This thread has two camps arguing past each other, and I think the disagreement dissolves once you separate what actually holds the learning.
The optimisation signal doesn't live in the ad account. It lives in the pixel/dataset and the Page. That's where conversion history, audience modelling and event data accumulate. The ad account is mostly an administrative and billing container.
Which is why both sides here have half the answer. Spin up a brand new ad account, attach a pixel with two years of conversion data and an established Page, and it will behave a lot like the "aged" account. Take a three-year-old account and point it at a fresh pixel and a new Page, and it behaves like a beginner. So when people observe aged accounts performing better, what they're usually observing is that the aged account happens to be attached to warm assets. Age is a proxy, not the cause.
What account age does genuinely give you, and GrishaV/airtman are right on this:
- Spending limits. These ramp with payment history, and it's a real constraint - you can't scale to $5k/day on day three regardless of how good the campaign is.
- Slightly less friction in review, anecdotally.
But notice both of those are throughput and administrative friction, not performance. An aged account doesn't win cheaper auctions. Your CPM is set by your creative, your audience and who else is bidding - not by your account's birthday.
seotrends is the most correct person in the thread imo: consistency of spend beats age. An account that's spent steadily for six months is worth more than one that's existed for three years and sat idle, because the former has actual signal attached.
Practical takeaway: protect the pixel and the Page. Those are the compounding assets and they're the ones that are painful to replace. Ad accounts are relatively cheap to rebuild around them.
