What 24 hardware brands’ SB video CTR data shows about creative refresh cadence

Sponsored Brands video CTR decays 34% on average by week 9 in hardware. We pulled 13 months of SB video performance from 24 hardware brands, 187 unique creatives, 412 million impressions, and the decay curve is more aggressive than any other category we track.

The takeaway is direct. Brands running 12-week refresh cycles on SB video are losing 2.4x ROAS against brands running 6-week cycles. The numbers below show why.

The decay curve

Week 1-2 CTR (median across 187 creatives): 1.42%. Strong launch performance, driven by novelty and Amazon’s exploration period.

Week 3-4 CTR: 1.31%. A 7-8% decline as Amazon’s algorithm narrows targeting.

Week 5-6 CTR: 1.18%. Down 17% from launch.

Week 7-8 CTR: 1.04%. Down 27%.

Week 9-10 CTR: 0.94%. Down 34%.

Week 11-12 CTR: 0.88%. Down 38%.

Week 13+: 0.81% and continuing to decay slowly. Creative is functionally exhausted.

The CPC story is the inverse. As CTR falls, Amazon raises effective CPC because the relevance score drops. Median CPC week 1-2: $1.18. Median CPC week 11-12: $1.61. That’s a 36% CPC increase on top of a 38% CTR decrease. ACoS roughly doubles by week 12 even when listing-side conversion holds steady.

Conversion rate post-click holds nearly flat across the lifecycle, week 1-2 median CVR was 9.8%, week 11-12 was 9.4%. That’s important. The decay is happening at the impression and click layer, not at the page layer. Refreshing the listing won’t fix it. Only refreshing the creative will.

Why hardware decays faster than other categories

We track the same metric across home goods, beauty, and grocery. Hardware decays 1.6-2.1x faster than those categories. Three reasons.

First, hardware buyers are repeat-impression-resistant. The buyer who saw a cordless drill SB video three times this week and didn’t click is unlikely to click on impression four. Beauty and grocery buyers tolerate higher impression frequency because the purchase intent re-arises naturally. Hardware purchases are project-driven and discrete.

Second, hardware audiences are smaller. The total addressable audience for “18v drill driver kit” is meaningfully smaller than “vitamin C serum.” Same creative, smaller audience pool, faster saturation.

Third, hardware creative is harder to refresh meaningfully. A serum bottle in a new color reads as a new creative. A drill in a new color does not. Hardware creative refresh requires actual change, new use-case framing, new spec callouts, new on-screen demonstration, not just a new background plate.

A fourth reason worth adding: hardware buyers cross-shop more aggressively than buyers in soft goods. Each impression is competing against three to five other tabs the buyer has open. The novelty premium on a fresh creative buys two or three weeks of attention before the buyer’s mental shortlist reforms and tunes out repeat impressions. After that point, the creative is essentially decorative spend.

The 6-week refresh playbook

The brands in our dataset that ran 6-week refresh cycles posted 2.4x the ROAS of the brands running 12-week cycles. The gap was not driven by better creative, average per-creative CTR was statistically similar between the two cohorts. It was driven by avoiding the back half of the decay curve entirely.

Run two creatives in flight at any time, A/B’d. At week 4, start producing the replacement. At week 6, swap the lower performer. The losing creative gets retired before week 7-8 when CTR collapses and CPC inflation accelerates. The winner runs another two weeks while you produce the next replacement. Steady-state cadence: one new creative every 3 weeks per ASIN cluster.

The cost objection is real. Most brands tell us they can’t produce SB video at this cadence. Two responses. First, the production cost of a 30-second SB video should be $400-$1,200 if you’re using a competent editor and existing product photography, not the $4,000-$8,000 most agencies charge. Second, the math: every $500 in production cost replaces approximately $2,800 in wasted ad spend over a 12-week period at typical hardware budgets. The refresh cadence pays for itself by week 7.

The operational lift is smaller than most brands assume. We’ve helped clients build a creative production pipeline that takes a single product video shoot, six hours, one day, and outputs nine usable SB video variants. The variants differ on opening frame, on-screen text, voiceover scripting, and use-case framing. That’s nine creatives off one shoot, which at a 3-week refresh cadence covers 27 weeks of in-flight rotation. Production cost amortized: under $200 per creative.

This is the same pattern we flagged in the Q2 2026 hardware category preview: efficiency in 2026 hardware is won at the operational layer, not the strategy layer. Cadence beats genius.

Creative variants that hold longest

One more finding worth surfacing. Across 187 creatives, the format with the slowest decay was “use-case demonstration”, a creative built around a specific task being completed with the product. Median decay at week 9: -19%. The format with the fastest decay was “feature montage”, a creative cycling through product features on a clean background. Median decay at week 9: -47%.

Brands that index toward use-case demonstration creative get a double benefit. The creative aligns with Cosmo’s intent-aware retrieval (we wrote about that in the multi-tool note), and it decays slower in paid placements. Same dollar of production buys 30-40% more performance.

Three other format observations from the dataset. “Customer testimonial” formats (a real customer demonstrating the product) decayed at -23% by week 9, slower than feature montage but faster than pure use-case demonstration. “Comparison” formats (your product next to a competitor) decayed at -41%, fast, because the comparison frame loses novelty quickly. “Time-lapse build” formats (a project being completed start-to-finish) decayed at -22%, strong performance, but production cost is meaningfully higher and ROI per creative is roughly equivalent to use-case demonstration once production is amortized.

What to stop doing

Three patterns we see brands stuck on that hurt performance. First, “evergreen” creative strategy, running a single creative for 6+ months because it had a strong launch. The data is clear: by month three the creative is destroying ROAS even if topline ACoS looks acceptable on a smoothed average. Second, refreshing visuals without refreshing concept, repainting the same feature montage with new colors does not reset the decay curve because the algorithm and the buyer both recognize the underlying creative. Third, refreshing only the hero ASIN’s creative while leaving secondary ASINs on stale creative, secondary ASINs decay just as fast and often have less budget to absorb the CPC inflation.

If you want a creative-decay audit on your SB video portfolio, week-by-week CTR curves, CPC inflation by creative, refresh-cadence recommendation, Subscribe to the Operator Brief. We send the audit checklist to every new subscriber.