Understanding Pencil Insights: a comprehensive guide
Pencil Insights is a powerful tool designed to help you make the most of your creative processes. By providing detailed analytics and feedback, Pencil Insights enables you to refine your content and improve performance.
Getting started with Pencil Insights
To access Pencil Insights login to your Pencil account and navigate to the Insights tab on the left hand side of your workspace.
At the top left of the Pencil Insights dashboard, you can filter by Channels and Campaigns. This dropdown list allows you to view data relating to specific channels and campaigns. By selecting a particular channel, such as Meta or Google Ads, you can focus on the relevant metrics for that channel, gaining insights into audience engagement and effectiveness.
Similarly, the campaigns dropdown lets you isolate data for advertising initiatives, enabling you to compare and contrast performance across various campaigns. This helps you identify strategies and areas for improvement, ensuring your marketing efforts are both efficient and impactful.
You can quickly sort and filter your data by using the arrow and filter buttons next to the column headers for each metric:
The box above the table will give you a quick view as to how the data is currently sorted - by which metric and whether it is in ascending or descending order:
In the third drop down you can select a date range for which you want to view your data with Pencil defaulting to the Last 30 days.
The upper right hand side of the dashboard offers a search function, allowing you to search within your dataset.
At the top right of the dashboard you will see a Sync now button as well as the time since the last sync. Pressing Sync now updates the dashboard with the latest data from your advertising platforms, allowing you to access realtime ad performance data quickly and easily.
Working with Tags
Tags are an essential part of organising and categorising your content within Pencil Insights, and help you track the performance of different themes that resonate most with your audience, offering valuable insights into which elements are driving engagement and success.
They can be both manually generated, allowing you to tailor them to your specific needs, or generated by large language models (LLMs), providing automated suggestions based on the content of your creatives. By assigning relevant tags to your creatives, you can easily filter and search for specific themes and assess how well these are performing.
There are a number of tag types, including:
Text Inside Creative: Tags that are based on the textual content embedded within the creative itself. These tags help identify and categorise the themes and messages conveyed directly in the ad's text.
Text Outside Creative: Tags for captions or any textual content that accompanies the creative but is not part of the main visual. These tags help in categorising and analysing the impact of supplementary text, such as social media captions or descriptions.
Audio: Tags based on the content within audio elements of the creative. These tags help in categorising themes, messages, or key phrases present in any audio components, such as voiceovers or background music.
Image: Tags that categorise and describe the visual elements within an image. These tags help in identifying the subject matter, style, or other significant aspects of the images used in the creative.
Visual: Tags that encompass broader visual elements, including design, colour schemes, and overall aesthetics. These tags help in categorising the visual style and appeal of the creative.
Attention: Tags that highlight best practices for capturing and maintaining audience attention. These tags focus on elements that are designed to engage viewers effectively.
Branding: Tags that relate to brand-specific elements, such as logos, brand colours, and slogans. These tags help ensure consistency and alignment with brand identity across all creatives.
Connection: Tags that focus on elements designed to create a connection with the audience, such as emotional appeals or relatable content. These tags help in assessing how well the creative resonates with viewers.
Direction: Tags that indicate the intended direction or call to action within the creative. These tags help in categorising elements that guide the audience towards a specific response or behaviour.
My Tags: Custom tags that users can create to suit their specific needs and preferences. These tags offer flexibility, allowing users to categorise and track elements that are unique to their campaigns or objectives.
Creating your own tags
Switch to the Creatives view within the Insights page and select one or more Creatives. The option to 'Add tags' will become available at the top right of the screen
You can apply your newly created tag to further Creatives if you wish.
What are Creatives?
The Creatives section Insights dashboard serves as a repository for all your generated ads, providing a comprehensive overview of your creative assets in one convenient location. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the organisation and analysis of your ad campaigns.
Within the Creatives section, you can measure a range of metrics that provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your ads. Metrics such as click-through rates and conversion rates can be tracked and analysed, offering a clear picture of how well your creatives are resonating with your target audience. Additionally, the section allows you to compare different versions of your ads, facilitating A/B testing and enabling you to identify which elements are most successful.
You may wish to use the Creatives section to gain a deeper understanding of an ad's performance and to make informed decisions about future campaigns. By leveraging the insights provided, you can refine their strategies, optimise their content, and ultimately achieve better results.
How do I conduct A/B testing using Pencil
Conducting A/B testing allows you to compare the performance of one or more Creatives or campaigns against another, analysing a huge number of metrics available from your connected ad account(s).
To conduct A/B testing in Pencil we suggest using naming conventions that identify your Pencil-generated ads. You can than apply custom tags respectively to the Creatives you want to compare and monitor their performance from the Insights dashboard.