If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many numbers is it worth? Humans are visual by nature. It's why we use charts and graphs to communicate complex metrics. Since so much of advertising is visual, it's important to take your actual ad creative into account when analyzing your ad strategy. An analytics report featuring beautifully rendered colored graphs is certainly helpful in making data more understandable, but that’s not the only visual aspect account managers and clients are interested in. When you’re sorting through CTRs, CPCs, and CPMs, you also want to know what ads those numbers correspond to. Was that the campaign that featured the cute dog, or was it the one that showed the product in action? To combat the guessing game, ad managers often spend hours screen-shotting, downloading, and organizing ad images into a spreadsheet.

You can save a lot of time by automating the process using AdStage’s Ad Creative widget in the Report product . It helps ad managers bring campaign results to life with automated creative analysis. Businesses can quickly run a report and get data and visual ad references side by side. Imagine the hours saved! Current AdStage customers love the Ad Creative widget so much, it’s the third most-used widget.

By evaluating actual ad visuals just as they appear to your audience in the native network, along with selected ad-level metrics, you can evaluate business priorities like brand with pure conversion metrics. Most marketers tasked with managing advertising do want to know which ads drive the best conversions. The AdStage platform allows you to choose specific ads to display or leverage Report product to determine the best ads based on specific criteria like “Top 2 ads based on Conversion Rate.”

Now let’s take a look at how analyzing ad creative alongside ad metrics can help you optimize campaign performance and get clients to better understand results.

Benefits of side-by-side ad creative & metrics

A lot of effort can go into creating effective visual ads. And it's not always clear what will resonate with your audience. Highlight the creativity, relevancy, and attractiveness of the ads while demonstrating each ad’s contribution to overall conversion goals can help you develop a strong ad strategy. Tools like the Ad Creative widget by AdStage make it easy and fast to share results with clients, executives, or team members. And again, all without the hassle of hours of screenshotting and downloading.

Show what converts

Instead of telling clients or stakeholders that ads with a yellow background convert most often, you can show them. With side-by-side creative and metrics, you can actually display your top-performing ads to show the copy and imagery that resulted in the most conversions. In the image below, you have two super cute dog friend pics. You might prefer the picture of Pete in the red beret for your Pinterest ad , but the numbers might tell a different story.

Analyze campaigns

When you’re adjusting budgets on-the-go, you want to be able to pull reports as quickly as possible. It takes time to locate, copy and paste creative, and if you pull a report with just the metrics, you only have half the story. Side-by-side creative and metrics let you review and analyze every aspect of the campaign so you can pinpoint high and low performing ads to make quick decisions about budget allocation.

Spot trends

It’s easy to spot trends in numbers, but it’s much more difficult to see how the makeup of an ad is affecting those numbers unless you have both in front of you. Quickly spot patterns like the placement of the CTA button, text in images, or background colors that may be contributing to a campaign’s performance.

Show value to clients

A well-organized, complete report can be the difference between a client trusting you know what you're doing and assuming you’re making it up as you go. A report that shows clients the full story not only demonstrates your professionalism, but it helps you explain campaign performance since you have everything you need right in front of you, and neatly organized into an impressive layout.

Get your whole team involved

Sure, your designers and copywriters care about how the final ad turns out but getting to see their work next to performance metrics provides a new level of feedback and inspiration for future ads. Pitting the ads up against results metrics helps take the subjectivity away from the creative and give everyone involved a better idea of what to strive for next time.

Try including ad creative into a report yourself!

If you want to see what an automated report containing ad creative can look like, you can try it out on AdStage. Its easy to include the Ad Creative widget to your dashboard with the following steps. If you’re not already using AdStage to analyze your paid media campaigns, join sign-up for a free trial . Read more about AdStage Report and ho w it can help you measure performance faster with frequently updated data from Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Yahoo Gemini, Google Analytics, Salesforce, and HubSpot.

Easy steps to start using Ad Creative

1. Log in to your AdStage account (or sign-up for a Free Trial)
2. Click the Ad Creative widget on the Side pane to open the edit widget menu
3. Title your widget
4. Select the entities you want to include
1. Choose a level of granularity from the “Select Ads From the Following” dropdown
2. Choose the specific networks, accounts, campaigns, etc. from which you want to view ads. Note: You can display up to 6 ads per widget.
5. Choose the KPI(s) you want to include from the "Fields" section
6. Select a date range
7. Customize your data view with the following additional options below the date range selector:
1. Sort by a certain metric
2. Count: increase or decrease the number of ads in your table (up to 6)
3. Order your data
4. Filter by status (active, all, etc.)
5. Select a display style (visuals only, metrics, ad name, etc.)
6. Customize the width of your widget
8. Add filters on the next tab as needed

Now, instead of spending time screenshotting dozens of ads and manually placing them in reports, you can do it all automatically with the Ad Creative widget.