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See which creatives are working

Rank every ad on quality, resonance and freshness so you can tell which creatives earn their spend, pause the ones that don't, and feature the winners.

3 min readUpdated 9 Sept 2026

Creative Lens ranks every ad in an account so you can see which creatives are carrying the results and which ones are quietly burning budget. You'll find it on the Improvements tab of any Meta Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads or TikTok Ads account.

Why use it

  • Spot the drag. Sort worst-first and the ads pushing your costs up land at the top of the table.
  • Judge creative fairly. Each ad is scored against comparable ads in the same account, not against a generic benchmark.
  • Act without leaving Pace. Pause a losing ad from the table, then feature the winner in a client report.

How it reads on Meta Ads and LinkedIn Ads

The table lists every ad with its thumbnail, headline and body text, alongside three judgments. Performance is a Top Performer / Average / Underperformer verdict based on the ad set's own optimisation goal, so a Landing Page Views ad isn't graded on conversion maths. Resonance scores engagement quality out of 100. Freshness scores fatigue out of 100 and carries a badge: Fresh, OK, Aging, Stale or Fatigued.

Meta Ads adds three more columns that mirror Meta's own diagnostics: Quality, Engmt. and CVR. Each one compares your ad to others chasing the same audience. Click an ad's status badge to pause or enable it.

The Creative Lens table for a Meta Ads account showing performance, resonance and freshness scores per ad

How it reads on Google Ads

Google Ads gets its own view built around ad quality rather than engagement. Every ad carries a Quality score out of 100, a composite of Google's Ad Strength, how many headline and description slots you've filled, asset diversity and CTR against your account average. Badges run Excellent, Good, Average, Poor, Critical.

Filter by campaign type to compare like with like: Search (RSA), Performance Max or Display. Expand any Search ad for a preview of how it appears on a results page.

The Google Ads Creative Lens table with quality score, ad strength and freshness columns

Controls that apply everywhere

Pick a date range of Last 7 days, Last 30 days or Last 90 days, search by ad name, filter by status, and set Rank by to CPA, CTR, CPC or ROAS. Results are cached, so a repeat visit loads instantly.

Putting the winners in front of a client

Meta Ads and TikTok Ads reports include two creative pages. Creative Spotlight renders one hero creative as a true-to-life feed ad with a Hook → Hold → Link CTR → ROAS scorecard and a plain-English read on why it won. Creative Leaderboard ranks your top creatives as a grid of feed-ad mockups. Both live in Client Reports.

The Creative Spotlight report page showing a hero creative with its performance scorecard

Limitations

  • Creative Lens covers Meta Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads and TikTok Ads. Microsoft Ads, Reddit Ads and Amazon Ads accounts don't have it.
  • LinkedIn Ads status can't be changed from the table, and ROAS ranking is Meta Ads only.
  • Meta hides its diagnostic rankings for ads under 500 impressions in the last seven days, so those cells show a dash.
  • Google no longer reports per-asset Best / Good / Low labels for Search, Display or Performance Max ads, so those markers stay blank and the quality score rests on its other signals.

Note: Creative Lens is available on Pro and above. On Basic, the Creative Lens row shows a Pro badge.

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