How to Diagnose and Fix Ad Fatigue
You’ve had an ad that performed well last month, but lately, your ROAS has dropped, and your CPA is going up. What’s going on? How do you know if you have ad fatigue?
What is ad fatigue?
Ad fatigue occurs when audiences encounter the same ad too often, and become less responsive to them. The three telltale indicators of ad fatigue are:
High ad frequency. Users in each stage of your funnel have seen your ad too often.
Decline in conversions. Ad performance has dropped from an established baseline conversion level in a specific audience. Identify your conversion goal (lead, purchase, download, add to cart, etc.) and track weekly to assess results.
Slowdown in engagement. Though your ad campaign has performed reliably well for a long period of time, your CPC is now rising, and CTR is declining.
It’s imperative to monitor ad campaign performance on a regular basis to identify ad fatigue. Recognizing the signs of ad fatigue early means that you can cut low performing campaigns promptly and save on ad spend. If growth priorities are at the forefront for your business, we suggest rotating out the fatigued creative with a new test.
Diagnosing your ad campaign
Prematurely attributing poor ad performance to ad fatigue is a common marketing fallacy. Keep in mind that ad fatigue only occurs with long term ad campaigns that have historically performed well.
If you suspect your campaign is experiencing ad fatigue, rule out other culprits for low performance before killing your ad creative entirely. Consider the following:
Decline in performance may indicate a high conversion rate. Your ad’s been so successful that interested viewers have already purchased a product. While the ad may be fatigued, the audience may not be, but you haven’t considered upsell or cross-sell strategies to encourage past purchasers to purchase again.
The audience parameters are too wide. For instance, users who like luxury cars on Facebook are not an ideal target audience for a Maserati ad. Luxury car enthusiasts range from kids who like fast cars, to casual admirers, which is a broad audience set that may not necessarily include those with buying power.
Your ad needs more creative variation. The core messaging of your ad has been effective. You’ve found the perfect tagline and image, but your audience scrolls past it because they’ve seen it before.
Your ad spend is too high for the audience size. The ad frequency in your audience set is high because you’re cycling through the same users in that audience group. This varies per funnel stage. As a baseline we follow these best practices for a frequency cap:
Top of funnel: 2
Middle of funnel: 4
Bottom of funnel: 8 to 12
Recipe for a successful ad campaign
Ad fatigue is inevitable, and will happen even to evergreen ads eventually. Running agile campaigns and consistently testing new creative, however, is a sure way to combat ad fatigue.
Ingredients for a fatigue resistant ad
Winning creative.
Timing.
Audience.
Spend.
No ad is perfect on the first try. Perfecting ad creative is an iterative and ongoing process. Continually try new ideas and make creative variations, and test new audiences to find what works. If your hunch for a winning ad doesn’t work out, take it for a test run next month—perhaps it’s an issue of timing.
Agile ad campaigns are fatigue-resistant
Ad fatigue is inevitable with traditional campaign management. Keep your ads fresh by running agile campaigns, and regularly testing out new creative ideas.
Work with us.
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