The Scenario
You are a creative director at an e-commerce brand. The brand has been running Meta Ads for three years and nobody has ever audited the creative library. You inherit the account and find 80+ ad creatives — images, videos, carousels, many duplicated under slightly different names, some created before the last rebrand.
The quarterly planning session is next Tuesday and the first agenda item is creative refresh strategy. You need an inventory before that meeting.
The bad version of the next two days:
- Open Ads Manager Creative Hub
- Scroll through 80 creatives, manually copying IDs and names into a workbook
- Try to find creation dates — they are buried in individual creative detail views
- Cross-reference each creative against the ads using it
- You get to 40 rows and the planning session is tomorrow morning.
One prompt pulls the whole library into the workbook.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that can query your entire Meta Ads creative library through the API, so you do not have to scroll Creative Hub row by row.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
List all ad creatives in our Meta Ads account and write creative ID, name, format type, thumbnail URL, and creation date into columns A through E. In column F, write "stale" if the creation date is more than 90 days ago, otherwise leave blank.
SheetXAI fetches the full creative library, writes every creative with its metadata, and applies the staleness flag in column F. You have an 80-row inventory workbook in the time it would have taken to manually copy 10 entries.
What You Get
A complete creative inventory workbook tab:
- Column A — creative ID
- Column B — creative name
- Column C — format type (IMAGE, VIDEO, CAROUSEL)
- Column D — thumbnail URL
- Column E — creation date
- Column F — "stale" flag for creatives older than 90 days
The staleness column is the one that matters for the planning session. If 40 of your 80 creatives are flagged stale, the refresh conversation has a clear scope before it starts.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
An 80-creative library accumulated over three years will have quirks.
When you want to see which creatives are actually in use
A creative in the library is not necessarily running. Some were created for campaigns that ended.
Fetch all ad creatives in this Meta Ads account and for each one write creative ID, name, format, and the count of ads currently using it into columns A through D. In column E, write "unused" if the usage count is 0. Sort by usage count descending.
When duplicate names need to be surfaced
The same creative was uploaded twice under slightly different names.
List all ad creatives and write creative ID and name into columns A and B. In column C, write "possible duplicate" if any other row has a name that differs only by punctuation or whitespace. Sort by column B alphabetically so potential duplicates appear near each other.
When you only care about video creatives for the refresh planning
The creative refresh is focused on video. The image inventory can wait.
Fetch all VIDEO ad creatives in this Meta Ads account. Write creative ID, name, creation date, and the number of ads using each creative into columns A through D. Sort by creation date ascending so the oldest videos appear first.
When you want format breakdown, staleness, and usage all in one audit workbook
The full creative audit — format classification, staleness flag, and usage count — in one pass.
List all ad creatives. Write creative ID, name, format type, creation date, and count of ads using the creative into columns A through E. In column F, flag "stale" if the creative is more than 90 days old. In column G, flag "unused" if no active ads are using it. Sort by creation date ascending. Add a summary row at the bottom showing total creatives by format type.
The pattern: the audit that would have taken two days happens in one prompt. You walk into Tuesday's planning session with the full picture.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull your Meta Ads creative library into any Excel workbook you have open. The Meta Ads integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related work, see how to export ad-level creative performance in Excel or the Meta Ads in Excel overview.