Paid Advertising AgencyA division of Influencer Advisory

How much of your ad budget should go behind creators?

Start around 10% of your ad budget, as a test with its own money, then let what a new customer costs move it. Nobody outside your ad account can tell you the right share, and the brands we read are far apart.

What ad buyers say

Ben Heath runs a Meta ads agency. Partnership ads are ads that show a creator's name beside yours.

“If you take say 10% of your budget to produce partnership ads where creators and influencers that are relevant to your target audience are promoting your products and services, is your return on ad spend likely to improve by more than 10% by doing so? Absolutely.”
Ben Heathfounder of a Meta ads agency

his YouTube channel, August 2026

  1. His test is plain: the money only has to lift your return by more than it costs.
  2. On bigger budgets, he keeps most of the spend on ads already known to work, and carves out 10, 20, maybe 30% to test new ones.
  3. Most of what you test will lose. A telehealth brand told us how it goes on a sales call.
“Whitelist a bunch of ads a creator has made, run some spend behind it, usually if you have 10 ads, two of them do well, cut all the others, and then push spend behind them”
A telehealth brand

on a sales call with us, June 2026

What brands run today

We counted each brand's own live Meta ads, and how many had a creator's name on them.

BrandShareWith a creatorOwn ads read
Olipop29.6%827
Liquid I.V.17.5%1057
Celsius0%019
  • We read these on August 9, 2026, off the top of a keyword search in Meta's Ad Library, so it's a sample of each brand's ads and not the whole page.
  • By that day we'd logged 12 paid partnership posts on Instagram for Olipop, 119 for Liquid I.V. and 78 for Celsius, so the brand with the most creator posts isn't the one with the highest share.
  • This counts ads, and it can't show dollars. One ad can spend more than the rest put together.
  • A creator's video can also run from the brand's own page with no name on it, so 0% means none we can see.

Source: Our own count, Meta Ad Library read August 9, 2026, and Instagram's paid partnership labels

A man and a boy in glasses posing in front of a blue backdrop with the Liquid I.V. and Spider-Man logos.
juixxe's paid partnership reel for Liquid I.V., at 2,324,065 views on Instagram. That name wasn't on any of the 10 Liquid I.V. creator ads we read, though it was on one of Olipop's.

Why the share stays low

  1. The creator budget and the ad budget usually have different owners, so nobody is asked to move a video from one to the other.
  2. Ad rights get asked for after a video works. By then the creator knows what it's worth. We ask before the video is made.
  3. New ads never get a fair read when they share a campaign with old winners. See how to read an agency's report.

How to set your own number

  1. Test 5 to 8 creators in a first wave.
  2. Give those ads their own money, apart from what's already working.
  3. Compare what a new customer cost on those ads against the ones you run now.
  4. Scale the 2 to 3 who clear your target, re-brief the rest.
  5. Move more of the budget across only while the cost per customer holds.
See your share next to your competitors

This audit comes from Influencer Advisory, our influencer marketing agency.

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You spend on ads, you pay for influencer marketing separately, and maybe someone else runs TikTok. We run all three together, so creator videos reach your ad account and the budget moves to what brings in customers.

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This audit comes from Influencer Advisory, our influencer marketing agency.