How To Analyze Facebook Ad Creative Performance?

Many creatives gravitate to the planning stage of the creative process. There’s a certain allure that comes with thinking about a winning ad—channeling your inner Don Draper to create something that grabs people’s attention and convinces them to buy.

While the research and opinion stages are important, the ad analysis stage is where the most significant impact can be made. It needs to understand how to analyze the creative data of the ad in it improve your campaigns and improve your creative skills.

This article explains how to analyze Facebook ad creators like a pro. We’ll focus on best practices for setting up creative tests, designing your ads, and KPIs to monitor.

Establish Appropriate Naming Agreements

If you want to track ad creative performance, you need to be able to pull ad data quickly. One of the biggest obstacles to this is poor naming conventions. Without them, you’ll spend hours searching for data instead of using your technology to make decisions.

Without a systematic naming system, identifying and comparing different campaigns is nearly impossible. How can you quickly identify which audience, creative, or message is driving conversions when you’re testing hundreds of campaigns with vague names like “Test 1” or “Campaign ABC”?

Proper naming conventions allow you to direct ad management and easily identify variables responsible for performance changes. This layout provides clarity, enabling your team to collaborate better and spend less time sifting through data.

Tips for Setting Up Composition Agreements

A solid composition structure provides clarity from the start. Here’s a quick rundown of what should go into designing your campaigns, ad sets, and ads:

• Campaign level: Include campaign objective (eg, conversions, traffic), target audience (eg, demographics, interest-based), and date range. This helps you see just what the campaign is intended to achieve.
• Ad Set Level: Define specific targeting information for this ad set. This may include factors such as age, gender, interests, and location (eg, Facebook vs. Instagram).
• Ad Level: Specify the creative elements being tested, such as the type of ad (static, video, carousel), the angle of the messages, and any calls to action. This gives a clear overview of the creative process of the ad.

Measuring these factors will make your data more organized and accessible, which is the first step to realistic ad analysis.

Set the Right Markup in Your Creative Tracking Tool

Proper marking within you ad reporting tool it is important to analyze the performance of the ad, especially if you are using multiple creatives at the same time.

How Marking Works

Tagging allows you to organize each creative asset into specific categories, such as:

• Campaign in brief: What campaign or strategic brief is part of the ad?
• Message Angle/Theme: The core message or theme an ad conveys.
• Hook used: An attention-grabbing feature at the beginning of an ad.
• Creation Type: Whether the ad is a repeat of a previous version or a completely new piece of art.
• Custom tags: Any additional categories relevant to your analysis, such as specific target audiences or platforms.

Significance of Marking

Using tags helps you find performance trends in things you might be checking, like the angle of messages. We also like to use tags to summarize data to see if our output is evolving in a nutshell.

How to Analyze Facebook Ad Performance (Starting High Level)

When analyzing the performance of Facebook ads, it’s important to start with a high-level overview before getting into specifics. This method allows you to see trends and patterns that guide detailed analysis.

Important Areas to Analyze

1. Format: Start by testing the overall performance of different ad formats (eg, video, static, carousel). Identify which formats drive the most engagement and conversions.
2. Recent Updates (CSR): Compare the performance of relevant ads with your latest campaign summaries or CSR (Campaign Strategy Reports). This helps you understand how the latest strategies are affecting your audience.
3. Message angles: Find a reasonable one emotional marketing message angles drive the best performance.
4. Theme/Design: Understand which creative themes or templates work best for your account. Things like Us vs. Them, UGC, etc.
5. Direct A/B testing: When using A/B testing, compare the results to see which variation works best. This may include testing different headlines, calls to action, or images.
6. About the Creator: If you work with multiple creators or influencers, analyze ad performance based on each creator. This helps identify which creators are driving the most value for your campaigns.

How to Analyze the Results of Facebook Ads

Now that we’ve reviewed the high-level performance, it’s time to analyze Facebook ad metrics indicating good or bad performance.

• CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) or CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) This KPI measures the cost of acquiring a new customer. Many KPIs play a role in this, such as your CPC, and website conversion rate.
• CTR (Click Through Rate): The percentage of people (Impressions) who clicked on your ad after seeing it. A high CTR suggests that your ad is compelling and relevant to your audience.
• CPC (Cost Per Click): It measures the average cost per click on your ad. Monitoring CPC helps manage your budget and maximize spend.
• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): It shows the average revenue earned for each dollar you spend on ads. A higher ROAS indicates more profitable campaigns.

Analyzing ad performance is how you will grow and learn as a strategist and channel your inner Don Draper. This guide is the starting point for becoming a professional ad creative analyst.

[Recommended reading: Should You Use Facebook Ads And How To Use Them Correctly?]

[Image credits – Main Photo by Abraham BL; Facebook Ad samples: from Facebook,..duh]

A veteran in the digital marketing space, Colby Flood is the Owner of Brighter Click and DataAlly. He began his career as a Marketing Director in the Non-Profit sector, before moving on to start his own business. Driven by a mission to increase giving, Colby is well known for encouraging businesses to connect with Nonprofits that align with their core values.