AdParlor launches Intelligence Tags to better assess social ads’ performance

In their never-ending quest to understand which creative works best in an ad, marketers now have another tool.

Today, social ad platform AdParlor is unveiling Intelligence Tags as way to offer more granular analysis of multiple creative elements in social ads.

The company, based in Toronto, provides video and static ads for social networks, and Intelligence Tags is initially available for ads on Facebook and Instagram, with Pinterest and Snapchat coming soon.

When a marketer uploads an image or video for an ad, Intelligence Tabs uses visual recognition to itemize elements in the image — a hand, a cup, a background and so on — and then adds metadata to track it.

A marketer can also manually tag textual elements, such as the headline or body text. The system then tracks the performance of the elements in various ads, as seen in such engagement metrics as clicks, shares or comments. Here’s a screen shot of Intelligence Tags applied to a specific ad:

Tracking of creative elements in an online ad is not uncommon, such as in systems using Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO).

The key difference here, CEO Ben Legg told me, is that DCO and other systems that track creative performance tend to treat the image as a single component, while Intelligence Tags breaks it down automatically into constituent elements. It’s a kind of souped-up multivariate testing, with many more elements and with machine learning to detect patterns.

And here’s one reporting screen, showing performance of the Tags:

Legg noted that an unnamed “large coffee shop chain” used Intelligence Tags that broke down the images in its ads into such alternatives as paper or china cup, male or female hand and a blurred or a pristine background. Some results might become “hard rules” that always apply, such as “always use a female hand in the ad,” while other insights might be particular to a campaign.

For this particular client, Legg said, the use of Intelligence Tags led to a 20 percent lift in performance for its social ads. Intelligence Tags is available to all of AdParlor’s clients at no extra cost.