Facebook Ads Manager helps you launch campaigns and track spend, but deeper analysis requires exporting data to spreadsheets. Motion pulls your data from Meta into easily understood visual reports so you can learn what’s driving performance in minutes. Motion’s AI features automatically find patterns in your ads and help with deeper analysis.
Facebook Ads Manager requires spending hours exporting data, building pivot tables, and manually connecting performance metrics to creative assets just to answer basic questions like "Which video hook converts best?" or "What's our top performer across all campaigns?"
Motion saves hours of weekly work with accessible creative analytics that unify your performance data, surface visual insights instantly, and use AI to explain exactly why ads succeed or fail.
Facebook Ads Manager excels at campaign management; setting up ads, managing budgets, and tracking basic metrics like spend and clicks.
To really understand creative performance, you need deeper analysis:
Ads Manager wasn't built for this. It siloes data by campaign and ad set, with no way to see holistic creative performance. When you're comparing hundreds of ads, the interface drowns you in data tables without visual context.
The result: difficulty identifying what's working, confusion about where to optimize next, and hours of manual work to answer creative strategy questions.
Facebook's fragmented view
Run the same video in five campaigns, and Ads Manager splits its performance across all five line items. Each shows a fraction of that creative's true impact.
To see the complete picture, you have to export CSVs from each campaign, merge them in spreadsheets, and build pivot tables. This can take hours each week, and leaves a lot of room for human error.
Motion's unified creative view
Motion recognizes identical assets across campaigns and ad sets, then groups them into one consolidated performance view.
This way you see how your actual creative performed, separate from campaign and ad set variables that can distort the impact of creative. And when you build a report in Motion it updates automatically, pulling your ad data straight from Meta.
Build a report once and you can use it for months.
The manual grind
Okay, so now you’ve got your spreadsheet built out from Ads Manager. Does your team know your ad names?
If you tell your boss that “ugc_creator3_FOMO_vid_product-name_5” is the top performing ad this week, will they know the asset you’re referring to?
Of course not, so you have to copy/paste over thumbnails. But what if different ads share the same thumbnail? What if someone wants to watch the ad?
Motion's visual-first reporting
Motion displays creative assets directly alongside performance metrics. Images, videos, and data live in the same view and you can expand and watch any asset inside a report.
Motion’s reports themselves are highly visual too, making your performance data easy for anyone to understand. With all your assets and data in one place, creative teams get direct access to performance data in a format they understand.
"Motion was the missing link in helping our media buyers and creative see eye-to-eye on ad performance," says Cody Plofker, Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer at Jones Road Beauty. "The platform has been crucial in our creative reporting workflow since day one."
Facebook's rigid naming system
Ads Manager offers one organizational tool: naming conventions. You name campaigns, ad sets, and ads according to your system. If you want to compare different creative elements, you have to set up precise naming conventions.
Want to compare all UGC ads against studio content? Export and filter manually. Curious whether testimonial hooks outperform problem-solution hooks? More spreadsheet work.
If you realize you want to analyze a new variable, you have to update all your ad names to track it. It’s not impossible, it’s just a lot of manual work.
Motion's flexible tagging
If you have naming conventions dialed in, you can use them to analyze your ads in Motion too. But if you don’t have strong naming conventions, you have more options available.
You can manually tag ads with your own labels and build reports that sort by those labels, letting you track just about anything you can imagine. In larger accounts though, manual tagging is still quite time-consuming.
Motion's AI Tagging automatically scans all your ads and tags them on eight different creative elements; format, hook type, messaging angle, etc.
These tags power comparative reports that answer strategic questions:
This builds a library of creative learnings that compounds over time. Stop guessing what to test next and start making decisions based on proven patterns.
Facebook's surface-level metrics
Ads Manager reports ROAS, CPA, CTR, and conversions. In other words, how your ads performed. This ad converted at 2.5%. That ad cost $45 per acquisition.
It doesn't explain why. Was it the hook? The offer? The visual style? Or was it just a change in campaign settings? You know performance changed, but not what to replicate next time.
Motion's creative-level analysis
Because Motion isolates different creative elements, you can see which pieces of an ad are working. Grouping the same ads together also reduces the influence of campaign settings.
Motion allows for deeper analysis at the creative level than other platforms. It’s important to know how your ads are performing, but even more important to know why. Motion helps you find those answers.
Motion's subtle AI features can also surface patterns for you, turning analysis into action and helping you iterate faster.
Facebook Ads Manager excels at campaign management but falls short for creative analysis. Motion fills that gap with the creative intelligence teams need to make fast, confident decisions.
Fast-growing brands rely on Motion to ship more winning creative.
Book a demo to see the difference firsthand.
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