What is Creative Analytics? Why should growth marketers care?

It seems every element of growth marketing is changing. From privacy and measurement to new and emerging channels, growth marketers face an ongoing sea change in advertising systems, software, and techniques.

Performance creative is no different, and ‘creative analytics’ seems to be the latest buzzy term gathering traction in the mobile industry. This should come as no surprise, however.

Why? ROAS continues to be scrutinized, competition for consumer attention and engagement is increasingly under pressure, and cross-channel tracking and measurement are complex. All of this complexity requires skilled people and partners to gain meaningful, actionable insights. Therefore, any performance improvement is important, and creative analytics offers marketers opportunities to improve KPIs at a scale and granularity that was not possible previously.

Advertising creative has always been a delicate mix of art and science. After all, ad creatives must engage target audiences within milliseconds. 

Understanding how and why specific ad creatives succeed is central to delivering more effective content and maximizing your campaign ROAS— the ultimate goal of all growth advertisers. However, the systematic analysis of creative performance has historically consumed a lot of time and resources. It can sometimes result in limited insights or clear actions that can drive a tangible difference in campaign outcomes. 

Enter ‘Creative IQ,’ a new creative analytics tool from M&C Saatchi Performance. Our solution leverages computer vision and AI to isolate and analyze the key drivers of your creative performance, providing growth-driving insights, such as:

• What CTA yields the best performance?
• What format leads to the best performance?
• Which logo position leads to the best performance?
• How frequently should I rotate creatives to limit fatigue and maximize ROAS?

And much, much more

Ultimately, Creative IQ helps brands maximize their creative performance, leading to improved engagement and higher ROAS.

What is Creative Analytics?

Creative analytics is the ability to systematically analyze all elements within ad creatives that impact the performance of advertising campaigns. This includes everything from the overall creative design and user experience to specific element performance, such as ad copy CTAs, images, and logo placement. 

Working with a creative analytics solution aims to scientifically and systematically dissect and understand the performance of every creative component and how it contributes to overall campaign KPIs. 

For growth marketers, this is where art meets science. Deeper creative analysis doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice creativity or emotion. Instead, it intends to identify which elements resonate with your audience and lead to improved campaign outcomes such as CTR, CPI, etc. 

Creative analytics lets you understand the secret recipe to successful creatives specific to your brand, product, and the channels you use to deliver your message.  

Thanks to Creative IQ, growth marketers can explore the elements of creative that influence performance in one easy-to-use dashboard. This should be the cornerstone of your creative testing framework, enabling continuous innovation and optimization. The competition for attention is greater than ever, and even the smallest margins of improvement can lead to significant gains in your bottom line.

Creative analytics has only recently become possible at scale thanks to enhancements of advanced analytics tools (thank you, AI!), and it would have been nearly impossible for a human alone to pull insights from these vast datasets. However, it is important to remember that people are still an important piece of the puzzle when using a solution such as Creative IQ. Both to interpret and – act on – the insights the solution provides.

Common pain points creative analytics can help overcome

1. Ad Fatigue:

People are bombarded with a constant barrage of content every second. To gain attention in the first place, the creative has to stand out, and the more it is seen, the less impact it may have, leading to a reduced ROAS. Creative analytics enables marketers to identify signs of fatigue before ROAS dips, enabling brands to identify their optimal creative refresh frequency and maximize creative effectiveness. 

2. Audience Inattention:

Creative IQ allows you to dive deep into specific audience segments to understand which creative elements lead to higher engagement and performance.  These learnings enable marketers to develop content that is likely to resonate in the first instance rather than going through multiple iterations right from the start. The stronger the connection, the stronger the relationship with the brand, and the more likely KPIs will be achieved.

3. Data overload:

Even a ‘small’ campaign with a handful of channels, formats,  audiences, and multiple campaign creatives will generate a large volume of data. Analyzing and interpreting this can be challenging and time-consuming without the right tools. Creative analytics solutions automate the boring stuff, ensuring you can focus on implementing the insights your data is suggesting. 

4. Consistency and branding:

Ensuring creative remains on brand and is consistent is a necessary but thankless task. Creative analytics can streamline this with automatic brand consistency checks and reports.

5. Performance Benchmarking

Creative analytics helps brands establish performance benchmarks at the click of a button. These are essential for growth marketers to assess, understand, and improve marketing performance and ROAS. 

The importance of creative analytics to growth marketers

1. Data-driven Decision-Making:

Data is at the core of everything we do as a performance and growth marketing agency. Creative analytics ensures growth marketers can make data-backed decisions instead of relying on gut instinct alone and forms the backbone of your creative testing framework.

2. Optimization:

Creative analytics helps teams identify opportunities for optimization. By identifying the individual elements of your creative,  marketers can test the impact of tweaking creative elements, such as moving a logo or updating a CTA. The outcome of these tests can then be monitored with limited delay, and if the outcome delivers a lower impact than expected, the change can be reversed quickly.

3. Personalization:

Granular audience segmentation requires a personalized approach to creative. Testing what creative resonates with audiences can improve performance, and lessons can be incorporated into new campaigns without wasting time or budget. 

4. Improved ROAS:

It is no surprise that better ad creative leads to a better ROAS. By leveraging creative analytics, you can ensure your creative is optimized to deliver impact. 

In Summary

Creative analytics gives brands a granular understanding of what’s working and what’s not across all their creative assets and channels. By making small, consistent improvements to your creative, brands will see an improvement in the impact of their media and, ultimately, an increase in ROAS.

Do you have any questions about Creative IQ or want to hear how we can help your brand grow?