How to perform a winning Creative Audit
If you’ve been anywhere EXCEPT under a rock in the advertising industry over the last few months, it seems that creative strategy has been quite the buzzword and job openings for creative strategists are seemingly everywhere. Creative strategy isn’t just a fad, though - it’s the future of advertising.
Where ad platforms are moving more and more towards broad targeting and AI, true ad buying is becoming less important than the ONLY thing the customer ever sees — the creative. We’ve always said, you can’t out-ad buy bad creative. But you can put a true winning creative nearly anywhere in an ad account and it will work.
One of our favorite things at Foxwell Digital about creative is the fact that it’s half science (the nerdy data and analysis) and half art (more holistic, what we think will or won’t work, and what a human sees in a creative that an algorithm or raw data might not). So, as you’re morphing your ad buying skills into being more of a creative analyst, strategist, or consultant, keep reading to understand the questions to ask on a creative audit and the action items to take from that audit to bring your account’s creative to the next level.
If you’re a creative strategist in today’s digital advertising world, you NEED to be in the Foxwell Founders Membership. We even have specific channels dedicated to creative and creative strategy, as well as cohort webinars for live creative review and creative strategist meet-ups. Oh, and you get every course on creative strategy included in the cost.
Questions to ask for a Creative Audit
What are the brand’s overall goals as it relates to digital marketing, Meta ads, organic social, and creative?
What metrics are important to the brand? List them all.
What metric should be the brand’s North Star for determining winners and creative success?
What conversion metric/optimization are the creatives being optimized for in the ad account? Is that the best optimization for the brand’s goals?
Reports to pull and analyze (in Motion or another software):
Top performing creatives by:
Highest ROAS
Highest Spend + Goal or above ROAS
Highest Thumbstop (videos only)
Highest Hold rate (videos only)
Top sale/discount performers (ROAS)
Performance by creative type
Top creators or editors
Landing page analysis
Demographic report - group creators by a demographic and create a comparison chart. For example: Male vs. Female, Gen Z creator vs. Millennial creator vs. Gen X creator vs. Boomer creator
Examples of other comparison charts to run:
Text on screen/subtitles vs. no text on screen/subtitles
Voiceover vs. Creator face to screen
Branded font vs. TikTok/Instagram native fonts
Video length comparison (bucket lengths into groups, so something like: Less than 15 seconds; 15-30 seconds; 30-45 seconds; 45-60 seconds; 1-2 minutes, 2 minutes+)
Lowest performing creatives (duplicate of all top performing creative reports)
WHY do you think each of the winning creatives DID work and why do you think each of the lagging creatives did not work? Give each creative a few bullet point analysis based on the data and your opinion and knowledge of the brand.
(There’s no right or wrong answer here, but it’s finally time to get out of the science and data/metrics a bit and switch to the artsy analysis side of creative strategy)
Creative Diversity: What’s the current breakdown between Videos vs. Images vs. Carousels vs. Catalogs/DPAs/DABAs
Total analysis of video soft metrics to find what the baseline is and set goals for improvement:
Thumbstop
Hold rate
Average watch time
25% video views, 50% video views, 75% video views, 95% video views
Creator/Designer/Editor/Creative agency comparisons
Creator/Designer/Editor/Creative agency cost analysis - profit vs. cost brand paid them (i.e. each one should essentially have their own MER - (amount of budget spent on ads + cost of creator) divided by total revenue from their ads)
Theme comparison (themes will all be very specific to each brand & account)
This likely needs to be done manually unless the ads have a specific naming convention in Ads Manager to separate them by theme
Quick analysis on the ad/creative copy and headlines - list the top and bottom 5 copy options, and top and bottom 5 headlines
Quick analysis on the landing pages ads are directing to (refer back to the comparison chart you already pulled) - why do you think certain landing pages worked better than others when paired with the creatives that they were?
Who is the brand’s target audience(s)? Is that audience being shown on ad creatives? Should ad creatives incorporate different or additional demographics in the future?
What are competitors doing? Are there any creative concepts for direct competitors or other e-commerce brands that resonate with the brand or could be used for net-new ideas?
Review analysis: What are some “golden nugget reviews” left by real customers that mention a word, phrase, or sentence that you couldn’t have said better yourself? Ideally list minimum 10, as many as 100-200 GREAT reviews that you can turn into future creative concepts.
Determine next steps for continual creative progress:
Depending on spend, decide on a set number of creatives needed per month
Iterate on winning creatives monthly
Continue testing new creators
Ensure retainer creators are consistently top performers
Work to improve video view watch time (i.e. Goal 10-12 seconds by end of year, up from 7 seconds previous year)
Improve hooks & thumbstops (22% in previous year, goal to improve to 40-50%)
Once the analysis has been done, the most important next step is making the audit actionable. Without action from learnings, the audit was… dare I say, pointless? Next steps after you’ve analyzed the creative and answered the questions above:
Next Steps & Action Items After a Creative Audit
What are some other themes in creatives that based on the analysis, but more holistically, I think would work for the brand?
After reviewing everything, what are the 3-5 main selling points of the brand/product that we need to highlight or overcome (if an obstacle)?
What type of ad creative format do we want to lean most into? What would be a general format breakdown moving forward? (i.e. 60% video, 30% image/graphic, 10% carousel or DABA)
What are 3-5 iterations needed for the top 5 performing creatives? Ways to iterate usually include 1-2 variables/changes but everything else stays the same. For example:
Change the length of the video somewhat drastically, like 60 seconds to 20-30 seconds
Record the exact same script but with a different creator
Use the same voiceover or storyline but change the footage from face to camera to all B-roll or mixed face to camera or face to camera/green screen and B-roll
Use the exact same raw footage and re-cut the video into an entirely new piece. You could even try using a different video editor for this
If the content is polished/branded, re-edit or reshoot it to be more UGC or lifestyle styled, or vice versa
Use the same footage, but reorder the content to tell a slightly different story
Have another creator tell the same story/concept in their own words and even work in some of the same B-roll as the original ad
Add or change the text on screen/headline overlays, particularly in the hook
Increase the "dramatization" (copy/visuals with more extreme emotional appeals, humor, etc.)
Trim out any video footage (or parts of a static concept) that you think are extra “fluff” and not resonating