514)41.4%
All companies51.4%

Companies that raised $10-20M advertise most often, at 61.8%. Below $1M the rate is 15.1%, and between $1M and $5M it is 40.6%. Those small rounds are not simply a foreign labelling quirk: the largest group of sub-$5M rounds is American (268 companies, 24.3% advertising), alongside South Korea (21.7%) and Japan (26.8%), while sub-$5M rounds in India (55.5%) and Europe (47%) advertise about as often as everyone else.

Above $75M the rate falls to 37.9%. A Series A that size in 2025 or 2026 is usually an AI lab, a fusion company, a chip startup or a defense contractor, and about one in five of them (22%) runs Google ads. Companies whose round size was not disclosed (514) advertise at 41.4%.

The median advertiser raised $13M against $10M for the median non-advertiser. The averages run the other way ($20M against $24M) because the very largest rounds sit on the non-advertising side.

Ad platform used, by size of their Series A round
<$1M11%7%4%
$1-5M31%16%13%
$5-10M41%33%14%
$10-20M48%42%11%
$20-40M44%43%9%
$40-75M28%35%5%
$75M+22%27%4%
GoogleLinkedInMeta

The platform mix moves with round size too. Google is strongest between $5M and $40M. LinkedIn holds its share further up the range, which fits: the companies raising more than $40M that do advertise are selling to large enterprises.

The best predictors of whether a company runs ads are traffic, headcount and sector

Inside a single funding stage, the things that predicted advertising across the Y Combinator portfolio predict it here, and one new one predicts it better than any of them.

Share of companies running paid ads, by monthly website visits
<1k (1,500)23.9%
1k-10k (1,638)54.5%
10k-50k (824)74.8%
50k-200k (407)86%
200k+ (316)88.9%
Not known (245)14.3%
All companies51.4%

Website traffic separates advertisers from non-advertisers more sharply than anything else we measured. 23.9% of companies with under 1,000 monthly visits (Semrush's estimate, via Crunchbase) have ads; 74.8% of those between 10,000 and 50,000; 88.9% of those above 200,000. Some of that traffic is the ads themselves, so this runs in both directions and we can't say which came first. What it does say is that the companies advertising are the ones that already have an audience.

Share of companies running paid ads, by headcount
1-10 (842)35.6%
11-50 (2,644)50.2%
51-100 (753)65.1%
101-250 (455)69.7%
251-500 (75)72%
501-1000 (27)59.3%
1001+ (22)54.5%
Not known (112)16.1%
All companies51.4%

Headcount is next. A company with 1 to 10 people has ads 35.6% of the time, at 51 to 100 it's 65.1%, at 101 to 250 it's 69.7%. Past 250 the sample is small (under 130 companies) and the rate stops rising; several of those companies with 500-plus staff look like later-stage rounds carrying an early-stage label. Headcount mostly stands in for having a marketing team at all: someone has to own the ad account. Companies whose headcount Crunchbase doesn't know (112) advertise at 16.1%, and every group we know least about sits low, so missing data and missed ads travel together.

Share of companies running paid ads, by sector
Security (262)72.9%
B2B Software (799)68.5%
Real Estate & Construction (166)68.1%
Education (73)65.8%
Developer Tools & Infra (244)61.5%
Consumer (563)58.4%
Fintech (614)57.3%
AI (208)50%
Climate & Energy (380)39.7%
Healthcare & Bio (937)35.8%
Hardware & Deep Tech (478)31.2%
Other (206)31.1%
All companies51.4%

By sector, Security leads at 72.9%, with B2B Software (68.5%) and Real Estate & Construction (68.1%) close behind. At the bottom sit Hardware & Deep Tech (31.2%) and Healthcare & Bio (35.8%). Healthcare & Bio is the largest sector in the study and one of the least likely to advertise, which pulls the overall number down. One label needs care: "AI" here means companies whose product is AI itself (models, infrastructure, general-purpose agents), 208 companies; a security company built on AI is filed under Security. Those AI companies advertise at 50%, about average.

Ad platform used, by sector
Security53%61%1%
B2B Software56%49%10%
Real Estate & Construction54%40%16%
Education52%37%18%
Developer Tools & Infra46%48%2%
Consumer50%13%33%
Fintech44%34%12%
AI34%35%5%
Climate & Energy20%31%7%
Healthcare & Bio24%22%8%
Hardware & Deep Tech18%23%2%
Other19%18%7%
GoogleLinkedInMeta

The platform split by sector says who each channel is for. Consumer companies run Google at 50.1% and LinkedIn at 13%; Security companies run LinkedIn at 61.1%, the highest of any sector.

Ad platform used, by who the company sells to
Sells to businesses34%36%5%
Sells to consumers54%17%33%
Both52%25%22%
GoogleLinkedInMeta

Split by who they sell to, companies selling to consumers advertise more often than companies selling to businesses (62.9% against 48.2%), and the channel flips. Consumer companies use Google at 54.1% and LinkedIn at 16.6%. Business-to-business companies use Google at 33.6% and LinkedIn at 36%. For a company selling to businesses at this stage, LinkedIn is not the channel you add later; it is already level with search.

One more group: the 100 largest rounds (everything from $101M up, and at the very top "Series A" is a Crunchbase label rather than a stage). 36% of them have ads, Google 21% and LinkedIn 25%. Y Combinator's top 100 by lifetime funding advertised at 72%, but that list ranks companies that have had a decade to build a marketing team, while this one ranks single rounds, most of them raised by companies with no product on sale yet.

The US, Europe and the UK are close, and Japan and South Korea are far behind

The companies are global and so are the ad libraries, so regions compare on the same footing. Sample sizes vary a lot: the company count is in brackets, and the country table lists countries with at least 45 companies checked.

Share of companies running paid ads, by region
Latin America (97)64.9%
Canada (100)63%
India (311)58.5%
Israel (88)58%
United States (2,318)55.3%
Rest of world (122)54.1%
Europe (excl. UK) (696)53.4%
Middle East & Africa (106)52.8%
Australia & NZ (87)51.7%
Hong Kong (28)50%
United Kingdom (323)49.2%
SE Asia (122)41.8%
Japan (229)27.5%
South Korea (287)22.6%
China (1,042)5.5%
All companies, excluding mainland China51.4%

United States companies have ads at 55.3%, Europe outside the UK at 53.4%, the UK at 49.2%. Latin America (97 companies) has the highest rate of any region with a meaningful sample at 64.9%, though on that sample the interval overlaps the US. Japan (27.5%) and South Korea (22.6%) are low, and low specifically on LinkedIn (7.9% and 5.9%), which fits how little LinkedIn is used in either market.

Mainland China is left out of the headline figure for a reason: 5.5% of the 1,042 Chinese Series A companies we checked show up in these three libraries. Their ads run on platforms with no public library (WeChat, Douyin, Baidu), so counting them would only tell you which library we looked in. Hong Kong (28 companies, 50%) is included.

CountryCompanies checkedAny platformGoogleLinkedInMeta
United States231855.3%40.4%37.5%8.8%
China10425.5%3.9%2%0.8%
United Kingdom32349.2%34.7%35.9%8.7%
India31158.5%46.3%22.5%28.9%
South Korea28722.6%17.1%5.9%4.2%
Japan22927.5%21.8%7.9%3.5%
France16950.3%36.1%34.3%8.9%
Germany16457.3%45.7%40.9%9.8%
Canada10063%44%46%13%
Israel8858%44.3%53.4%0%
Singapore8143.2%34.6%24.7%9.9%
Australia7146.5%32.4%38%14.1%
Switzerland6339.7%23.8%25.4%3.2%
Brazil5862.1%46.6%34.5%19%
The Netherlands4961.2%42.9%46.9%8.2%
Italy4555.6%44.4%28.9%26.7%

One row is missing on purpose: Crunchbase lists 119 Sri Lankan "Series A" rounds of $120,000 to $190,000 with near-identical profiles. They look like spam submissions, none of them advertises, and we dropped them from the study rather than print a 0% row. Israel's Meta column reads zero on 88 companies; we found 38 Israeli Facebook pages but none with ads that landed on the company's own domain, so read that cell as a limit of our matching as much as a fact about Israeli companies.

Advertising by lead investor

Crunchbase names a lead investor on 78.9% of these rounds, so we can look at each firm's Series A companies as a group. Two things before the table. The samples are small, so the range on each figure is 24 to 44 points wide and almost no two firms here are meaningfully different; read it as a reflection of what each firm invests in, not as a ranking. And a round with two named leads counts for both.

Lead investorCompanies advertisingShare95% intervalGoogleLinkedInMeta
Andreessen Horowitz35 of 5465%52-76%52%50%7%
Accel29 of 4564%50-77%44%47%11%
Lightspeed Venture Partners24 of 3667%50-80%39%47%3%
Insight Partners27 of 3577%61-88%66%57%9%
Khosla Ventures21 of 3462%45-76%44%41%9%
Sequoia Capital19 of 3161%44-76%48%42%13%
General Catalyst15 of 2952%34-69%41%38%3%
Bessemer Venture Partners19 of 2479%60-91%62%50%29%
Felicis12 of 1963%41-81%58%37%10%
Peak XV Partners14 of 1974%51-88%63%47%26%
Google Ventures10 of 1856%34-75%33%50%6%
Kleiner Perkins15 of 1883%61-94%56%56%17%
Index Ventures12 of 1771%47-87%65%65%12%
Norwest15 of 1788%66-97%59%82%12%
Bpifrance5 of 1631%14-56%19%19%0%
Redpoint15 of 1694%72-99%81%62%6%
8VC9 of 1656%33-77%38%56%12%
CDP Venture Capital6 of 1540%20-64%33%13%13%
Spark Capital9 of 1560%36-80%47%53%7%

The one pattern that survives the intervals: the two state-backed funds (Bpifrance, CDP) sit low and the firms concentrated in B2B software sit high. That is the sector and geography charts again, seen through a different lens.

Tracking tags tell us less than we hoped

Before pulling a single ad, we read each company's homepage for the tracking tags the ad platforms hand out. We expected the gap between "tag installed" and "ads running" to be a finding. It turned out to say more about our detection than about the companies, so here is the honest version.

Tracking tagFound on all companiesFound on companies we know advertise thereWhat that means
Meta pixel9.1%28.2%We find the pixel on about 3 in 10 known Meta advertisers
LinkedIn Insight tag6.7%14.6%About 1 in 7 known LinkedIn advertisers
Google tag29.5%30.2%Shared with Google Analytics, so not an ads signal

Reading raw HTML catches the Meta pixel on only 28.2% of companies we know are running Meta ads, and the LinkedIn Insight tag on 14.6% of known LinkedIn advertisers, because most tags load through a tag manager that never appears in the page source. The Google pattern matches gtag.js, which Google Analytics also uses, so it says nothing about an ads account. So the 301 companies that carry a Meta pixel but run no Meta ads are the smallest possible version of the "set up but not spending" group, and the real number is several times larger. (270 companies' pages couldn't be read at all and count as untagged.) We're publishing the tag columns in the data file; we wouldn't build a chart on them.

What the ads look like

We pulled the ads themselves: 169,640 in all, 159,793 of them from the companies we checked, which is what every figure from here on uses (100,727 Google, 40,821 Meta, 18,245 LinkedIn). The libraries and our pulls cap what you can take: LinkedIn returns at most 20 ads per account (575 advertisers sit at that cap), our Meta pull stopped at 300 per page, and 78 Google advertisers were truncated by the run limits. Google's pull also covers 74.3% of Google advertisers, because the scraping budget ran out before the rest. So volume figures below are Google and Meta only, and figures counted per ad lean toward large consumer accounts. Where it matters we give the figure counted per company next to the one counted per ad.

Among the 1,593 Google or Meta advertisers whose ads we captured, the median has 24 ads in the libraries and the top tenth have 248 or more.

Ad formats on Facebook and Instagram
video37.3%
dco34.4%
image22.8%
carousel4.5%
text1%

On Facebook and Instagram, video is the largest format at 37.3% of active ads, dynamic catalog ads (product-feed ads that render a different item to each viewer) are 34.4%, static images 22.8%, carousels 4.5%.

Ad formats on Google
text60.2%
image20%
video19.8%

Google is different: 60.2% of Google ads are text search ads, 19.8% are video (YouTube) and 20% display images. A Series A Google account is a search account first, but two ads in five aren't search.

Ad formats on LinkedIn
image69.2%
video16.4%
document6.6%
message3.2%
carousel2.3%
event1%
other0.6%
spotlight0.4%
text0.3%

LinkedIn sits in between. Single images are 69.2% of LinkedIn ads, video 16.4%, document ads (the swipeable PDF format LinkedIn pushes for reports and guides) 6.6%, sponsored messages 3.2%.

We also had a vision model describe a random sample of the images (406 Meta, 316 LinkedIn; Google's stills are mostly rendered search ads, so we leave them out here). On Meta the most common image types are product shot 28%, founder or person photo 20%, lifestyle photo 17%; 49.3% of Meta images show a human face and 51% carry heavy text. On LinkedIn: text on color 19%, event promo 16%, product screenshot 13%; 32.3% show a face, 15.2% show software or a web page, 77% carry heavy text.

How long do ads run? The libraries answer differently. Google reports the number of days an ad actually served: the median is 61 days and 10.3% of Google ads have served for more than a year. Meta only shows active ads with a start date; the median active Meta ad started 18 days ago, and 1.7% started more than six months ago. A search ad that has served for years is the closest thing a public library offers to a signal that it works, though the library never shows spend or results. Google's records begin on 2021-10-25, so anything that old is "at least" that old; the table below leaves those out and shows one ad per company. Most of the longest runners are consumer ecommerce search ads.

Google ads first shown on the library's earliest date (2021-10-25) are excluded: their true start is unknown.
CompanyPlatformDays servedFirst shownAd copy
House of Chikankarigoogle1,7052021-12-06Exclusive Kurta Collection - House Of Chikankari
AKT Londongoogle1,6762022-02-08AKT | The Deodorant Balm SC.01
SKYWITHCLASSgoogle1,6432022-03-12Skywithclass - Fly First Class Affordably - Up to -70% Off
Cycloidgoogle1,6262022-02-03Cycloid Platform Engineering - Roll out platform engineering
Radical Storagegoogle1,5972022-05-02Bags Storage Milan from €0.90 - Storage in Milan Centrale
Poppy Flowersgoogle1,5782022-05-21Simple, Transparent Pricing - Low Minimums, No Hidden Fees
Oxylabsgoogle1,5552022-05-05Better Proxy Alternative - 175M+ Residential IPs
Cryptiogoogle1,5332022-02-02Track Crypto Gains & Losses - Best Crypto Tax Calculator
Camphousegoogle1,5332022-02-04Powerful Marketing Platform - #1 Media Planning Tool
Nutrabaygoogle1,5012022-07-28oO Nutrabay Premium Quality whey Protein - 100% Purchase Protection

The copy is short and plain, and one ad in ten mentions AI

134,020 ads carry readable copy (82,979 Google, 32,848 Meta, 18,193 LinkedIn). We excluded 7,833 Meta catalog ads whose text is a template token and 17,940 ads with no extractable text. Google's copy is read off rendered ad images, so some of it is garbled (a capital "I" often comes back as a lowercase "l", accents get lost); the word counts and matches below allow for the common substitutions, and Google copy figures should be read as good to within a few points.

The median headline is 6 words; Google and LinkedIn headlines run 7 words, Meta 5. Bodies are 16 words on Google, 33 on Meta and 52 on LinkedIn. 36% of ads say "you" or "your", 53.5% contain a digit of some kind, 14.8% use an emoji (almost all on Meta).

Questions are a Meta and LinkedIn habit, not just a long-copy effect: per 100 words of copy there are 8.58 question marks on Meta, 6.37 on LinkedIn and 4.22 on Google.

18.4% of ads mention AI (whole-word match on "AI", "artificial intelligence", "LLM", "GPT", "AI agent", "agentic" or "copilot", accepting the "Al" misread in Google's rendered text). Split by who's talking: companies whose Crunchbase categories include AI say it in 45.9% of their ads, everyone else in 5.6%. Counted by company, 55% of advertisers with readable copy have at least one ad that says AI.

Most common call-to-action buttons
learn more30.2%
shop now24.4%
install now6.9%
book now6.4%
sign up5.7%
see details5%
download4%
order now2.9%
get quote2.3%
apply now2%

The button tells you what the company wants, with one caveat: Google search ads have no button, so this is 1,444 Meta and LinkedIn advertisers out of 1,900. Counted by ad, "Learn more" and "Shop now" dominate because a handful of consumer catalogs run thousands of them. Counted by company, using each advertiser's most common button:

The button each advertiser uses most often
learn58.9%
signup or start10.8%
other8.2%
shop8%
contact or quote5.5%
install4.9%
demo3.7%

58.9% of advertisers default to "Learn more." 10.8% lead with a sign-up or get-started button, 8% with a shop or order button, 5.5% with a quote, contact or message button, 4.9% with an app install, and 3.7% with a demo button.

The button advertisers use most often, by who they sell to
learn71%24%
signup or start12%7%
demo5%0%
contact or quote2%14%
install3%10%
shop0%34%
Sells to businessesSells to consumers

B2B and B2C advertisers barely overlap. 70.9% of B2B advertisers lead with "Learn more" and 5% with a demo button. Part of that is LinkedIn's default (its picker starts on "Learn more", and lead-gen form ads often pair it with a demo request), so the button understates demo intent; the landing-page section below has the other half. B2C advertisers lead with "Shop now" (33.6%) and app installs (10%).

What the ad copy offers, and what proof it carries
free trial or free12.1%
discount or price8.3%
report or guide4.7%
webinar or event3.7%
demo2.6%
waitlist or early0.3%
proof: rating or review4%
proof: backed by or funding3.2%
proof: trusted by or named customer2.1%
proof: customer count or users0.6%
proof: award or press0.6%
proof: g2 gartner forrester0.2%

What the copy offers: 12.1% of ads say "free" or "free trial", 8.3% name a price or a discount, 4.7% push a report or guide, 3.7% an event or webinar, 2.6% a demo. Waitlists and early access are 0.3%. Proof in the text itself is rare: 4% of ads mention a rating or reviews, 3.2% funding or a backer, 2.1% a named customer, 0.2% an analyst or G2 badge. Most of the proof lives in the image or the landing page.

One quirk worth knowing if you browse the Meta library yourself: 7,833 ads in our pull open with a token like {{product.name}}. Those aren't broken ads. They're dynamic catalog ads shown to a logged-out viewer with no product feed to fill the template. Real customers saw a product name; we left them out of the copy figures.

1,000 Series A ad headlines

The headline is the most portable part of any ad. Here are 1,000 of them, verbatim (the headline, or the opening line where a platform has none), from the Google, Meta and LinkedIn ads of 856 Series A companies. Filter by platform or sector inside.

Shop House of Chikankari Kurta - COD + Free Express Shipping

House of ChikankariGoogle

AKT | The Deodorant Balm SC.01

AKT LondonGoogle

Perfect tool for Telepathology - Affordable Whole Slide Imaging

Morphle LabsGoogle

Skywithclass - Fly First Class Affordably - Up to -70% Off

SKYWITHCLASSGoogle

Bags Storage Milan from €0.90 - Storage in Milan Centrale

Radical StorageGoogle

Boston Wedding Florists - (Custom Florals On A Budget)

Poppy FlowersGoogle

Scan. Plan. Build. - 3D scan rooms with our app

CanvasGoogle

Track Crypto Gains & Losses - Best Crypto Tax Calculator

CryptioGoogle

Contact us | Nonprofit Borrowing - We Finance Nonprofit Projects

Clearinghouse Community Development Financial InstitutionGoogle

Bima, Online insurance in Oman

BimaGoogle

5 Minutes Laser Circumcision - Best Treatment Cost Guaranteed

HexaHealthGoogle

Fastest Mortgage Approval - Fastest Mortgage in the UAE

HoloGoogle

oO Nutrabay COD Available | Free Shipping - Top Deals On Nutrabay

NutrabayGoogle

UV Water Purifier - UV os Light Years Ahead - Le... a

AquiSense TechnologiesGoogle

Your All-in-One Home = Gym

OxeFitGoogle

Up to 70% Off sale Live now - Splash Deals Live Now

Cava AthleisureGoogle

Alice Functional Mushrooms - Mushrooms are for Lovers

Alice MushroomsGoogle

Even Health Cover - Don’t overpay for healthcare

EvenGoogle

Get Your State Licenses Today - Get Your State License Quickly

LighthouseAIGoogle

Rafting Adventure a | Verona - Rafting a Verona cri i)

FreedomeGoogle

Bambo Nature Diapers - Bambo Nature For Babies

All Things BabyGoogle

Peter Blake art - Free Shipping Worldwide - Established in 1978

ArtsyGoogle

Accepting New Patients - Rheumatologist Near Me

Remission MedicalGoogle

HEST - Sleep Well. Play More

Hest OutdoorsGoogle

Most ads point at a product page or the homepage, almost never at a page built for the campaign

Where does the ad point? Google's library shows only the display domain for most search ads (a path is visible on 32.6% of Google destinations), so a Google "homepage" is usually just a hidden path. This section uses Meta and LinkedIn, where the full URL is exposed: 44,772 ads (39,914 Meta, 4,858 LinkedIn, since LinkedIn shows a link on only 26.6% of its ads), from 1,211 of the 1,900 Meta and LinkedIn advertisers. Destinations are classified from the URL path, so a campaign page without a telltale path counts as a product page.

Where Meta and LinkedIn ads send the click
product or feature page46.2%
homepage19.2%
article or advertorial14.6%
app store12.8%
content or blog2.3%
demo or contact2%
campaign landing page1.2%
signup or trial0.9%
booking tool0.4%
pricing0.4%
app deeplink0.1%

Counted by ad, 46.2% point at a specific product or feature page, 19.2% at the homepage, 14.6% at an article-style page and 12.8% at an app store. Purpose-built campaign pages (a /lp/ or /go/ path) are 1.2% of destinations, demo and contact pages 2%, pricing pages 0.4%.

The destination each advertiser uses most often
product or feature page57.1%
homepage17.6%
article or advertorial8%
content or blog6.1%
app store3.6%
demo or contact3.5%
campaign landing page1.9%
signup or trial1.6%
booking tool0.5%
pricing0.1%
app deeplink0.1%

Counted by company, 57.1% of those advertisers point most of their ads at a product page and 17.6% at the homepage; 35.7% point at least one ad there. The median advertiser uses 2 distinct destinations across all its ads, and 1.9% have a page on a /lp/ or /go/ path as their main destination. For brand-term search the homepage is often right; for cold social and LinkedIn ads, which is what these are, it rarely is. Nothing here measures results, so read it as what the median company does, not as what works.

The destination advertisers use most often, by who they sell to
product or feature page58%56%
homepage18%16%
article or advertorial7%11%
content or blog8%1%
demo or contact4%1%
app store0%12%
campaign landing page2%2%
signup or trial2%1%
Sells to businessesSells to consumers

B2B and B2C advertisers land in the same two places (product page, then homepage). The tails differ: B2B uses content pages (8.2% of advertisers) and demo or contact pages (4.5%); B2C uses app stores (11.7%). Put the demo page next to the demo button from the copy section and the "B2B ads are all book-a-demo" picture doesn't hold at Series A: most of them ask you to learn more, then show you the product.

Tracking, where we can see it: LinkedIn exposes an outbound URL on 26.6% of its ads (the rest use on-platform lead forms or have no link), and 44.7% of those carry a UTM or click ID. Meta exposes the URL on 97.8% of ads and 9.8% carry a tag; the Meta library sometimes strips the tracking part of the URL, so read that as a minimum. Google shows a path on a third of its destinations, so its 6.2% says nothing.

1,100 real Series A ads for your inspiration

Enough numbers. Here are 1,100 actual creatives, pulled straight from the Meta, Google and LinkedIn ad libraries, run by 911 different companies that raised a Series A in the last two years. Hit play on any video ad to watch it right here. Filter by platform, sector, or B2B/B2C inside.

Ad by RAS Luxury Oils
RAS Luxury OilsFB/IG
Ad by Freedome
FreedomeGoogle
Ad by BeyondTrucks
BeyondTrucksLinkedIn
Ad by ResBiotic
ResBioticFB/IG
Ad by Oxylabs
OxylabsGoogle
Ad by Recur Club
Recur ClubLinkedIn
Ad by Coral Care
Coral CareFB/IG
Ad by Kampaay
KampaayGoogle
Ad by TeamLinkt
TeamLinktLinkedIn
Ad by Jumppoint
JumppointFB/IG
Ad by DÔEN
DÔENGoogle
Ad by Kertos
KertosLinkedIn
Ad by Ketone-IQ
Ketone-IQFB/IG
Ad by Radical Storage
Radical StorageGoogle
Ad by BotCity
BotCityLinkedIn
Ad by Klubi
KlubiFB/IG
Ad by House of Chikankari
House of ChikankariGoogle
Ad by TENEX.AI
TENEX.AILinkedIn
Ad by ariika
ariikaFB/IG
Ad by Omni
OmniGoogle
Ad by SheMed
SheMedLinkedIn
Ad by Next Fit
Next FitFB/IG
Ad by Remix Global AD
Remix Global ADGoogle
Ad by Bluefish
BluefishLinkedIn
Ad by Arogga
AroggaFB/IG
Ad by Scopevisio AG
Scopevisio AGGoogle
Ad by Drivepoint
DrivepointLinkedIn
Ad by Podeo
PodeoFB/IG
Ad by Morphle Labs
Morphle LabsGoogle
Ad by Daymark Health
Daymark HealthLinkedIn

Creatives are shown as served in the public Meta, Google and LinkedIn ad libraries, credited to the advertiser. A representative sample, not the full set.

Questions people ask about this study

What share of Series A companies run paid ads?

51.4% of the 4,930 companies we checked (raised a Series A between September 2024 and August 2026, live website, outside mainland China) had at least one ad in the Google, Meta or LinkedIn ad libraries when we captured them in September 2026. If every company we could not check ran no ads at all, the figure would still be 46.6%.

Which ad platform do Series A companies use most?

Google, at 38.1% of companies. LinkedIn is second at 32.2% and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) third at 10.6%. For companies selling to other businesses, LinkedIn and Google are close to equal. The order is the same one we found across the Y Combinator portfolio.

Do Series A companies advertise more than Y Combinator companies?

Yes, 51.5% against 44.5% on the same measure. Most of that gap comes from the kind of company in each list: a Series A company is larger and more likely to sell to businesses than the median Y Combinator company, and company size predicts advertising in both studies.

Does the size of the round predict whether a company advertises?

Up to a point. Companies that raised under $1M advertise at 15.1%, those that raised $10-20M at 61.8%, and those that raised more than $75M at 37.9%, because the largest Series A rounds go to AI labs, hardware and defense companies that do not buy ads.

What do Series A ads look like?

Short and plain. The median headline is 6 words. Video is the biggest format on Facebook and Instagram, text search ads dominate Google, and single images dominate LinkedIn. 58.9% of advertisers use "Learn more" as their most common button, and most ads point at a product page or the homepage rather than a page built for the campaign.

Where does the data come from and can I download it?

The company list is every Series A round recorded in Crunchbase for the window, enriched from each company's Crunchbase profile. The ads come from the public Google Ads Transparency Center, Meta Ad Library and LinkedIn Ad Library, pulled with Apify scrapers. Every number traces to the files linked in the method section.

Method and data

We started from every funding round Crunchbase records as a Series A announced between September 1, 2024 and August 31, 2026: 7,819 Crunchbase company records after collapsing extensions. Each was enriched from its Crunchbase profile (website, headquarters, headcount band, categories, lead investors) and its website was fetched to confirm it is live. Sector and B2B/B2C were assigned by a language model from the description and categories; on two 100-company hand checks the sector label agreed 94 times out of 100 and the B2B/B2C label 99 times.

Where the 7,819 went. 119 rows are Sri Lankan "Series A" rounds of $120,000 to $190,000 that look like spam submissions, and 27 are second records for a company already in the list (same name and date, or same website); both dropped. 1,086 have no live website (830 of them Chinese), 15 are recorded as closed, and 1,131 are headquartered in mainland China and reported separately because their ads run on platforms with no public library (1,042 of them were checked). That leaves 5,441 eligible companies, of which 4,930 were checked on all three libraries and are the ones every figure in this piece is based on. The remaining 511 were never checked: their websites only resolved after the library pass, and our scraping budget ran out before a second pass. They are spread across the whole window (15.1% are August 2026 rounds, although 61.1% of that month's rounds went unchecked), and if anything they lean toward advertising: 54.2% are American against 47% of the pool, with a median round of $16M against $12M. Counting all of them as non-advertisers would put the headline at 46.6%, which is the lowest the figure could be.

How a company counts as having ads. Meta: we found a Facebook page that is provably theirs (their site links to it, or its ads land on their domain) and the page has active ads; a name-matched page with no such ads never counts (we matched 2,480 Facebook pages in the pool and credited 521 as advertisers). LinkedIn: we searched the Ad Library by company name and kept an advertiser only when one of its ads lands on the company's own domain, or its account name matches exactly and its visible clicks don't point at another company; the library keeps roughly a year of ads. Google: the company's own domain appears in the Transparency Center's advertiser index (a domain identifies one advertiser, so the match is exact; companies whose "website" is a shared host such as a link-in-bio page are excluded) and at least one of its ads was shown in the twelve months before capture, since the Transparency Center is an archive that keeps stopped ads. Among Google advertisers whose ads we pulled, 99% met that bar and 75.3% had an ad shown in the last 30 days. 482 Google advertisers' ads were never pulled (budget), and they are counted at the pulled rate; the confirmed-only figures are in the sensitivity table. A company whose website now redirects to an unrelated domain (an acquirer) is never credited with that domain's ads.

What these numbers are not. They are presence in a library on one date, so every figure is a minimum, not a count of everyone who has ever advertised. LinkedIn returns up to 20 ads per advertiser (575 advertisers hit it), our Meta pull stopped at 300 per page, 78 Google pulls were truncated by run limits, and the Google pull covers 74.3% of Google advertisers, so ad-level figures lean toward large accounts; company-weighted figures are given alongside. Google ad text is extracted from rendered ads and a small share of non-English copy is garbled. Pixel detection reads raw HTML and misses tags loaded by a tag manager. Crunchbase's round labels are the industry's standard record but not clean: a hand check of 20 rounds confirmed 15 by press coverage, found 2 ambiguous and could not confirm 3, and the top of the list carries billion-dollar rounds that are "Series A" in name only. None of this measures spend or results.

How we pulled the ads. Crunchbase rounds and profiles came through the Crunchbase scraper and Crunchbase Company API actors on Apify. The ads came from the Meta Ad Library page resolver and Meta Ad Library ads scraper, the Google Ads scraper, and the LinkedIn Ad Library scraper. Capture date: 2026-09-17.

The data is open. companies.csv has one row per company (round, HQ, sector, size, whether it was checked, whether it is in the pool, who advertises where, library links). stats.json holds every figure in this article, including the ad-level ones. aggregates.csv is the adoption breakdowns in long format, and ads_sample.csv is a readable sample of the ads (4,000 per platform), not a basis for computing shares. The YC study this one is modelled on is here. We sell paid-ads services; the data is there so you don't have to take our word for any of it.

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