Social Thrive

Ad Fatigue – What Is It And How To Fight It

As we all move into the holiday season and start ramping up our advertising efforts, we want to send a friendly reminder about ad fatigue and the steps to prevent it. If you’re new here, you may not know what ad fatigue is. So, let us teach you! Ad fatigue is what happens when your target audience has been shown your ad too many times and your CTR (click-through rate) falls while the frequency of your ad being shown continues to increase. It makes you think your ad is starting to fail (and you definitely don’t want your stats to suffer before you show your boss). Basically, your audience is seeing your ad too often and they’re losing interest. 

Diagnosing Ad Fatigue 

Your ad budget just got approved. You work hard setting up your best ads, copy that captures the audience, and the perfect CTA. Everything is running smoothly… until it’s not. 

You log into your analytics and POOF – your audience is continuously falling off. Now, don’t dismiss your skills in advertising or the power of great creative copy just yet. Ad fatigue happens to the best of us. 

First, analyze your advertisements and ensure that ad fatigue is what happened to you. (Meaning, look at your CTR and audience, and ensure all other assets are correct such as the landing page and verbiage.) If your ad frequency is increasing, and your other stats are declining, that is usually a telltale sign of ad fatigue. 

Okay, so you’ve come to your ad fatigue prognosis. This happens for a few reasons. The first being that users are shown your ad a lot. Just about every time they sign-in to Facebook, Instagram, etc. Not to mention your ad is up against friends’ photos, fun statuses, and the latest news articles in their feed. In the end, people are accustomed to your image, and they simply stop clicking. The ad becomes stale. The same would happen if you’re sick of seeing a TV commercial, listening to a repetitive radio ad and so on. SKIP! 

You don’t want people to skip over your ad. So, how do we fight ad fatigue? Read on!

How To Fight Fatigue 

First and foremost, keep your ads fresh! ! Change up your creative content and stop users from being desensitized to your efforts. As you already know, creative content should be eye-catching! Whether that means a large layout, fun brand colors or an enticing CTA. Continue to check in on your ad creative, and switch it up at the first signs of fatigue! Create and rotate! Make various versions of your ad; tell the same story with different creatives and text. 

Keep it fun, but keep it simple. The busier the image, the worse it will perform. That being said, it’s all about testing different versions out and seeing what works for your company. 

Monitor and analyze your ads. The key to spotting dips in performance is to keep an eye on your ad metrics. First, check on the ad frequency. Frequency refers to the number of times your audience sees the ad. Rule of thumb is, if your audience is close to seeing your ad eight to ten times, that is too frequent. 

Additionally, it is important to monitor the click-through rate (CTR). This is the number of times people click on your ad, divided by the number of impressions. Each industry has a different CTR, but a general guide is to ensure your CTR is around 2%.

Lastly, keep an eye on your engagement. How is your audience reacting to your ad? Are you reaching the right audience? You’ll want to make sure each ad you have running is speaking to each of your target audiences. For example, advertisements geared toward sports fanatics should not be the same as advertisements meant for new moms. You’ll want to make sure each of your ad sets makes sense for your demographic and geographic audiences. 

Continue to check on the audience’s response to your ads. Is engagement increasing or decreasing? Change up your ad at signs of decreased ad engagement. 

Overall, ad fatigue is easy to combat. Remember – let your ad play out and gain traction. You want to give your ad time to build an audience and performance. So, don’t jump ship on your ad too early. Publish your ad and give it some time to see the world! Once your ad has been running a few weeks, then you can start your optimization.