The Scenario
You are a creative director at an e-commerce brand. The brand has been running Meta Ads for three years. Nobody has ever audited the creative library.
You inherit the account and find 80+ ad creatives — some images, some videos, some carousels, many of them duplicated under slightly different names, some created before the last rebrand. You have a quarterly planning session next Tuesday and the first agenda item is creative refresh strategy.
You need an inventory. You need to know what formats exist, which creatives are stale (more than 90 days old), and which ones are being reused across multiple ads.
The bad version of the next two days:
- Open Ads Manager Creative Hub
- Manually scroll through 80 creatives
- Copy IDs and names into a spreadsheet one by one
- Cross-reference each one against the ads using it
- Try to figure out creation dates from the UI — they are buried
- You get to 40 and stop because the meeting is tomorrow.
One prompt pulls the whole library.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet 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 sheet in the time it would have taken you to manually copy 10 entries.
What You Get
A complete creative inventory:
- 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. If 40 of your 80 creatives are flagged stale, your planning session has a clear first agenda item 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 by only punctuation or whitespace. Sort by column B alphabetically so potential duplicates appear near each other.
When you only care about a specific format for the planning session
The creative refresh is focused on video. You do not need the image inventory right now.
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 sheet
The full creative audit — format classification, staleness flag, and usage count — in one shot.
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 the planning session with the full picture, not a partially scrolled Creative Hub.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull your creative library into any Google Sheet you have open. The Meta Ads integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related work, see how to export ad-level creative performance or the Meta Ads in Google Sheets overview.