It's no secret that creative is one of your most potent growth levers in post-iOS-14 paid advertising. But don’t just take our word for it. Google found that creative drives 70% of a campaign's success – that's a significant number, to say the least.
But data and analytics must complement creativity. At Motion, we believe backing those creative hunches with data is the key to achieving powerful ad outcomes while still fostering innovative ideas.
In this guide, we will guide you through the fundamentals of using data insights to drive your creative, the challenges surrounding the practice, and how your marketing team can use creative analytics to ship more winning ads.
Creative analytics is the organized method of gathering and studying the data related to marketing assets and ad creatives. Its purpose is to identify patterns and comprehend customer preferences by evaluating how your audience interacts with your creative.
In the past, brands would typically analyze creative performance using spreadsheets or custom dashboards. Today—you don't need to lose your mind with pivot tables and copy and paste creative links from Facebook Ads Manager. With creative analytics tools like Motion, it's never been easier to analyze your Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube ad performance.
For example, let's say your brand just launched a new paid ad campaign, and you want to know which ad formats (video, static imagery, etc.) are performing best.
To uncover these findings, you run a comparative analysis report that displays the return on ad spend (ROAS) for each ad format in your rotation.
After analyzing the data, you find that video ads have the best ROAS, so you adjust your ad spend toward more video ads and, as a result, your brand sells more products. That's creative analytics in action.
The emerging role of the creative strategist takes on the bulk of this work. By interpreting performance data to guide creative decisions, they bridge the gap between performance teams (media buyers) and design-leaning creatives.
Creative analysis is challenging but worthwhile. Brands that dedicate time to this task will see benefits including:
Creative analysis helps you identify which paid ads resonate with your target audience. By analyzing their interactions with your ads, you can identify their preferences and interests — helping you ship more targeted and personalized campaigns. For example, say you’re targeting Instagram users who liked at least one of your posts and notice they prefer UGC video ads with promo codes over static image ads for legacy products. As a result, you double down on UGC and influencer marketing to drive user engagement and sales.
A fast-moving DTC brand forged in the fire of results would quickly adjust ad spend based on what resonates — embracing a test-and-learn mindset driven by creative data. The marketing team behind Obvi (an 8-figure health and wellness brand) created a culture of creative experimentation by using a creative analytics platform at its core.
Whether your brand is shipping new creative or looking to make minor improvements on existing ads, creative analysis provides the added clarity needed to make data-driven decisions that bolster campaign effectiveness.
Building onto our example from the last section, let’s say your Instagram UGC campaigns were a huge success. Knowing short-form video performs well with your audience, you expand your UGC campaign to TikTok, broadening your reach and bolstering campaign effectiveness.
The more effective your ad creatives are at captivating your audience, the better your ROI and ROAS. While shipping more winning ads is a goal for brands of all sizes, it's especially important for brands with limited marketing budgets.
For example, Motion’s partner Fluency Firm — a full-stack marketing agency — ran a creative split test to help a client determine the impact of displaying its awards on ads. The test found that ads displaying awards had a 30% higher ROAS than those that did not — another insight that would be impossible to uncover without creative analytics.
Can we see if there's an opportunity to talk about A/B testing in a bit more detail in this section? Maybe discuss best practices on how t set up effective A/B tests, as well as expert tips on how to maintain brand consistency while experimenting.
Within Facebook Ads Manager, A/B Testing lets you compare two versions of an ad strategy by changing variables such as ad images, ad text, audience or placement.
Before you select a variable to test, you’ll choose a hypothesis for your test. For example, you might hypothesize that a custom audience strategy will outperform an interest-based audience strategy for your business.
Meta recommends A/B Testing when you’re trying to measure changes to your advertising or quickly compare two strategies.
Digging this data from Ads Manager is an arduous task, though. Especially when you’re running many tests for many different products. This is why skilled creative strategists leverage Motion reports to visually and seamlessly compare how each variant performed next to each other.
Optimizing your creative performance starts with asking yourself the right questions. By assessing the effectiveness of your current creative analytics strategy, you’ll identify any potential shortcomings in your journey to ship more winning ads.
The first stage in creative analytics is gathering your ad data for further analysis. It’s important to ask yourself where you're pulling data from because if your data is spread across multiple platforms or vendors, it can be a trying process to retrieve it.
Typically, brands will pull their ad performance data from the following sources:
Each of these metrics plays a critical role in determining the effectiveness of your creative assets. Without them, your creative reporting process will be based on partial data that doesn’t tell the whole story.
By bringing performance metrics and creative insights together using a platform like Motion, your creative and performance teams can finally see eye-to-eye.
Beyond ROAS, the essential KPIs to track for creative analysis are Thumbstop Ratio, CTR, Video Play Rate, and Click to Purchase Ratio.
These KPIs answer questions like:
Your brand's best advocates are often lurking within positive product reviews on your website, hiding in the comments on Instagram, or within the depths of a Reddit thread.
Find these gems, and use them as social proof in your ads.
Product reviews are an easy way to build trust, win conversions, and turn your customers into an extension of your marketing team.
A simple static image with the review will do. As long as you put the glowing testimonial front and center.
Here’s a great example from Jones Road Beauty.
Product recommendations mean so much to consumers — even when they come from a complete stranger.
Do you compile your data and findings into spreadsheets, leave it in various ad platforms, or use a data analytics platform as your central hub?
Regardless of your brand's size, having your data spread across various platforms, tools, or vendors is a recipe for disaster — as the time spent trying to assemble and analyze that data can quickly eat into your bandwidth for other business objectives.
Speaking of bandwidth, while consistent creative reporting is incredibly valuable, it's also incredibly time-consuming.
The average media buyer spends 8 hours generating and presenting creative reports each week. That number can vary depending on the cleanliness of your data, which creative reporting tools you're using, and the size/scale of your company.
Brands that invest in leading creative analytics platforms will spend significantly less time on creative reporting. Meanwhile, brands that keep their data siloed across different platforms and rely on spreadsheets for reporting will spend considerably more time trying to generate the same insights.
The end goal of all creative reporting efforts is to deliver easy-to-understand and actionable insights to stakeholders. If your findings are locked behind cluttered spreadsheets or pivot tables, it's doubtful your stakeholders are gaining meaningful takeaways — making your creative reporting efforts an exercise in futility.
Fortunately, there are dedicated creative analytics platforms that specialize in delivering highly visual and easy-to-understand reports, but we’ll discuss that in a bit.
While creative analytics is essential in helping your brand ship more winning ads, there are several hurdles to overcome in your path to success. From significant time investments to overcoming cross-team inefficiencies, here are the most common challenges brands face:
Time spent per month on creative reporting can vary widely, ranging from just a few hours to several dozen hours, depending on your workflow and tools.
Why is creative analytics such a time sink? Like any in-depth reporting process, creative analytics requires your team to consolidate your ad data and generate high-impact reports, preferably on a bi-weekly basis.
If your ad data is scattered across many platforms or you rely on formula-heavy spreadsheets for reporting, your creative reporting process will be a significant time investment.
Creative analytics is not a single-team effort. Both your media buyers and creatives play a crucial role in the process. The problem is getting your creatively-minded and analytically-minded teams to see eye-to-eye.
Most creatives will take one look at a cluttered spreadsheet or pivot table and run the other way. Those who stuck around will be staring glassy-eyed at the numbers, struggling to gain any meaningful takeaways.
This underscores the importance of generating visual reports that help all teams understand your findings regardless of data fluency.
Motion presents visually simplified dashboards, enabling even the least data-savvy creative teams to glean actionable insights. By building trust through transparency, advanced advertisers can rely on the data to guide creative direction without guesswork.
When it comes to creative analytics, operational inertia is the silent killer. While platforms like Excel and Google Sheets help store ad data, their ability to uncover actionable insights (like thumb stop ratios or influencer attribution) leaves something to be desired. This is where dedicated creative analytics platforms come into play.
Motion is a creative analytics platform used by ecom and DTC brands like Vuori, True Classic, The Farmer’s Dog, HexClad, and hundreds more. We bridge the gap between media buyers and creative teams with fast, visual reporting for your Meta, TikTok, and YouTube ads.
During the DTC boom, Motion was the first to bet on creative strategy as a discipline, championing the idea that data and creativity should work in tandem to produce high-impact paid ads.
Motion helps brands unlock the growth potential of creative analytics in several ways:
Having helped scale top-tier DTC brands, Motion continues to define the standard for creative analytics by fusing performance data and innovative asset ideation into a single source of truth.
Your most significant growth lever is creative — when harnessed with the right data and strategy.
Creative analytics is invaluable for any brand looking to ship more winning ads and gain a competitive edge in the world of paid marketing. However, knowing the value of creative analytics is only one piece of the puzzle.
If you want to discover how to effectively analyze your creative performance, start your free trial / Book a demo.
Creative analytics measures and analyzes the performance of creative assets (ads, images, videos, etc.) to determine what resonates with audiences and drives engagement, conversions, or other key metrics. It helps optimize creative strategies based on data.
Creative analytics enhances decision-making in marketing strategies by providing data-driven insights into which creative elements perform best, enabling marketers to refine campaigns, target the right audience, and allocate resources effectively for better outcomes.
The most important creative analytics KPIs for measuring how effectively creative assets drive actions and engage audiences are:
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