Custom tags in Analytics reports

Custom tags are the one part of your reporting that's entirely yours. Meta will tell you the campaign, the ad set and the format. Raya's AI tags will tell you the persona, the hook and the emotion. Neither of them knows that these six ads are Steph's, those four are the new refill range, or that this lot came out of the June shoot — and that's usually exactly the cut you want. Custom tags are how you tell Atria those categories exist.

This is far and away the most common mix-up we see in support, so it's worth thirty seconds before anything else. They're two different things that live in the same panel — which is precisely why everybody muddles them.

Click any ad's thumbnail and there they are, stacked: your Custom tags at the top, Raya's categories directly underneath. Same panel, completely different origins. The ones at the top are yours — free text, you type them or pick from chips you've used before, and they mean whatever you've decided they mean. Everything below them is Raya's, generated from the creative itself.

Two practical consequences. First, custom tags never depend on AI tagging — whether auto-tagging is on, off or halfway through a run, your own tags sit there untouched. Second, if the thing that's missing is a persona or an emotion column, that's an AI tagging question and not a custom tag one — the article you want is Find winning ad formulas with Raya's AI creative tagging.

Click the ad's thumbnail. That's the main route and the one to learn. A Preview panel opens with the creative in it — a document icon, a download icon and an orange View details button — and the tagging panel sits alongside it.

Custom tags is the first thing in that panel: an Add tags… field. Click into it and you get an Add or search tags box, a Clear link, and every tag you've already used waiting there as chips to pick from. Atria, coffee, coffee beans, coffee shop, motion, mug, us vs them, or whatever your own vocabulary turns out to be. Type a new label, or click an existing chip. That's the whole job, and from the second ad onwards you're mostly clicking rather than typing — which is exactly how you avoid the sixty-near-duplicates problem further down this page.

Underneath your custom tags, in the same panel, come Raya's AI-generated categories — USP, Theme ("Relatable Statement"), Key message ("Struggling with Healthy Habits"), Emotion ("Empathy", "Amusement") and a health/category tag — each with an ⓘ icon telling you what the category means, and each chip removable. Those are hers, not yours. If you're ever unsure which half you're looking at, the rule is simple: the bit you can type into is yours; everything below it Raya wrote by looking at the ad.

The other way in, if you're already scanning a list of creatives rather than looking at one: on the Analytics dashboard, scroll to Top Spend or Top Performing, hover over the creative and click Edit tags.

Inside a report, switch to card view using the view icons at the right-hand end of the metric row above your graph — there are three, bar, line and card/grid — then hover and click Edit tags. (You can't tag from table view — the hover control lives on the cards.)

One thing worth saying plainly, because it comes up a lot: you don't need to upload anything first. If your ad account is connected, every creative Atria has pulled in is taggable exactly as it stands. Uploading assets is a separate workflow — it isn't a prerequisite for tagging, and there's nothing to prepare before you start.

If you've tagged something and can't see it, this is nearly always the reason — so:

Once a tag exists, it becomes a proper dimension, and there are two things you can do with it.

Group by it. In a custom report, use Group by and choose Custom tag — every ad carrying the same tag collapses into one row, so you're comparing Steph against Priya against Jo rather than twelve individual ads. There's more on the rest of the options in Group-by options in Analytics reports.

Filter by it — and this is the part that got considerably better recently.

Until this year a filter could match all your conditions or any of them, never a mix. So "the two creators I'm considering renewing, but only their video work" meant building two or three separate reports and reconciling them in a spreadsheet.

You can now group conditions inside any Analytics report filter:

You'll find it under Analytics & Launch → select an ad account → open any report → Dimension filter or Metric filter → Add filter group.

Those two buttons open modals headed Dimension filter records and Metric filter records. Inside either one, + Add filter rule adds a single condition — a tag rule reads Where → Custom tag → is → Steph — and Add filter group, the button with the small panel icon, adds a nested one, which lands as an indented, orange-bordered box with its own Where row and its own + Add filter rule, joined to the rules above it by an And dropdown.

Groups nest one level deep, and every filter you'd already built carries on working exactly as it did.

If you'd rather not click through it, describe the segment to Raya in plain English — "show me ads tagged Steph or Priya that are video or carousel, build me an Analytics report" — and she'll build the grouped filter and save it to the report for you.

This is the answer to the request we get most often about tags, incidentally: "how do I make a report with only certain creators' ads?" Tag the ads by creator once, then a filter group does the rest, forever.

A small, well-kept tag vocabulary beats a sprawling one every time — so our honest advice is to tag only what nothing else in Atria can tell you:

And two we'd steer you away from. If the information is already sitting in your ad names, don't hand-tag it — set up Turn your ad naming conventions into insights instead and Raya will parse every segment into a filterable dimension automatically, retroactively, with no typing. And if it's a creative attribute — the hook, the emotion, the format, the offer — AI tagging already does that job across ten categories, and does it more consistently than a human will at eleven at night.

The failure mode we see is a tag list that's grown to sixty near-duplicates: Steph, steph, Steph UGC, Stephanie. Agree the spellings with your team on day one. Tags only pay off when they're boring and consistent.

And as always — if you'd like a hand agreeing a tag structure before you start, or you want a second pair of eyes on a filter group, just shout. Happy to build the first one with you.