Almost 70% of marketers use data to make decisions at all levels. Creative analytics has become crucial in creating more effective ads. However, collecting data for your ad campaigns is just one part of the creative analytics puzzle. In this guide, we’ll explore how brands can analyze their data to identify which creative content captivates their audience, prompting them to pause, visit their website, and ultimately purchase.

Let’s dive deeper.

Why Analyzing Creative Performance is Important

In the past, the creative process relied heavily on intuition and introductory psychology. Marketers had a general sense of what worked, but it took months to see results, and it was challenging to attribute them to a specific ad. Today, analyzing the data related to your ad creative is crucial for understanding your audience and optimizing new and existing ads. Without creative analytics, your ads are unlikely to effectively address your target audience’s needs and preferences. Here are several compelling reasons your team should prioritize analyzing your ad creative’s performance:

To Improve ROAS and ROI

Nielsen research indicates that effective creative content is responsible for 50% of the return on investment in paid advertising. To understand high-quality content, brands must analyze customer engagement with their ads, including thumb stop ratios for video ads and identifying points in the video funnel where users act. This understanding prompts brands to adopt a more data-driven approach in their creative processes.

To Understand Your Audience

By creatively analyzing data, you gain a direct route to understanding which advertisements resonate with your specific audience and which do not. This knowledge eliminates the need for guesswork in your creative marketing strategy, empowering you to deliver more tailored and captivating campaigns with confidence.

For instance, if you’re conducting a video campaign on TikTok and notice that one of your clips has a 5% higher engagement rate than the others, you can analyze the audience to create a new segment of viewers engaged with this particular ad. Subsequently, you can target them with ads featuring similar creative elements, copy, headlines, and so on, thereby increasing the likelihood of them converting in future ads.

To Make Swifter Marketing Decisions

Marketers can no longer depend solely on intuition and guesswork to optimize campaign performance. Analyzing creative performance is crucial for making data-driven decisions and driving incremental value with each ad. By analyzing creative content at the point of engagement, marketers can identify top-performing content and reallocate ad spending to maximize revenue.

Standard Methods to Analyze Creative Performance

In the realm of testing creative performance, several established methods are commonly utilized:

A/B Testing (Split Testing)

A/B testing, while insightful, can be time-consuming and limit your ability to test multiple creative variables. To enhance efficiency, consider leveraging a specialized creative analytics platform like Motion. This can streamline your testing process, making you more productive and effective in your creative endeavors.

Multivariate Testing

Unlike A/B testing, multivariate testing examines multiple creative variables within an ad, offering a comprehensive view of their combined impact. While it provides insights into collective ad performance, the multitude of variables makes it challenging to pinpoint specific resonating elements.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) Analysis

CTR analysis uncovers a creative’s ability to elicit user clicks. While crucial for understanding ad effectiveness, it only focuses on click actions and doesn’t provide comprehensive insight into user behavior post-click. Therefore, it is best utilized as a complementary rather than a primary performance evaluation method.

Engagement Analysis

Engagement metrics like likes, comments, and shares can provide valuable insights into how your audience is interacting with your ads. However, it’s important to remember that these metrics can sometimes be misleading, as they may not always correlate with actual purchase behavior. In the context of engagement analysis, these metrics are often referred to as ‘vanity metrics’ because they can give a false sense of success if not considered alongside conversion data.

Best Practices for Assessing Creative Performance

Although each brand’s method for creative testing may differ, some fundamental steps can simplify the creative reporting process and yield consistently dependable insights.

Improve Accessibility with a Visually Friendly Reporting Format

Media buyers may be able to extract valuable insights from data using spreadsheets, but due to their right-brained nature, creatives often need help interpreting this type of information. Their strength lies in processing visual information rather than raw data. To ensure that all stakeholders can derive valuable insights from creative reporting, it is essential to employ visually intuitive reporting formats.

Organize Your Ads with Reusable Naming Conventions and Tags

To facilitate ad organization and review, apply consistent naming standards to tag ads. This allows for easy reference during the reporting phase. For instance, if you’re currently running a video ad campaign in the summer of 2024, offering a 50% discount to first-time buyers, consider the following tagging options for this campaign:

• Ad format: video
• Promotion type: 50OFF
• Promotion keyword: Summer
• Year: 2024

Implementing descriptive naming and tagging conventions streamlines ad retrieval, aids in identifying successful and underperforming creatives, and establishes a basis for comparative testing.

Consolidate Your Creative Performance Data in One Central Hub

Instead of spending valuable time navigating through multiple ad platforms and dealing with data import/export tasks, it is advisable to centralize your ad data for streamlined access. Leveraging dedicated creative analytics platforms facilitates this endeavor by seamlessly integrating all ad creative data sources from Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms.

Creative Analytics Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated

Detailed analysis of creative performance is essential for gauging campaign effectiveness and improving ad content. Delving deeper into creative analytics involves thoroughly evaluating audience engagement, expansion, and data visualization.