Creative Analytics 101: Data-Driven Insights for Marketers

Creative Analytics 101: What every marketer needs to know

Great marketers are often creative visionaries, coming up with brilliant ideas out of thin air. But successful campaigns need more than just creativity - they rely on data. In fact, companies that leverage data-driven marketing are six times more likely to be profitable year over year. So, to truly master a campaign, marketers need a solid understanding of analytics.

Creative analytics shows you exactly how well your campaigns are performing, removing the guesswork. By blending the art of creativity with the science of data analysis, marketers get a complete picture of their efforts, leading to more informed and successful strategies.

In this guide, we’ll break down the basics of creative analytics and reporting and how it can help you create successful ad campaigns.

What is Creative Analytics?

Creative reporting involves analysing the data behind your campaigns to reveal how your ads, visuals, and messages are performing. It gathers insights from social media metrics, website analytics, and customer feedback to show what truly resonates with your audience.

The goal is simple: figure out what works and use those insights to optimise current and future campaigns. When you know which creatives drive the most engagement and conversions, you can make smarter decisions about where to focus for the best results.

Let’s break it down with an example:

Imagine you’re running a Facebook campaign for a new product launch, testing three different ad formats: image, video, and carousel.

During your creative analysis, you’ll compare each format by examining key metrics like click-through rates and conversions. This helps you identify which format resonated most and delivered the highest ROAS (return on ad spend). From there, you can replicate that success in future campaigns, continuously optimising your creatives for even better results.

Traditionally, marketers have used spreadsheets to record and analyse these results. However, with data-driven marketing software like MagicBrief, marketers can now streamline and automate the creative reporting process, saving time and resources.

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Why Should You Analyse Creatives?

Gain Deeper Insights into Your Audience

Creative reporting allows you to test different versions of the same ad with varying variables. For example, you might discover that ads offering discounts perform much better than those without. This insight shows that your audience is budget-conscious, and ads that emphasise savings will likely be more effective.

The same applies to other aspects of your creative, like visuals, copy, and calls-to-action. The more you understand your audience's preferences, the more successful your campaigns will be.

On top of that, creative reporting lets you see how different groups respond to your ads. Maybe carousel ads grab the attention of younger audiences, while single-image ads resonate more with older consumers. This means both formats can work, but they need to be tailored to the right audience.

Helps to Optimise Budget Allocation

Generally speaking, marketers allocate more funds to their top-performing ads.

Why? Because more budget means more reach, which leads to higher engagement and conversions. By analysing your creatives, you can easily identify the top performers and allocate more budget towards them.

Generally, social media platforms like Meta have automated optimisation tools that prioritise budget towards the top-performing ads. However, it’s far from fool-proof, so you'll want to analyse your creatives first-hand to ensure you're getting the most bang for your buck.

Benchmark Against Competitors

Your ad metrics might look impressive at first glance, but it’s hard to truly gauge success without comparing them to industry standards. Creative reporting allows you to benchmark your ads against competitors, helping you see how well you stack up.

This isn’t about ego (though it can be a confidence boost), but a way to see how your strategy measures up. If you're below the industry average, it might be time to rethink your approach and make adjustments.

Adapt to Trends

Trends can shift quickly, whether it’s popular memes, new ad formats, or platform updates. While UGC (user-generated content) might be the go-to strategy today, something new could easily take its place tomorrow.

To stay ahead, regularly analyse your creative performance. If you’re using trends like influencer marketing or interactive ads, track their impact and be ready to pivot when necessary. Even small tweaks, like adding pop culture references or trending music, can keep your ads fresh and engaging.

Creative elements, such as colour schemes, typography, and messaging tone, are also constantly evolving. Minimalist designs, interactive ads, or UGC-focused campaigns are current trends that can quickly gain traction.

Where to Collect Data to Analyse

With your ad campaign up and running, it’s time to analyse your creative’s performance. Let's go through each platform and their corresponding data points:

Social Media Platforms (Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter)

Most social media platforms, including Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, Pinterest, and Twitter, have built-in analytics tools to track ad performance. These platforms provide data on impressions, clicks, engagement rates, and other relevant metrics.

Some platforms also offer more in-depth insights such as audience demographics, time spent viewing an ad, and even sentiment analysis of comments or reactions.

Google Display Ads

Google Display Ads comes with its own reporting tools, available within the Reports Dashboard of Google Ads. This dashboard provides detailed metrics on ad performance, such as impressions, click-through rates (CTR), conversions, and cost per click (CPC). In addition to these standard metrics, Google Display Ads allows you to track engagement metrics for interactive ads, like video plays or hover-overs.

How to Perform Creative Analytics

Here’s a simple, step-by-step guide to help you optimise your ad creatives using data.

Set Clear Ad Objectives

First, you need to determine what it is you're trying to achieve. If you’re running a brand awareness campaign, you’ll want to track metrics like impressions and reach. For conversions, you'll need to track click-through rates (CTR) and cost per acquisition (CPA).

Learn from Competitors’ Ads to See What Works

Creative analytics shouldn’t be limited to your ads. Before launching an ad campaign, you can also learn a lot from your competitors' ads and incorporate that knowledge into your own strategy. Take note of their preferred visuals, copy, CTAS, and concepts, and see if any patterns emerge.

Tools like MagicBrief simplify this process by giving you access to the world’s largest ad library, with over 10 million ads from 30,000+ brands.

You can sort ads by industry, ad format, or brand, and even track competitors to see which of their creatives are performing well over time. This means you won't have to create new ad ideas from scratch, saving time and resources.

Analyse Your Creative Elements

Once you’ve gathered enough data, start examining which ad formats, messaging, and visual designs performed best.

A great way to do this is by running A/B tests to compare different variations of the same ad. For example, one version might feature a face as the main visual element, while another focuses on a product shot. By testing these subtle yet impactful differences, you can fine-tune your creative strategy and discover what resonates best with your audience.

Learn which Segments of Your Target Audiences Respond Best

Delve deeper into your audience data to see which demographics are converting the most. If you’ve opted for broad targeting, creative analytics and A/B testing can help you pinpoint which segments (age, location, behaviour) are most engaged.

You might discover that the demographic you initially targeted isn’t the most responsive, prompting a shift in your targeting strategy. While not all platforms provide detailed audience analysis, many offer valuable insights into how different segments are reacting. This information is key to creating more effective campaigns moving forward.

Tweak and Optimise

Now it’s time to put what you’ve learned into action:

Double Down on What Works: If certain formats or messages are hitting the mark, focus on optimising those and create similar versions for future campaigns to keep the momentum going.

Expand Your Reach: Take the insights you’ve gathered and apply them to new audiences. By targeting similar profiles to your top-performing segments, you can broaden your reach while still keeping your campaigns effective.

Roll out Ads Based on Your Top Performers

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Now it's time to take your winning ad formula and scale it up. Use the insights from your top-performing ads to roll out more, using the same creative elements. From there, you repeat the process of analysing, tweaking, and optimising to ensure ongoing success.

How to Streamline the Creative Reporting Process

Most media buyers spend about 8 hours a week creating creative reports—that’s a significant chunk of time that could be better spent strategising or optimising ad campaigns.

To lighten that load, consider using automated tools like MagicBrief to quickly generate easy-to-read reports. These tools save you time by delivering reports faster. Once the reports are ready, they’re straightforward and easy to understand, so you won’t have to spend extra time explaining them to your clients or team.

MagicBrief not only tracks a wide range of metrics, such as add-to-cart rates, clicks, Thumbstop, ROAS, and cost-per-click, but also provides always-on performance updates. These updates are delivered through automated Slack summaries, keeping you informed about your ad performance and competitor activity in real-time.

Our AI scoring framework also identifies top-performing ads and provides benchmarks to guide what to optimise and scale. All this can be shared instantly with your team or clients, ensuring they stay up to speed without extra effort on your part.