How We Analyze & Optimize Ads

Happy Friday!

This is Jakub Szunyogh from 10X ROAS and we have another exciting week in Creative Ad Lab.

Last week, we delivered another batch of creative for RYZE Superfoods and their new release Mushroom Overnight Oats.

They are delicious and even our UGC creators are asking for more!

What we’re going to take a look at today:

• What are the most important performance and retention metrics we analyze for our creative every time

• What are industry benchmarks for retention metrics and do they even matter

• 6 ads with real data that we are going to analyze and create a performance optimization plan

Before we dive deep into how we analyze and optimize our creative, I have a wonderful bonus for you:

If you run an e-commerce business, I will write 3 creative concepts for your brand completely free.

I want to show you our creative process and why brands like HexClad, RYZE, and BestSelf love it.

Simply fill out this form and I will send you 3 concepts tailored to your brand within 24 hours.

I only have time to do this for the next 5 brands that fill out the Typeform.

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Ad Creative Deep Dive: How We Analyze & Optimize Ads

Since we launched a new batch of our creative for RYZE Superfoods last week…

I wanted to dedicate today’s edition of Creative Ad Lab to explaining how we analyze and optimize ads for brands like HexClad, RYZE, BestSelf, and others.

After we launch new ads, we need to wait a few days to weeks for reliable data.

Depending on ad spend and bidding method, this can take anywhere from 3 to 14 days.

We then analyze the most important performance metrics:

• CPA (determines winners and losers)

• ROAS (determines winners and losers)

• Purchases (do we have a winner or an early success)

• Ad Spend (how much ad spend does the platform allocate to creative)

• Conversion Rate (shows congruency between creative and landing page)

These performance metrics and KPIs, which are different for each brand, tell us which category each creative falls into:

• Winning Performance

• Good Performance

• Poor Performance

Once we understand the performance of a creative, we determine its potential by analyzing retention metrics:

• Hook Rate (percentage of people who watched at least 3 seconds)

• Hold Rate (percentage of people who watched at least 15 seconds)

• Watched Video 25% (percentage, not total count)

• Watched Video 50% (percentage, not total count)

• Watched Video 75% (percentage, not total count)

• Watched Video 100% (percentage, not total count)

When you compare these retention metrics across your Winning, Good, and Poor creative in the ad account, they start making sense.

There are, of course, industry benchmarks that you can strive for, but they might not apply exactly to your brand.

For example, with our hooks, we aim for a minimum 30% hook rate and ideally above 40% hook rate.

Some people say that the higher your hook rate is, the better. That is only true if your performance metrics (CPA, ROAS…) reflect better performance.

I don’t know about you, but I would much rather have a 20% hook rate and $10 CPA than a 40% hook rate and $20 CPA.

To create an action plan for optimizing your creative, you need to find their weak spots by looking at retention metrics.

Take a look at the image above with real data from one of our ad accounts.

Take a few minutes to analyze the data and determine where are the weak spots that we can optimize.

Here are some weak spots I see:

Ad 1 has a poor Hook Rate and Hold Rate.

Viewers lose interest very early and scroll past our ad.

Due to our poor hook, we are losing thousands of viewers who would’ve watched the entire ad and purchased our product if our hook was better.

We need to improve our hook to improve the performance of Ad 1.

Ad 2 has a wonderful Hook Rate and overall retention metrics.

I don’t see clear ideas for the optimization of this ad, besides maybe looking at what could be the cause of a drop from 7.70% to 3.04% in the last quarter of the video.

Meta pushed this ad the most due to its amazing retention metrics. People love watching this ad and Meta is happy to show this ad to more people.

After some time, the CPA and ROAS of this ad dropped below our KPI and we had to turn this ad off.

This shows you that beautiful retention metrics don’t necessarily guarantee strong ad performance (CPA, ROAS…).

Ad 3 has similar retention as Ad 1, except there is a little more significant drop between VW 25% and VW 50%.

I would compare Ad 3 and Ad 1 in this timeframe, see how is this part of the video different, and create a hypothesis about what we can do differently next time.

Ad 4 has a very nice retention and the best CTR out of all 6 ads.

I don’t see any metric that would stand out and call for immediate optimization.

Ad 5 and Ad 6 have a similar retention as Ad 2.

What stands out the most is a significant drop in Ad 6 from 7.71% to 2.59% between VW 50% and VW 75%.

We know this is uncommon by looking at the retention metrics of all 6 ads.

I would immediately take a look at this part of Ad 6 and try to determine why people lose interest and skip the video when they see this part.

It could be a clip that’s inauthentic, an obvious sale promotion, or simply boring clips that people don’t want to watch.

Ad 6 has also the lowest CTR with a significant difference compared to the average CTR of our other ads.

At this point, we would write down our detailed notes on how we can improve the performance of each ad.

We will have a call with our client and their media buyer and compare our notes. We align on the optimization plan, and our video editors will make the optimized variations of these ads completely free for the client.

We launch the optimized variations and repeat the entire analysis and optimization loop to improve the ad performance further.

How I Can Help You

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you…

1. If you’re looking for a creative partner who will handle your entire creative production, deliver winning ads every month, and help you scale, apply to work with us here. We have worked with brands like HexClad, RYZE, BestSelf, Product Hunt, Morning Brew, and others.
   

2. Want me to train your internal team and implement all of our creative production systems and strategies in your business? Apply here and I will help you build an in-house team that can create hundreds of winning ads every month.
   

3. If you’re looking to take your ad performance to the next level and have a consistent stream of winning creative, but don’t want to hire anyone, I have created a program that teaches you our entire creative production process and everything I have learned over 3 years of creating tens of thousands of ads.