To get better results track the number of cleans ( usually vendor recommends a 50 time of clean as a life time for a cleaning tape ) save them in a dry place with no sunlight or any electro magnetic fields.
Cleaning tapes are a bit of rough tape that scrape the magnetic tape residue off of the working parts of the drive so if you over use them you will wear out the drive prematurely.
Most modern tape drives will let you know when they need cleaning.
If you use quality tapes and use the drive daily then about once a month should be fine for running the cleaner through it.
Always keep a cleaning tape for each drive / never use a cleaning tape in more than one drive.
Ideally the same applies for data tapes.
If you hope to restore a data tape on a different drive then check / test this works before you need to rely on it because there might be alignment differences between the drives meaning one drive will struggle reading a tape made on a different drive.