# Motion

> Motion is a creative analytics platform for paid social teams that connects Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn ad accounts and renders performance as visual creative reports rather than spreadsheets, automatically tagging every ad across creative dimensions such as hook, format, and messaging so teams can see which creative attributes drive results; it adds a competitive ad research tool called Inspo, shareable Snapshot reports, and a published Starter plan at $250 a month covering up to $50,000 of monthly ad spend with unlimited seats and unlimited ad accounts.

- Category: Paid Ads Management (https://saastracker.org/categories/ppc-ads)
- Website: https://motionapp.com
- Starting price: $250 per month (Starter, up to $50,000 monthly ad spend)
- Free plan: A free tier covering one ad account connection, 14 days of historical data, standard reporting only, two team members, and unlimited view-only guests, positioned for advertisers under roughly $25,000 of monthly spend.
- Free trial: 14 days
- Founded: 2021, HQ: Toronto, Canada, Ownership: Venture-backed
- Profile last reviewed: 2026-08-22
- Canonical profile: https://saastracker.org/products/motion-app

## Overview

Motion sits in a narrow and clearly defined job: cross-channel creative reporting. It does not act on your ad accounts. It cannot pause an ad, shift a budget, or write a rule. Every read connection is read-only by design, and the company is unusually direct about that, stating that you always own your ad creative and performance data. What Motion produces is the artifact that paid social teams were previously assembling by hand every Monday morning, a report where each row is the actual creative with the numbers attached rather than an ad ID that means nothing to the person who made it.

The mechanism that makes this work at volume is AI Tagging, which categorizes every ad across eight creative dimensions automatically. Manual creative tagging is the standard practice in performance creative teams and it is the first thing that collapses once an account is running hundreds of variants a month. Once ads are tagged, the analysis that people actually want becomes possible: not which ad won, but which hook type won, which format won, which messaging angle won, and whether that holds across TikTok and Meta or only on one.

Around the analytics sits Inspo, a competitive research surface where you follow brands and browse their public ads into saved boards. This is the same job Foreplay does, bundled into an analytics tool rather than sold separately, and it is why creative strategists tend to describe Motion as a command center rather than a reporting tool. The company has leaned into that language explicitly since its 2024 Series B.

Motion is a Toronto company founded in 2021 by Reza Khadjavi, Alexander Sloan, and David Berglas, which raised a $30 million Series B led by Inovia Capital in September 2024, bringing total funding to roughly $42 million. It reports more than 2,100 customers analyzing $14 billion in annual ad spend. The commercial catch is that only the entry tier is priced in public: Starter is $250 a month up to $50,000 of monthly spend, and everything above that is a sales conversation.

## How it works

1. You connect ad accounts by OAuth across Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Paid plans allow unlimited ad account connections and unlimited seats, which is the pricing decision that most distinguishes Motion from per-seat competitors and makes it viable for agencies with a large roster.

2. Motion ingests the creative assets alongside the performance data, then AI Tags classify every ad across eight creative dimensions so that analysis can be run on attributes rather than on individual ad IDs.

3. You work in visual reports: creative dashboards where the thumbnail or video is the primary object, top-performing reports with flexible grouping and filtering, comparative analysis across products, formats, and messaging, launch analysis for recently shipped creative, and a weekly leaderboard ranked by spend showing what is scaling, declining, new, or paused.

4. Findings go out as Snapshots, shareable reports that a client or an executive can open without a seat or a login. Attribution integrations with Google Analytics 4 and Northbeam are available on the higher tiers to tie creative performance to revenue rather than to platform-reported conversions, and Inspo runs alongside all of it as the competitive research and inspiration surface.

## Best for

Paid social teams and performance agencies spending enough on creative-led channels that creative decisions dominate media decisions, typically ecommerce and DTC brands running Meta and TikTok, who currently rebuild creative reports by hand and want unlimited seats so strategists, editors, and clients can all see the same view.

## Not the right fit for

- Google Search advertisers, whose performance is driven by keywords, match types, and bids rather than by creative attributes; Motion has nothing to say about a search account and does not connect to Google Ads for search at all.
- Anyone who wants software to act on their accounts; Motion is read-only by design and will never pause an ad or move a budget, so it does not substitute for Madgicx, Opteo, or Optmyzr.
- Small advertisers under roughly $20,000 a month in spend, where $250 is a punishing percentage of media for reporting you could still assemble by hand in an hour a week.
- Buyers who need published pricing above the entry tier; anything past $50,000 of monthly spend means Pro, Growth, or Agency, all of which are quoted rather than listed.
- Teams whose real gap is producing creative rather than understanding it; Motion analyzes and never generates a single asset.

## Features

### Creative analytics

Performance reporting where the creative itself is the unit of analysis.

- **Visual creative dashboards**: Reports render the actual ad, image or video, next to its metrics, so a creative strategist can read the report without cross-referencing ad IDs.
- **Top-performing reports**: Flexible grouping and filtering to surface winners by whatever dimension matters: campaign, product, format, or creative attribute.
- **Comparative analysis**: Compares performance across products, formats, and messaging so conclusions are about creative categories rather than individual assets.
- **Launch analysis**: Tracks recently shipped creative specifically, which answers the question every weekly creative meeting actually asks: did last week's batch work.
- **Weekly ad leaderboard**: Top ads ranked by spend with week-over-week movement flagged as scaling, declining, new, or paused, refreshed daily.
- **Funnel-stage creative scores**: Hook, watch, click, and conversion metrics separate where a creative fails, distinguishing an ad nobody watched from an ad everybody watched and nobody bought from.

### AI tagging and automation

The layer that makes attribute-level analysis possible at volume.

- **AI Tags**: Every ad is automatically categorized across eight creative dimensions, replacing the manual tagging convention that always breaks down once an account runs hundreds of variants.
- **Custom tagging**: Teams can layer their own taxonomy on top of the automatic tags so reporting reflects how the brand actually thinks about its creative.
- **AI Tasks**: Automated analysis workflows that run recurring questions against the data rather than requiring someone to rebuild the same view each week.
- **Cross-account rollups**: Because ad account connections are unlimited on paid plans, tagging and reporting work across a whole brand portfolio or agency roster rather than one account at a time.

### Inspo, competitive research

An ad library and inspiration workspace bundled into the analytics product.

- **Brand following**: Follow competitor brands and get a filtered feed of the ads they are running from public ad libraries.
- **Saved ads library**: Save competitor and reference ads into a team-accessible library so inspiration is shared rather than trapped in individual bookmarks.
- **Boards**: Group saved ads thematically, which is how a creative brief gets assembled in practice.
- **Brand intelligence hub**: A monitoring surface for competitive activity over time rather than a one-off search.

### Sharing and reporting out

How the analysis leaves the tool, which matters more for agencies than any individual chart.

- **Snapshots**: Shareable report links that a client or executive opens without a seat or platform access, which removes the usual reason agencies export to slides.
- **Unlimited seats**: Every paid plan includes unlimited users, so editors, strategists, media buyers, and account managers all see the same numbers without a per-seat calculation.
- **Unlimited ad accounts**: Paid plans do not cap account connections, so agency rosters do not create a pricing cliff the way they do on per-account tools.
- **View-only guests**: Guests can be added for read access, available even on the free plan, so clients can be looped in without consuming anything.

### Data connections and attribution

Which networks are genuinely connected, and how the revenue picture is assembled.

- **Meta ad accounts**: Facebook and Instagram, the primary use case and the deepest integration.
- **TikTok ad accounts**: Fully supported alongside Meta, which is the pairing most performance creative teams actually run.
- **YouTube and LinkedIn ad accounts**: Both connect for creative reporting, extending coverage past paid social into video and B2B without changing the analytical model.
- **Google Analytics 4 integration**: Available from the Pro tier, tying creative performance to site-side outcomes rather than only to platform-reported conversions.
- **Northbeam integration**: Also Pro and above. This is the honest answer to the post-iOS-14 attribution problem: Motion does not build its own attribution model, it reads one from a dedicated attribution vendor.
- **Asset format coverage**: Video, static images, carousels, and dynamic creative are all handled as first-class objects rather than flattened into rows.

## Use cases

- **Creative strategist at a DTC brand**: The team ships forty new ads a month across Meta and TikTok, and the only report anyone has is Ads Manager, where nothing indicates what the creative actually was. Outcome: AI Tags classify every asset, the weekly leaderboard shows what is scaling, and the next creative brief is written from attribute-level evidence about hooks and formats rather than from the loudest opinion in the room.
- **Performance agency with twenty client accounts**: Monday reporting eats a day per account manager, and per-seat tools make it expensive to give every strategist and editor access. Outcome: Unlimited seats and unlimited account connections put the whole roster and the whole team on one plan, and Snapshots replace the hand-built client slide deck with a link.
- **Head of growth reconciling platform numbers with revenue**: Meta claims credit for conversions the finance team cannot find, and creative decisions are being made on platform-reported ROAS that nobody trusts post-iOS-14. Outcome: The Pro tier's Northbeam and GA4 connections put a second, independent revenue view next to the creative analysis, so creative decisions rest on modeled attribution rather than on the ad platform grading its own homework.
- **Video editor producing paid social creative**: Editors work from vague briefs and never see how their work performed, so the same mistakes recur every cycle. Outcome: Free seats mean the editing team lives in the same dashboards as the buyers, hook and watch metrics show exactly where viewers dropped, and Inspo boards give the next brief real reference material.

## Pricing

Tiered subscription banded by monthly ad spend, with unlimited seats and unlimited ad account connections on every paid tier. Only the entry tier is publicly priced.

- **Free**: $0 per month. 1 ad account connection; 14 days of history; Standard reporting; 2 team members plus unlimited view-only guests. The 14-day history window is the binding constraint; creative analysis needs longer lookbacks to be worth anything.
- **Starter**: $250 per month, up to $50,000 monthly ad spend. Unlimited seats and unlimited ad accounts; AI Tagging and creative dashboards; Weekly ad leaderboards; Inspo competitor research; In-app chat support. The only tier with a published price, and the one a small brand or boutique agency should evaluate.
- **Pro**: Custom quoted, up to $250,000 monthly ad spend. Everything in Starter; Google Analytics 4 attribution integration; Northbeam attribution integration; Higher spend ceiling. The attribution integrations are gated here, which is a meaningful feature gate rather than a volume gate.
- **Growth**: Custom quoted, unlimited monthly ad spend. Everything in Pro; No spend ceiling; Enterprise support arrangements.
- **Agency**: Custom quoted. Multi-client structure; Roster-level account management; Client reporting arrangements.

Billing notes:

- Tiers are banded by your monthly ad spend, so the fee does scale with growth, but in steps rather than as a percentage. At $5,000 of monthly spend Starter is 5 percent of media, which is hard to justify. At $25,000 it is 1 percent. At $50,000 it is 0.5 percent, which is where the tool is priced to be bought. Cross $50,000 and you are quoted rather than listed.
- Unlimited seats and unlimited ad accounts on paid tiers is the genuinely unusual commercial choice here, and it changes the arithmetic for agencies more than the headline price does.
- Only Starter is published. Pro, Growth, and Agency all require a sales conversation, so a buyer above $50,000 in spend cannot budget from the website.
- The attribution integrations, Google Analytics 4 and Northbeam, sit behind the Pro gate. If revenue reconciliation is your reason for buying, Starter will not do it.
- Because every connection is read-only, cancellation is clean in a way it is not for tools that write to your accounts: nothing you built inside Motion was ever pushed to the ad platforms, so nothing breaks in Meta or TikTok when you leave. What you lose is the tagging, the boards, the Snapshots, and the historical views, and no bulk export path for those is documented.

Value assessment: At $250 a month with unlimited seats and unlimited ad accounts, Starter is priced correctly for a brand spending $30,000 to $50,000 a month or an agency whose alternative is per-seat tooling across a dozen strategists. It replaces a genuine recurring labor cost, the hand-built weekly creative report, and the unlimited-seat decision means giving editors access costs nothing, which is where most of the practical value shows up. Below about $20,000 in monthly spend the arithmetic does not work and the free tier is too history-limited to be a real substitute. Above $50,000 the price disappears behind sales, and Motion stops being a product you can evaluate on published terms.

## Strengths

- The best answer in this category to a specific and widely felt problem: creative reporting that shows the creative, at a volume no one can maintain by hand.
- AI Tagging across eight dimensions makes attribute-level analysis practical, which is the difference between knowing an ad won and knowing what kind of ad wins.
- Unlimited seats and unlimited ad account connections on every paid tier, which removes the usual per-seat penalty for including editors, strategists, and clients.
- Genuine multi-network coverage for creative reporting across Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn, rather than one network with the others merely mentioned.
- Snapshots make client reporting a link instead of a deck, which is the single most time-consuming ritual in an agency's week.
- Read-only by design and explicit about data ownership, so the tool cannot damage an ad account and cancellation cannot break a live campaign.
- Well funded and growing, with a $30M Series B led by Inovia in 2024, roughly $42M raised in total, and a reported 2,100-plus customers analyzing $14B in annual spend.

## Limitations

- It acts on nothing. There is no rule engine, no budget control, no pausing, and no bid management, so it is always a second tool alongside whatever manages the accounts.
- No Google Search coverage. Motion is a creative analytics product and search accounts have no creative to analyze in the sense the product means.
- Only the Starter tier is publicly priced, and the spend bands mean a growing brand runs into an unquotable wall at $50,000 a month.
- Attribution is borrowed rather than built. GA4 and Northbeam integrations are the answer to post-iOS-14 measurement, and both sit behind the Pro gate, so the honest reading is that Motion reports on attribution someone else computed.
- The free tier's 14-day history window makes it a demonstration rather than a usable plan, since creative analysis depends on longer lookbacks.
- It produces no creative, so a team whose actual bottleneck is production needs a generation tool as well, and now has two subscriptions.
- No documented bulk export of tags, boards, or historical reports if you leave, which means the taxonomy you build inside Motion is not portable.

## Comparisons

- **Motion vs Atria**: The closest competitor and the most useful comparison. Atria covers Meta and TikTok only but goes further into action: it grades creative in plain English, mines customer reviews for angles, generates scripts and image variations, and bulk uploads to Meta. Motion covers four networks, is strictly read-only, and is better at reporting. At $129 a month annually Atria is also cheaper. Take Motion if reporting quality and unlimited seats matter most; take Atria if you want research, analysis, and production in one seat.
- **Motion vs Foreplay**: Foreplay is a dedicated ad library and creative research tool, and Motion's Inspo module does a lighter version of the same job bundled into an analytics platform. If competitive ad research and brief building is the whole reason you are buying, Foreplay is deeper and much cheaper. If you want the research beside your own performance data, Motion's bundling wins on workflow.
- **Motion vs AdCreative.ai**: Straightforwardly complementary rather than competitive: AdCreative.ai makes the creative and Motion tells you which creative worked. Neither substitutes for the other, and a team that only has budget for one should ask whether its bottleneck is supply or judgement. If nobody can make ads, buy the generator; if you make plenty and cannot tell what is working, buy Motion.
- **Motion vs Adbeat**: Both include competitive intelligence, but they look at different halves of the internet. Adbeat tracks display, native, and programmatic placements across 145-plus networks with spend estimates and publisher data. Motion's Inspo tracks paid social creative from public ad libraries. A media buyer researching where competitors buy needs Adbeat; a creative strategist researching what competitors say needs Motion or Foreplay.
- **Motion vs Madgicx**: Madgicx manages Meta accounts and acts on them, with a creative element attached. Motion reports on four networks and touches nothing. The pair is not redundant, and teams spending seriously on Meta often run one of each. If you can only have one and your problem is that nobody is minding the account overnight, Madgicx; if your problem is that nobody knows why last month worked, Motion.

## Implementation

- Setup time: Under an hour to connect accounts and see data, though AI Tagging and historical backfill need some hours to populate before the reports are worth reading.
- Learning curve: Low for consumption and moderate for construction. Anyone can read a creative dashboard; designing the tag taxonomy and the standing reports that your team will actually run each week takes a couple of weeks of iteration.
- Onboarding: Self-serve on Free and Starter with in-app chat support. Pro, Growth, and Agency involve a sales process and correspondingly more hands-on onboarding.
- Migration: Nothing to migrate in, since Motion reads directly from the ad platforms and backfills history itself. Migrating out is where the friction is: tags, boards, and saved reports have no documented bulk export, and the underlying performance data always remains available in the ad platforms themselves.

## Platform, API & security

- Platforms: Web application
- API: No self-serve public API is advertised on the published tiers; data flows in through platform OAuth connections and out through Snapshots and exports.
- Compliance: GDPR
- Data residency: Not published.
- SSO: Not published on the Starter tier; likely part of higher quoted plans.
- Security notes: Connections use OAuth and are read-only, which materially limits the blast radius of a compromise compared with tools that hold write access to ad accounts. The vendor states customers retain ownership of their ad creative and performance data.

## Support

- Channels: In-app chat support on paid plans, Email support, Dedicated support arrangements on quoted tiers
- Documentation: Product documentation, release notes, and solution guides on the vendor site, including a published release log for features such as AI Tagging.
- Community: Strong presence in performance creative and DTC marketing communities; the company publishes creative strategy content that functions as its main community surface.

## Company

- Founded: 2021
- Founders: Reza Khadjavi, Alexander Sloan, David Berglas
- Headquarters: Toronto, Canada
- Ownership: Venture-backed
- Employees: Not disclosed
- Funding: Approximately $42M raised in total, including a $6M seed in 2022 and a $6M Series A in 2023 both led by Headline, and a $30M Series B in September 2024 led by Inovia Capital.

Funding history:

- Seed (2022): $6M. Led by Headline.
- Series A (2023): $6M. An insider round led by Headline, disclosed later alongside the Series B.
- Series B (2024): $30M. Led by Inovia Capital with Threshold Ventures, Headline, Abstract Ventures, and Sugar Capital participating.

Timeline:

- 2021: Founded in Toronto by Reza Khadjavi, Alexander Sloan, and David Berglas to solve creative reporting for paid social teams.
- 2022: Raises a $6M seed round led by Headline as creative analytics becomes a distinct product category after the iOS 14 attribution disruption.
- 2023: Raises an insider $6M Series A led by Headline, and expands beyond Meta into TikTok reporting.
- 2024: Raises a $30M Series B led by Inovia Capital in September, positioning the product as a command center for creative strategists.
- 2025: Ships AI Tagging, automatically categorizing ads across eight creative dimensions, and adds YouTube and LinkedIn ad account support.
- 2026: Reports more than 2,100 customers analyzing $14B in annual ad spend, with Inspo brand research and Snapshot sharing built out around the analytics core.

## Integrations

Meta (Facebook and Instagram) ad accounts, TikTok ad accounts, YouTube ad accounts, LinkedIn ad accounts, Google Analytics 4 (Pro and above), Northbeam (Pro and above), Snapshot links for external sharing without a seat

## FAQ

### What is Motion?

Motion is a creative analytics platform for paid social advertising. It connects Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn ad accounts, automatically tags every ad across eight creative dimensions, and renders performance as visual creative reports so teams can see which creative attributes drive results. It also includes a competitive ad research module called Inspo. It is read-only and does not manage campaigns.

### How much does Motion cost?

There is a free plan with one ad account, 14 days of history, and two seats. Starter is $250 a month covering up to $50,000 of monthly ad spend, with unlimited seats and unlimited ad accounts. Pro (up to $250,000 monthly spend), Growth (unlimited spend), and Agency are all quoted rather than published. There is a 14-day trial.

### Does Motion's price scale with my ad spend?

Yes, in bands rather than as a percentage. Starter covers up to $50,000 of monthly spend, Pro up to $250,000, and Growth is unlimited. At $5,000 of monthly spend, $250 is 5 percent of media and hard to justify. At $25,000 it is 1 percent. At $50,000 it is 0.5 percent. Past $50,000 you cannot budget from the website, because Pro and Growth prices are not published.

### Can Motion pause ads or change budgets?

No. Every connection is read-only by design and the vendor is explicit about it. Motion analyzes and reports; it never writes to an ad account. That makes it safe to connect and means cancelling cannot break a live campaign, but it also means Motion is always paired with something else if you want software acting on the account.

### Which ad networks does Motion genuinely support?

Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn ad accounts all connect for creative analytics. Google Search is not covered, which is a deliberate scope decision rather than a gap: a search account has no creative to analyze in the way this product means. Google Analytics 4 and Northbeam connect as data sources, not as ad networks.

### How does Motion handle attribution after the iOS privacy changes?

Honestly, by not trying to solve it itself. Motion reports platform-reported performance by default and integrates Google Analytics 4 and Northbeam on the Pro tier and above so you can put a modeled, independent revenue view alongside the creative analysis. If reconciling platform ROAS with real revenue is your reason for buying, budget for Pro rather than Starter.

### What is AI Tagging and why does it matter?

AI Tagging automatically classifies every ad across eight creative dimensions such as hook, format, and messaging. It matters because manual creative tagging is the standard practice on performance teams and the first thing that collapses at volume. Without tags you can only ask which ad won; with them you can ask which kind of ad wins, which is the question that changes what you produce next.

### Is Motion good for agencies?

It is built for them. Unlimited seats and unlimited ad account connections on every paid tier remove the per-seat and per-client penalties that make competing tools expensive across a roster, and Snapshots let clients read a live report without a login or a slide deck. The catch is that agency spend usually exceeds the $50,000 Starter band immediately, putting you into the unquoted Agency plan.

### What happens to my data if I cancel Motion?

Nothing breaks in your ad accounts, because Motion never wrote to them; the campaigns, creative, and history all live in Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn as before. What you lose is what Motion built on top: the AI tags, the custom taxonomy, Inspo boards, saved reports, and Snapshots. No bulk export path for those artifacts is documented, so export anything you rely on before you leave.

### Who owns Motion and is it stable?

Motion is an independent venture-backed company founded in Toronto in 2021 by Reza Khadjavi, Alexander Sloan, and David Berglas. It has raised roughly $42 million, including a $30 million Series B led by Inovia Capital in September 2024, and reports more than 2,100 customers. Note that a separate, unrelated company also called Motion sells AI calendar scheduling; they are not the same product.

## Editorial verdict

Motion is the clearest example in this category of a tool that does one job and refuses the adjacent ones. It will not touch your ad accounts, it will not make a single asset, and it has nothing to say about Google Search. What it does is turn hundreds of live ads across Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn into a report a creative strategist can actually read, with AI tags making attribute-level conclusions possible at a volume no human taxonomy survives. Unlimited seats and unlimited ad accounts on every paid tier is the commercial decision that makes it work for agencies. Buy it if you spend at least $25,000 a month on creative-led channels and your weekly creative review currently runs on screenshots and opinion. Skip it if you spend less, if you need something to act on the account, or if your real problem is that nobody is making enough ads in the first place.

## SaaSTracker awards

- Momentum (Paid Ads Management, Summer 2026): "Creative analytics that show you the ad rather than the row in a table, riding the shift from bid tactics to creative strategy."

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Source: SaaSTracker (https://saastracker.org), an independent editorial project. This profile is compiled from public information, carries no peer reviews or paid placement, and was last reviewed 2026-08-22. Awards are judged on published criteria: https://saastracker.org/methodology