The news: Meta is giving advertisers the ability to see into the performance of individual media assets, rather than having to rely solely on a campaign-level view.

In Meta Ads Manager, advertisers can access new reporting breakdowns for single images, videos, and variations of text. This view is also available for assets that have been removed from ads but is unavailable for ads that are shown as part of collections or carousels. Some custom conversions, such as “Donate” or “Contact,” are also unsupported.

Why this matters: Granular reporting gives advertisers greater visibility into the nuances behind their ad performance. A campaign-level view may be comprehensive, but it can easily obscure patterns across groups of assets. By looking at how individual assets perform in comparison with one other, advertisers can identify and boost higher-performing media while sidelining media that is underperforming.

These precise adjustments can have a compounding effect across an entire campaign, leading to better results in Meta’s ecosystem, which agency marketers see as the most promising among all of social media.

By providing more granular transparency, Meta may be trying to win much-needed trust from advertisers—and instill confidence in its ability to drive performance—as it simultaneously removes their controls. In mid-October, Meta advertisers lost the ability to make their own placement decisions for ads that drive lower-funnel objectives as it gave that capability to its automated system, Advantage+.

Recommendations for marketers: Use Meta’s reporting breakdowns for various forms of media across different objectives, but don’t make key decisions based on these insights alone.

• Assess the performance of AI-generated assets, including text, and compare it to that of assets developed without the use of AI.
• Analyze each asset with respect to multiple KPIs to gather a more descriptive picture of performance.
• Parse insights generated from asset-level data alongside those of campaign-level data to avoid making adjustments that could run counter to larger strategies.

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