We analyzed the ads the top lead generation companies run. Here is what works.

The sample: 5 advertisers out of 15 lead generation companies, and where their ads land

Brevo has found its ads: 37 of its 60 were still running when we looked, the oldest for 175 days. HubSpot is the other way round. 51 of its 60 ads ran 45 days or more, the oldest ran 858 days, but only 2 were still running. Its ebook ads ran for years, then most of them stopped. Mailchimp had nothing running at all. Most of its 28 long runners came from one pricing campaign, September to December 2025.

Ten of the fifteen companies have no ads here. We did not check eight of them (ZoomInfo, Gong, Unbounce, Outreach, Perspective, Surfe, Popupsmart and Invoca). We checked Salesloft and Close and found no ad we could be sure was theirs. All five companies with ads sell email software, so this post is about how email tools advertise.

Ad analysis: the eight angles lead generation ads use

Almost every message on Meta fits one of eight angles. For each angle, below: the ads that ran longest, and why they keep running. The number in brackets is how many days the ad had been running when we looked.

1. The document

A free guide, template or report. You get it when you give your email. Nothing is for sale on the ad. This is the most common angle here, and it has the oldest ads.

• HubSpot: "Free eBook Download" over "Our Instagram cheat sheet." (858 days, and a second copy at 786 days).
• HubSpot: "Social Media Content Calendar", "Plan and bulk upload your social media posts with this free template." (786 days), and "Free Branding Guide" (786 days).
• HubSpot: "Make your ads count", "50 Facebook ads that really work and what you can learn from them." (362 days), and the State of Data-Driven Advertising ebook (330 days).
• ActiveCampaign: "How To Get 13 Hours Back Each Week", a survey of 1,000 marketers (110 days).
• Lemlist: the ElevenLabs outbound playbook, "How did ElevenLabs grow outbound from 5% to 35% of pipeline in under 6 months?" (15 days in English, 32 days in French).

Why it runs: the guide stays useful for years, so the ad can keep running. The HubSpot ad above ran from September 2023 to January 2026 without a single change.

2. The free plan

The price is zero, and the ad says so: free forever, free for 14 days, or free credits to try.

• Brevo: "No card. No limits. No catch.", "300 emails a day. Unlimited contacts. AI generator. CRM included. All free." (126 days, live).
• Brevo: "Email. CRM. Automation. All free.", "No limited trial. No credit card required." (74 days, live), and "Start for free now" with "Rated 4.5/5 on G2 and Capterra" (102 days).
• ActiveCampaign: "Create your first automation today with our 14-day free trial!" (66 days).
• Lemlist: "Get 100 free leads to test lemlist!" (97 days) and "Get 25 B2B phone numbers for free" (102 days).
• Mailchimp: never on the card, always on the page. All 38 ads of its pricing campaign land on a plan card that reads free for 14 days, no card required.

Why it runs: if you send 200 emails a day, Brevo's ad tells you it will cost you nothing. You know that before you click.

3. The spam folder

Anyone who sends email worries about landing in spam. Two companies put that worry in the headline.

• ActiveCampaign: "Better open rates (even during the 14-day trial)" over "Nearly 1 in 5 emails never reach the inbox" (205 days, the oldest ActiveCampaign ad on file).
• ActiveCampaign: "Emails going to spam? Try ActiveCampaign FREE", with "ActiveCampaign averages 8% better deliverability than any other platform on the market" (191 days).
• Lemlist: "Avoid the spam folder.", "If your open rate is below 50%, it's probably already happening" (102 days, and a French twin at 77 days).

Why it runs: every marketer knows their open rate. Lemlist tells them which number means trouble: below 50%. ActiveCampaign gives a number too: 1 email in 5 never arrives. Both ads land on a page about getting into the inbox.

4. The hours back

Time saved, usually given as a number of hours.

• ActiveCampaign: "How To Get 13 Hours Back Each Week" (110 days), the same claim as a video, "How To Save 13 Hours Each Week" (85 days), then as a money figure, "AI saves them 13 hours per week (and $4,739 monthly)" (29 days), then smaller, "What Would You Do With 5 Extra Hours Each Week?" (20 days).
• Lemlist: "you're wasting hours searching for valid phone numbers, only to call the wrong ones" (102 days).

Why it runs: ActiveCampaign found one number, 13 hours, and kept using it for 110 days. First as a report, then a video, then a dollar amount, then a smaller 5 hours. Anyone who asks where 13 hours comes from can read the report.

5. The busywork

The boring work you do again and again, which the software should do for you.

• ActiveCampaign: "Autonomous marketers break through busywork", which opens "The blank cursor blinks. Your deadline approaches." (81 days).
• ActiveCampaign: "Automate your WhatsApp customer service", "Tired of answering the same WhatsApp questions over and over?" (101 days), and "Built to deliver better outcomes, faster." (72 days).
• Mailchimp: five ads on the automation page (62 days), which opens "You work hard. Now work smarter."
• Lemlist: "Clone your voice now", "Cold LinkedIn messages ignored? Send a voice note that sounds like you. Record once, send automatically at scale." (60 days).

Why it runs: each ad names a job you did by hand this week. Answering the same WhatsApp question again. Sending LinkedIn messages nobody replies to. Mailchimp's page above answers with an email field and a picture of the product.

6. The customer story

Proof from real customers. The best ones name the company and give a number.

• Lemlist: the Spendesk story, "How do you double the outbound meetings your AEs book?" (100 days), and the Pennylane story, a growth lead and a BDR on their move from manual prospecting (89 days).
• Mailchimp: the Gruppo Terroni case study, in Spanish (122 days) and in English (62 days).
• Lemlist: "Explore our Wall of Love" (56 days, live), whose body is a reply to an unhappy customer: "We're sorry, Maxime."
• ActiveCampaign: "Woops! leveraged ActiveCampaign's 950+ app integrations to grow their business, and so can you!" (66 days).

Why it runs: a sales manager knows how many meetings their team books each week. "Double" is easy to picture against that number. The Spendesk story behind the ad shows how.

7. The series

The same offer run in many versions: new headlines, new pictures, new languages.

• HubSpot: one ebook, three headlines, three ads live at once: "Drive High Quality Leads" (198 days), "Find High-Intent Leads" (198 days), "How To: Facebook Ads" (197 days). All three use the same guide and the same page.
• HubSpot: the Instagram kit as a dark book cover (858 days), a cream square (497 days), then a phone mockup (362 days), each on its own page address.
• Mailchimp: 38 ads, one pricing page.
• Brevo: the same free-plan card in English, French and German, each on its own market path, for example "9,000 emails a month for 0 euros" in German.

Why it runs: a new headline or a new cover costs much less than a new guide. HubSpot wrote three headlines for one guide and ran them side by side for 198 days.

8. The code

Only Brevo does this: a creator's discount code on the ad, and a page named after that creator.

• "50% off with MICHELLE50" (105 days and 104 days), landing on a German welcome page for Michelle.
• "Get 50% with MIKE50" (103 days and 99 days), landing on a page called welcome-micah.
• "50% off with FELIX50" (94 days), on a welcome page for Felix.
• Three more for MELODY50 in French (40, 38 and 38 days).

Why it runs: the code tells Brevo which creator sent each new user. And the visitor lands on a page with the name of someone they already follow.

Two more angles are not in the eight, because only one company uses each. The lesson: HubSpot sells a free Academy course, "Learn how to apply a privacy-first approach to your advertising in half an hour" (139 days, plus a Spanish version at 359 days). The guarantee: ActiveCampaign runs nine ads at one page, "Marketing results in 30 days (or a full refund)" (90 days).

Ad analysis: six angles almost nobody in lead generation uses

Out of all 300 ads, these six show up a few times or not at all. The ads that do exist are listed below and linked in the sources.

1. A named competitor. Brevo started it this summer: "Brevo vs Mailchimp, which one suits your business?" (23 days, in French) and "They call 250 contacts free. Brevo: 300 contacts and 9,000 emails a month." (19 days in French, 18 days in German). HubSpot, Mailchimp, Lemlist and ActiveCampaign never name a rival. None of these ads has reached 45 days yet.
2. The switch itself. Two ads, both Brevo, both young: "Start the switch. It's free.", "Your subscriber list doesn't have to stay where it is. Import to Brevo in minutes." (20 days and 7 days). Most people who see these ads already use another email tool. Only two ads out of 300 offer to help them move.
3. The price on the card. No ad says what the product costs per month. The closest is Brevo's German ad, which says zero ("9,000 emails a month for 0 euros"). ActiveCampaign's "$4,739 monthly" is money saved, not a price (29 days). Mailchimp's page shows 17.37 euros a month, but none of its 38 ads do.
4. Interactive proof. No calculator, no quiz, no "see your own number" card in the whole set. The closest is ActiveCampaign's 13 hours, which is an average from a survey of other marketers.
5. The joke. None in 300 ads. In our fintech sweep the longest-running creative was a joke that had run for 386 days.
6. A date. Two ads use the word deadline, but it is the reader's deadline ("Your deadline approaches"), not an offer that ends. The only campaign with a date is Brevo's Black Friday code (28 and 27 days). Everything else has no end date, and HubSpot's ran for years.

Landing page analysis: what happens after the click

Here is where the ads send people:

• On Meta, 1 ad of 257 lands on the homepage. That one is an ActiveCampaign ad that ran 66 days. Everything else goes to a page made for one offer.
• Google is empty for this set. Nothing on file for the companies we swept, so every number in this post is Meta.
• So the pages worth studying are all from social ads. We sort them into four tiers, from the homepage up to a page with a country or a person's name in the address. Every page below is linked, so open them.

Tier 1: the ad points at a page that already existed

• Four HubSpot ads, the longest at 308 days, land on this toolkit page. It was already on the site before the ads started.
• The cheapest tier, and the most common here: 158 of the 257 ads.
• It works when the page is about exactly what the ad offers. It fails when the ad sells one feature and the page is about the whole product, like Mailchimp's pricing page in the second teardown below.

Tier 2: the ad points at a page built for the ad

• Seven Brevo ads, the longest at 173 days and still running, land on brevo.com/landing/email-marketing-service-us. The word landing is in the address. You cannot reach that page from Brevo's navigation.
• Two more land on a page about a competitor's price increase, made because a competitor raised its prices.
• Nine ads of 257. Any company in the table could build a page like this. So far only Brevo has.

Tier 3: the ad points at a per-market or per-person page

• Brevo has ad pages for the US, France and Germany, and a welcome page for each creator. Sixteen of its twenty pages have a country in the address.
• Mailchimp sends Spanish ads to a Spanish pricing page. The English page changes language on its own: when we opened it from France, it came back in French, with prices in euros.
• Lemlist has a French folder just for ad pages, lemlist.com/fr/ads. Seven ads point at one page in it.

How many paid pages each company runs

• Ad counts don't tell these companies apart, because the library shows about 60 ads per brand per country at most. Page counts do: from 10 for Mailchimp to 20 for Brevo. And 16 of Brevo's 20 pages are for one country, against 1 of HubSpot's 16.
• No company here hides its pages behind a tracking link, so anyone can count them. In the fintech study SoFi did, and we could not count its pages at all.
• We only counted pages on the company's own site. Lemlist sends 11 ads to no page at all: its "Chat With Us" video ads open a chat instead. HubSpot sends 21 to YouTube and other sites.

Try it on yourself. Open your own Ad Library entry, click the ad, look at where it lands. The homepage puts you on tier 0. A country code or a campaign name in the address puts you on tier 3. Most teams are on tier 1, with one page for every ad.

Teardown 1: HubSpot

Two campaigns taken apart the way we take apart a page in a client audit: the ads, then the page they land on, then the gaps. HubSpot, because its ebook campaign is the oldest one here. Mailchimp, because 38 ads point at one page, and the ad and the page say different things.

The campaign. One offer, the Instagram for Business Kit, advertised non-stop from September 2023 to January 2026. Five ads point at the current page, the longest for 497 days. Two older ads point at the old address, one for 858 days and one for 786. Every ad has the same text and a different picture of the same book.

The ads

Read the ad from the top. The text is four words: "Our Instagram cheat sheet." The image is the cover of the free book, and its subtitle keeps it looking new ("Now with Stories and Videos"). The headline is "Free eBook Download". The description lists four results ("get followers, build your audience, set goals, and measure success"). The button says Learn more. HubSpot's product is not on the ad at all.

The second ad is the same offer with a new cover, running 497 days on the newer page. A third version puts the cover inside a phone (362 days) and changes only the headline, to "Download for free".

The landing page

The hero. A badge that repeats the ad's first words ("Free Ebook and Templates"). A headline that is the offer's name ("Free Instagram for Business Kit"). A subhead that repeats the ad's description and adds one promise ("navigate algorithm updates"). One orange button, "Download for free". The book from the ad shows up again on the right, three times bigger. The partner's name, Agorapulse, appears here but not on the ad.

The contents. Six lines. The first line is a number: "22 free Instagram post and story templates". The third names a person: "a featured chapter from Instagram expert Jenn Herman". Before you give your email for an ebook, you want to know how much is in it.

The proof. A slider that shows the inside of the book, from the table of contents up to page 39. It's the best part of the page, because you see inside the book before you give your email.

The closer. A short block, a photo and the same button as the hero. Then a footer with five legal links. The page has no menu, no product links and no second offer.

Message match

The gaps

Two gaps, both fixable in a week. There is no form field anywhere on the page. You have to click a button first, so someone who clicked an ad for an ebook has to click again before they can type their email. Mailchimp's automation page puts the email field right at the top. And the page has no proof of its own: no download count, no review, no logo except Agorapulse's, for an offer advertised since 2023.

The competitive audit does the same reading on your own pages and finds gaps like these.

Teardown 2: Mailchimp

The campaign. 38 ads pointing at one page, mailchimp.com/pricing/marketing. The longest ran 75 days, from September to December 2025, on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads. They are all dynamic ads: Meta builds a different version for each person, so the text we get back is only a template. What stays the same is the offer and the page, and you can read the offer on the image.

The ad

The text promises one feature and one result: "Turn more visitors into leads with Mailchimp's targeted popup forms. Sign up today and start growing your audience." The image shows three popups from real stores with the line "Create branded popups effortlessly with 100+ customisable templates". The link headline is "Your Brand, Your Popups" and the button says Sign Up. It is a good ad: it sells one feature and shows it.

The landing page

The hero. The top of the page is a price card. The headline offers the Standard plan for free. The paragraph makes the page's biggest claim ("a return up to 27 times higher"), with a footnote. Six ticks list what the plan includes. On the right: a menu to pick how many contacts you have (set to 0 to 500), "Free for 14 days", the price after that (17.37 euros a month), one yellow button, and a black strip saying "No risk, no credit card required". The popups from the ad show up once, as the fifth tick, under a different name.

The feature grid. Three plans across, twenty rows down, in four groups. Popup forms are one ticked row in the last group. As a pricing page, it is good. The middle plan is marked as the best deal. The cheapest plan shows what it is missing with a cross, not a blank. And the first-year price sits next to the price you pay after.

The proof. One dark band, four badges, one line of text: "Work with a trusted industry leader". TrustRadius Top Rated 2024, Buyer's Choice 2025, and two G2 Fall 2025 Leader badges, one for mid-market and one for small business. No customer is named and nothing is quoted.

The footnotes. Eighteen numbered notes at the bottom of the page, each one linked to a number above it: how "up to 27 times the return" was measured, over which months, on which plans. Copy this: a buyer who doubts the 27x claim can check it.

Message match

The gaps

There are two. The ad sells popup forms. The page sells plans, and the visitor has to dig 14 rows down a table to find the feature they clicked for. Mailchimp already knows how to do better: its automation tools page, which gets only five ads, answers its ads right at the top with a headline about revenue, an email field and four numbers. The second gap: before the page says what the product does, it asks how many contacts you have, and the price changes when you answer. That order suits someone who searched for a price. This visitor clicked an ad about popups.

Key takeaways: five things to do with this

1. Give something away before you sell anything. Free guides have the oldest ads here by far: 858 days for HubSpot's Instagram ebook, 330 for its advertising report, 110 for ActiveCampaign's survey. The Instagram kit ads never mention HubSpot's product.
2. Build a page for the offer, and put the email field on it. Of 257 social ads, one lands on a homepage. HubSpot's kit page sells one thing and has no menu. Mailchimp's automation page goes further and puts the email field right at the top.
3. Show what is inside. HubSpot's page has a slider through the ebook's own pages, from the table of contents on. The reader sees 39 pages before giving an email for it.
4. Write three headlines for one guide. One HubSpot ebook carried "Drive High Quality Leads", "Find High-Intent Leads" and "How To: Facebook Ads" at the same time, all near 198 days.
5. Take one of the six open angles. A named competitor, the switch, the price, a calculator, a joke, a date. Brevo started two of them this summer, with ads less than a month old, and no one else runs them yet.

How to run this analysis on your own competitors

The Meta Ad Library and the Google Ads Transparency Center are public and free. Search the brand's page, not a keyword, set the country, filter to active ads, sort by start date. Then:

1. Group the ads by angle. Use the eight above.
2. Keep the ones that have run 45 days or more. The advertiser keeps paying for them. Click through and read the page each one lands on.
3. Write down the angles they are not running. Start your next campaign from that list.

Or send us the URL and we do it for you.

How we did the analysis

• Sample: the lead generation companies on the benchmark leaderboard, picked by traffic, not by whether they advertise. We picked fifteen. We did not check ZoomInfo, Gong, Unbounce, Outreach, Perspective, Surfe, Popupsmart and Invoca this time, so we don't count them as having no ads. We checked Salesloft and Close and found no ad we could be sure was theirs. That leaves five advertisers: HubSpot, Brevo, Lemlist, Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign.
• Sources: the Meta Ad Library, searched by brand page, through Apify, in the US and France, on September 1, 2026. The Google Ads Transparency Center returned nothing on file for this set, so every number here is Meta.
• Filter: only ads we could tie to the brand. An ad counts when the Facebook page name matches the brand and the ad links to the brand's own site. Of the 420 ads we collected, 300 passed and 189 could be read in English.
• Ranking: days running. We care about ads that ran 45 days or more, long enough to survive at least one budget review. 173 of the 300 did.
• Reading: we read every different message by hand and put it in one angle. Dynamic ads only give back a template, so we read those from the image and the page they link to. Ads whose image we could not open are counted, but never quoted.
• Limits: the library shows about 60 ads per brand per country at most, so each company may run more than we counted. Look at the shares, not the totals. All five advertisers hit exactly 60, so all five hit the limit. Meta shows reach only in the EU, and never shows spend.

Every ad above links to its primary source in the sources list, so you can check every claim yourself.

Sources

Primary sources, all public and checkable today. Open any Meta ad with its Library ID at facebook.com/ads/library/?id=ID.

1. HubSpot's Instagram kit ads: 283661904436831 (858 days), 208210878976874 (786 days), 1152525792662625 and 1421677228514169 and 2599574267060401 and 426365847026168 (497 days), 859303066090871 (362 days).
2. HubSpot's other documents: 1502181780568359 (the content calendar), 650096470635039 (the branding guide), 1973044899828492 (50 Facebook ads), 932622308732486 and 918764023468628 (the data-driven advertising report), 572990701946664 (the first-party data toolkit), 1473044650497136 and 561209663439983 and 690910043750533 (one guide, three headlines).
3. HubSpot's Academy lesson: 1212896413092026 (139 days), its dynamic twin 1207231547442028, and the Spanish version 1247203666320233 (359 days).
4. Mailchimp's pricing campaign: 4164724470460240 (75 days, the popup ad shown above), plus 1247660447387357, 1803084490355689 and 1192093366320222. The automation ads: 1666062187704490. The case study ads: 796129266168042 and 1210048007685452.
5. Brevo: 1709278550496055 (no card, no limits, no catch), 831598139773164 and 3251602371668595 (start for free now), 1031368339341506 (the free carousel), 1261422091988662 (the oldest live dynamic ad), 3390917704416660 (175 days, French). The creator codes: 910565308275545, 3909553332508941, 1473394034453603. The open angles: 806808485655917 (Brevo vs Mailchimp), 3457862921055151 (the free-tier comparison), 1380413410632166 and 1061683876198476 (start the switch), 2365955600888444 (9,000 emails for 0 euros), 831049752708571 (Black Friday).
6. ActiveCampaign: 660635426643493 (205 days, deliverability), 663206159432672 (191 days), 815535561079864 (the 13-hours report), 1555819912125801 (the video), 879918038224602 (13 hours and $4,739), 2457724331289046 (5 extra hours), 1379620620180035 (WhatsApp), 25432555736418549 (busywork), 711302028163914 (better outcomes), 34070683972575760 and 4356022028016113 (the money-back guarantee), 2250455508792395 (the one homepage ad).
7. Lemlist: 722897777163487 and 820952310459207 (the spam folder), 1425610525139456 (25 phone numbers), 1869315233859412 (100 free leads), 673197435839901 (voice clone), 1927196081500306 (Spendesk), 904000962504083 (Pennylane), 1022751963638224 (the wall of love), 1728286208202950 and 1049519111167013 (the ElevenLabs playbook).
8. The landing pages, live: offers.hubspot.com/instagram-for-business-cr012, offers.hubspot.com/first-party-data-resources, mailchimp.com/pricing/marketing, mailchimp.com/solutions/marketing-automation-tools, brevo.com/landing/email-marketing-service-us, activecampaign.com/platform/deliverability, lemlist.com/lemwarm.
9. The sample: the lead generation leaderboard of the Web Anatomy benchmark, selected by traffic. The sibling post for the same method in another market: the fintech ads playbook.
10. Ad sweep made September 1, 2026 (Meta by brand page, US and France); the landing page and ad card captures made the same week.

Data collected September 2026. Ad statuses and run lengths change; the library links above always show the current state.

Written by

Gabriel Amzallag , Founder, Web Anatomy

5 years CRO + SEO at Qonto (2021–2025). After advising 15+ SaaS on their websites (Payfit, Pigment…), the same patterns kept breaking, so I decided to build the source of truth on what works on the web: the intelligence layer every tool, builder, and team uses to ship sites that perform.

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