Implement an elements explorer tool in six easy steps

In the “Your creative team has superpowers” post I briefly mentioned the elements explorer, a tool your company should begin using yesterday. Here’s how to implement one, in six easy steps.

Note: To get the elements explorer tool live, you will first need to automate the creation of your creatives, which you can do using the Variables feature in Photoshop.

1. Align the entire user acquisition (UA) team on one KPI to track as a kind of test run, to make sure the UA and creative teams understand how to correctly use the elements explorer to evaluate a marketing campaign.
2. Make sure the creative name used by your creative team is the same as the creative name on the partner side (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.). This is the first and most important step in your process.
3. Start simple. Ask your creative team to track the creative name and one main element, and be sure to keep the information in an Excel or Google spreadsheet. This spreadsheet should be connected with the data you receive from your campaign partner and from your attribution tool, which tracks visits to your site.
4. Increase the number of elements (Variables) tracked in your Excel spreadsheet. Ask the creative team to track up to three elements. It’s best to build up gradually, because the creative team needs to learn how to use the elements explorer and should be the one to decide which elements are important to track and later be used for evaluation.
5. Add some upper funnel segmentation, such as brand or generic images, product category, and where the user landed (the home page or a landing page custom-made for the campaign). This will make it easy to analyze the effect of the creative team’s work versus the effect of the UA and tech teams’ work.
6. Make your data richer by adding metadata from the partner (age, device, gender, location, etc.). The more information you have, the better the data analysis you will be able to do on your campaigns.

Takeaway:Building your elements explorer gradually, step by step, will create a “data culture” among your creative team, enabling them to analyze their creatives, improve their brainstorming process, and generate new ideas that convert site visitors to customers.