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What is Creative Lab and what can I do there?

A tour of Creative Lab, where you compare your Meta ads by creative, find your best images, videos and texts, and get AI tips on them.

What Creative Lab shows

Creative Lab is the page where you compare your Meta ads by the creative they use, meaning the image or the video in the ad, and by the texts, buttons and audiences around it. Open it from Analysis in the left menu, then Creative Lab. Hovering over the menu item shows See which ad creatives are driving the most revenue and ROAS.

Clicking a row of the Top Creatives card on the Dashboard also opens Creative Lab. That card is explained in What do the cards on the Summary dashboard mean?.

Attribution is how TrueROAS decides which ad gets the credit for a sale. Sales, orders and ROAS in Creative Lab show two figures side by side: the sales TrueROAS credits to the ad with your store's attribution model and window, and the figure Meta reports about itself. Why the two differ is explained in Why don't my TrueROAS numbers match Meta or Shopify?.

Creative Lab only shows Meta ads. Ads from Google Ads, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, Microsoft Ads or AppLovin never appear here.

Connect Meta first

Until Meta is connected, the Ad Performance and Creative Breakdown tabs show a box titled Connect Meta to Unlock Creative Analysis with a Connect Meta Ads button. When Meta is connected but no Meta ad account is picked for the store, the box is titled Select a Meta Ad Account and shows the Select Meta Ad Account list instead of the button.

  1. Click Connect Meta Ads and log in to Facebook.
  2. Pick your ad account in Select Meta Ad Account. It is saved the moment you pick it.
  3. Creative Lab loads your ads.

The Facebook window and the ad account list work as described in How do I connect or change the ad account behind the Meta, Google and Tiktok tabs?. The Video Analysis tab has no connect box, but it also needs your Meta connection.

The page from top to bottom

While your store is new, the setup card from the Dashboard, or the Import Historical Orders card, can show at the top of the page. See What does the setup card at the top of the Dashboard mean? and How do I bring in orders from before I installed TrueROAS?.

  1. The date buttons 7 days, 30 days and 90 days, next to a calendar icon in the top right corner. See How do I change the dates in Creative Lab?.
  2. Three tabs: Ad Performance, Creative Breakdown and Video Analysis. The page opens on Ad Performance.

Ad Performance

From top to bottom, this tab holds:

What the chart and each column show is explained in What do the numbers on the Ad Performance tab mean?. To sort the table or pick its columns, see How do I sort the creatives and choose the columns in Creative Lab?. To tick rows and download them, see How do I select creatives and export them to a CSV file?.

Creative Breakdown

This tab starts with Find your winning creative elements. Same video/image across multiple ads? We combine their stats to show true performance. It ranks the parts of your ads one by one, such as single images, videos, ad copies, headlines, buttons and audiences, each across all the ads that use it. See How do I see which images, videos, headlines and ad copies work best?.

Video cards on this tab have an Analyze Hook button. See How do I check the hook of one of my video ads?.

Video Analysis

The tab is called Video Analysis, but its heading reads Competitor Video Analysis. Paste the link of any video ad from the Meta Ads Library, and AI scores its hook, the opening seconds that make people stop scrolling. See How do I analyze a competitor's video ad?.

While the page loads

  • Grey placeholders fill the page while TrueROAS loads your ads from Meta and your orders. When it is done, you see Done analyzing ads.
  • If Meta has no ads for your dates, the table reads No ad data available for this time period. and the chart reads No creative performance data available. See Why are creatives missing or showing no TrueROAS sales in Creative Lab?.
  • If loading fails, a red message shows the reason.
  • Creative Lab loads your ads from Meta again each time you open the page, change the dates or pick another Meta ad account.

Preview an ad

  1. Click the small picture at the start of a row on Ad Performance, or Preview Ad on a Creative Breakdown card.
  2. Ad Preview opens with Meta's own preview of the ad, as it looks in the mobile feed. When several ads use the creative, it shows the first of them.
  3. The window has no close button. Click outside it, or press Esc, to close it.

Good to know