Ad Formats
Which creative format your Meta budget goes to, and which one earns it back.
This page tells you what to shoot more of next month, and what to stop paying a studio for.
Every row and line here is a creative format — Video, Photo, Carousel, Dynamic, or Unknown. Not a campaign, not an ad.
The charts
Meta moves budget between formats on its own, day by day. This is where you catch the move while it is still happening.
Each panel draws one line per format, per day, and each carries its own metric picker inside the card.
The picker offers SpendSpendWatch it to control budget and back the winners., Spend ShareSpend ShareThis format's share of spend across all formats in the selected period. Shows your creative mix at a glance, ImpressionsImpressionsPure visibility; only matters if clicks and sales follow., Link clicksLink clicksTraffic Meta is sending; judge it by the sales it converts., CTR (Link)CTR (Link)How enticing your ad is to the people who see it.1.5% or more is healthy, CPC (Link)CPC (Link)The cost of each site visit from Meta. and CPMCPMWhat it costs to reach a thousand people.. Changing it redraws the panel straight away — nothing is fetched from Meta again, so switch freely.
Creative Format — Spend
Money per format, per day. This is Meta's budget decision written down where you can read it.
The left panel opens here.
Watch the shape across the week, not the daily wobble. A format whose line climbs while you changed nothing means Meta's delivery moved the budget, not you.
Creative Format — CTR (Link)
The attention read. It says which format makes people tap, before any question of whether they bought.
The right panel opens here. Link click rate per format, per day.
Backing a winner
Budget is flowing to the format people click most. The one shape where more money is the obvious answer.
Money into a fading format
Spend is rising into a format that is losing its click rate. Classic creative fatigue, and the spend line will keep going until you stop it.
Starving a good format
Clicks got cheaper here and the budget left anyway. Usually a delivery decision, not yours.
Correctly cut
The format lost attention and lost budget with it. Nothing to fix.
A small caveat line can appear beside the metric picker: Showing the last 7 days only, Based on the top N ads of each day, or both. When you see it, the panel is not covering everything you asked for.
The tables
Your largest bet on a format should also be your best-returning one. Two columns here tell you whether it is.
Performance by Creative Format
Read Spend Share against ROAS and you have next month's shoot list in one line.
One row = one creative format.
Columns: Format · Spend · Spend Share · Purchase ValuePurchase ValueTotal purchase value attributed to this format. Pair it with spend to judge which formats return the most revenue · ROASROASRevenue earned for every ad dollar spent.4 or more is healthy · PurchasesPurchasesHow many sales advertising drove; pair with CPA for the cost. · AOVAOVYour average order size, and a direct lever on revenue. · Impressions · Link clicks · CTR (Link) · CPC (Link) · CPM
How to scan it
- Sort by Spend, highest first. It opens that way.
- Look across at Spend Share, then ROAS.
- The row that matters: your biggest Spend Share sitting on a lower ROAS than the row beneath it. Your largest bet is not your best one.
Then run it a second way. Sort by CTR (Link), highest first, and read CPC (Link) beside it — a format with a high click rate and a low cost per click is cheap attention you are underusing.
AOV and Purchases together tell you whether a format is genuinely small or just sells fewer, bigger orders. Read them before you call a format a failure.
Filters
Two controls decide whether this page has anything on it: Apply, and a date range of seven days or fewer.
Campaign — multi-select with an Apply button. Nothing on this page changes until you press Apply.
Ad set — always on screen, but it only works when exactly one campaign is selected. Otherwise it sits on "All" and its options open greyed out, with the reason written in the list.
Account — appears only when more than one Meta account is connected.
Date range — the control that decides whether the table loads at all. Seven days or fewer.
Watch out for
Over 7 days the table does not load. You get "Performance by Creative Format can be fetched only for up to 7 days, so select a 7 day range to view it." Pick a 7-day range and the rows come back.
The panels and the table will not tie out. They come from two separate calls: the panels take each day's top-spending ads, the table takes the top ads by spend for the whole week. Both print a note when they have left ads out. Do not spend the afternoon reconciling them.
"Revenue metrics unavailable for this range" under the table means Purchase Value, ROAS and AOV are missing, not zero. Nothing was earned or lost — the numbers were not returned.
Unknown is a real row. Those are ads whose creative could not be identified, not a format you chose to run. A large Unknown row makes every share on the page less useful.
Purchases and Purchase Value are Meta's own attribution. They will not match your Shopify order count for the same days, and they are not meant to.
Do this first
Set the date range to exactly 7 days, then read Spend Share against ROAS in Performance by Creative Format. If your biggest share of spend is not your best ROAS, that is the week's move.
See yoursAd Formats sits under Meta in the left menu, one item below Campaigns.
Open Ad Formats →