Boosting Campaign ROI with AI-Powered Creative Analytics
No matter what marketing department you’re in, you’re probably haunted by the goal of improving your ROI.
You’re doing everything you can – from optimizing copywriting to sharpening call to action and targeting – to make your campaigns perform.
But no matter how often you change the campaign, the results have stagnated, and you’re struggling to boost engagement.
Before you change the marketing copy again or adjust your bid and budgets as part of media optimization, have you ever wondered if the different elements in a creative are impacting your success?
According to a Nielsen study, creativity is the primary driver for generating ROI across all media platforms – especially digital video. It is the key contributor for success in digital campaigns, accounting for 89%.
While marketers are able to analyze campaign creatives on a higher level, most are actually missing out on the insights that stem from an element-level analysis. And that’s where AI comes in to supercharge the level of analysis on your creatives.
What is AI-powered creative analytics?
Creative analytics is the systematic process of collecting and analyzing data related to the creatives you use for marketing and advertising.
In contrast to traditional creative analytics, AI-powered creative analytics now focuses on qualitative aspects. It breaks down your creative into various elements and analyzes each one of them in detail to identify what triggers a positive or negative response from your audience – – everything from the colors used to the font type, size, images included, and other graphical elements, breaking down what’s working and what’s not.
How can AI-powered creative analytics boost campaign ROI?
When you have complete control over changing creatives any time you want, why use AI for creative analytics? We’ll give you several reasons:
1. Access untapped audience insights
AI powered creative analytics goes beyond campaign reach, impressions, and clicks. It delves into your audience’s innermost triggers – visual preferences and interests.
Do they tend to click on the ad when the call-to-action button is green? Do they engage more when they see illustrations or real people? What kind of people do they want to see?
It gives you a breakdown of how each element in your creative impacts your target audience’s response to your campaign.
Various studies, including one by ResearchGate, have found that information is processed faster when presented through visuals. So, if a picture is worth a thousand words, you want to ensure that you get the picture right!
2. Make A/B testing more efficient
Think about the number of times you moved back and forth with the design team to get a creative right for your campaign. You would run an ad for about a week, come back with inputs and request changes to A/B test what works, and the cycle goes on and on until the campaign succeeds.
Now think about the amount of time it takes to get to the point of success. This is where AI-powered creative analytics makes all the difference.
A solution like Alison.Ai breaks down your creative analysis on an element level, such as background, colors, CTA, visuals, and other aspects, giving you clarity on what it is that will help you move the needle in ONE go! So you get to eliminate wasted money on A/B testing.
3. Encourage creative imagination
Creative analytics is not about bogging you down with more data. Instead, it gives your imagination more direction as you explore new ideas for your creatives. And, on bad days, the insights provided by AI also act as a prompt to overcome creative burn!
We all know the more creative you get, the higher the engagement on your campaigns. Be it Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or other channels, that’s one common factor across all platforms.
4. Provide a competitive edge
An average internet user is exposed to almost 10,000 ads per day. Unless your creative stands out by instantly ‘speaking’ to them, you stand no chance for a good brand recall. Creative analytics is like an extra layer of data on the numbers already available, giving you a competitive edge.
While there are several creative intelligence tools on the market, only Alison allows you to benchmark your creatives on an element level with those of your competitors. This helps you pick up on the smallest of patterns, like sound, color, characters, character type, call-to-action text and color, and more, that could be driving better results for them. It’s like a competitive intelligence tool on steroids!
5. Increase ROI and ROAS
The benefits above are enough to say that creative analytics helps you increase the ROI and ROAS on campaigns. The insights bring you closer to what your target audience responds to the most, leading to campaigns that are more personalized to their preferences, and getting you better engagement on the campaigns.
For example, Alison analyzed the various media types a fashion retail brand uses to promote their products – banners, videos, and GIFs. The brand found that the creative copy and characters impacted how their products were perceived.
The creative analysis found that slender, white models drove a 32% higher CTR, while diverse and realistic model body types showed lower CTR but a 283% greater purchase rate. This helped the brand improve its creatives, thereby improving their campaign ROI. Read more here.
How to get started with smarter creative analytics?
While there isn’t just one way of using creative analytics, we recommend going in with a plan so that you can derive actionables that reap the results you want.
1. Set clear KPIs
Look into the marketing and advertising campaigns you’re running and their goals. Identify your pain points across campaigns – for example, high impressions but low engagement.
Then, set a goal for creative analytics. This can include things as simple as achieving better optics, increasing watch time, boosting engagement and conversions, driving more leads or sales.
2. Use an AI creative analytics tool
You can go the traditional way – recording the creatives used across campaigns and brainstorming what worked. This is not efficient and not based on data.
Alternatively, you could use a creative analytics tool to give you insights on how each creative is performing. But that could still take a few back and forths before you get the campaign creative right!
Instead, using AI with a creative analytics tool such as Alison can help you go into an element-level analysis in an automated manner. AI allows you to analyze data at very large scales, scoring elements in correlation to the impact on performance of campaigns. This removes the guesswork from the creative analysis and helps you pinpoint the exact additions or subtractions your creative needs. As a result, your paid media campaigns perform better.
3. Benchmark with competitor creatives
Next, we also recommend identifying your key competitors and benchmarking your creatives against them on an element-level.
With Alison, you can break down every little element that is getting competitor campaigns better engagement than yours, as well as compare the two side by side. The action-oriented insights are also broken down by country, platform, media channel, operating system, campaign, ad set, and more, so that you can create the ideal assets tailored to each market.
Our intelligent algorithms get paired with human insights to provide a superior quality of data on your brand’s and competitors’ creatives.
4. Brainstorm and incorporate insights
Once you have all the insights, we recommend incorporating the actionables into your creatives.
You can either sit down for a brainstorming session with the relevant teams to improve your campaign creatives, or use AI with Alison to generate Smart Briefs for your creatives based on the analysis made.
Alison provides live data to easily detect creative fatigue and rejuvenate your media assets to maximize campaign potential. So you know exactly when your creatives are due for a refresh!
Ready to leverage creative analytics?
At a time when trends change in the blink of an eye, creative analytics can enable your brand to create a lasting visual impression on an audience, which, in turn, impacts how they engage with your campaigns.
The best part? Getting started with AI for creative analytics is easy with solutions like Alison.
