5 Things You Can Do to Mitigate the Risk of Ad Fatigue

We’ve all experienced it before.

That uncomfortable feeling when you’re caught in someone else’s marketing web with no escape…

Bombarding you with the same ad over and over again.

And having the same ad follow you across channels and platforms…

Eventually, you don’t even care if it’s something you’re genuinely interested in, you’re not going to buy it because their ads are relentless and annoying. 

Or worse - the ads are irrelevant to you.

Eventually, you white noise them.

This is ad fatigue. 

It’s also referred to as marketing fatigue or audience fatigue, which means the same thing.

Let’s delve into what ad fatigue is and what it could mean for your business if your audience has it.

What is ad fatigue?

We all know by now that the path to advertising success lies in your ad creative. Your ad design is how you catch people’s attention to inspire them to interact with your brand online and enter your sales funnel.

Ad fatigue is when your audience disengages from your brand. 

It’s when a consumer has seen your ads so many times that they’re sick of seeing them, and start growing resentment towards your brand. They lose interest in your ads and stop engaging with them, your brand channels, and your brand overall.

Audience fatigue should be a serious concern for any business advertising online. It’s a major turnoff. Once your audience grows disinterested it’s an extremely difficult situation to rectify.

More importantly, ad fatigue is a cross-platform problem. This is because it speaks to a deeper issue within your marketing strategy’s tactics. 

It means your advertising is no longer working and you’re alienating your audience.

Ad fatigue statistics

It’s fair to say that many people want to see fewer marketing messages and that most people have a predetermined journey when they want to buy something. People also want the ads to have relevance to their lives and the problems they need to solve.

It’s safe to say that showing the same ad too many times is bad for business.

This graph tells us that advertisers who stop showing their ads after a couple of weeks outperform advertisers who leave theirs running for five weeks or longer. 

So, cycling your ad content faster produces better results in keeping your audience engaged.

The true cost of an overstimulated and disinterested person can last months or even longer. 

In fact, who knows if they’ll warm up to your brand again, as they could be immune. 

You know this because you’ve experienced it.

Because of the negative impact, you want to address marketing fatigue early on so you can work to fix it. 

In this article, I’m going to tell you how to diagnose ad fatigue and give you 5 things you can do to lessen the impact, and what you can do to avoid it in the future.

How do you detect ad fatigue?

While some platforms let you know when ad fatigue creeps in, it’s best to know what to look out for in your key performance indicators and analytics data to spot it and address it as soon as possible. Here are the signs and symptoms.

Lower click-through rate (CTR)

One of the first signs is a drop in click-through rate on your ad campaigns. This is the number of times your ad was clicked on divided by the number of impressions. Your CTR is an indication of interest in your offering.

A drop in CTR is an undeniable sign that your ad content isn’t appealing to your audience anymore and could be due to ad fatigue. 

It could mean they’ve either seen it too much, aren’t excited by or interested in your offer, it’s not relevant to them, or they’re flat-out ignoring your ads.

Check out the CTR benchmarks for your industry so you know where to aim.

Decreased engagement

A drop in your engagement rates is a clear indication that something is off with your ad. Fewer likes, comments, shares, and messages tell you that your audience isn’t interacting with it as much, and perhaps advertising fatigue has set in. 

With ad fatigue, it shows your ad is not resonating with your audience which could be because of boredom, irrelevance, or a feeling of being bombarded.

Higher cost per action (CPA)

If you’re paying a higher cost per action, cost per result, cost per click, cost per acquisition, or any other action-related metric, it could mean you’re dealing with ad fatigue.

A spike in these costs can mean your audience is scrolling straight past your ads, which means you’re paying for the view without it leading to an action.

Higher frequency

Your frequency rate tells you how many times someone sees your ad before taking action.  

A boost in ad frequency means they need to see it more times before they do anything, which can indicate ad fatigue and boredom.

The ideal ad frequency rate differs between warm and cold audiences, and you want to make sure you aren’t over-advertising to them. While you need to show your ad to consumers a few times for it to stick, you must remember that if they haven’t taken action by the 20th time they’ve seen it, they’re not likely to.

Ways to mitigate the risk of ad fatigue

First, we’ll look at the methods that can be applied across multiple channels, and then I’ll break it down by platform in the next section.

1. Refresh your creative assets

Your creative production workflow can save you. By creating new ads based on creative variations, you can explore simple adaptations like

• Changing the colors you use
• Using different backgrounds
• Rewording your ad copy or offer
• Trying a new call to action (CTA)

Regardless of what you change or test, you should refresh your content regularly. 

The sheer amount of ad creatives needed can seem overwhelming, but if you have a reliable toolkit, this becomes a non-issue. 

Enter Madgicx’s Creative Workflow. 

The Madgicx Creative Workflow was designed by advertisers for advertisers to constantly create converting ads and take the pain out of ad production. Here’s what’s included:

• Ad Library for creative inspiration from your competitor’s ads and examples of ads from your favorite brands
• Sparkle for creative design by the pros in 48 hours
• Ad Launcher to launch your ad variations immediately, straight from your media library

With a production system like this, your creative well will never run dry - and it’s cheaper than employing an entire creative team. Give the Ad Library a try today.

2. Rotate your ads

If you’re not ready to take the plunge on testing tons of creative variations yet - it eats up your ad budget -  you can try another tactic. 

If you create a large number of variations at the beginning, you can divide them across audiences (ad sets) and rotate them if they start showing signs of ad fatigue (remember our diagnostics!).

3. Expand your target audience

Ad fatigue could also be an indication that your audience pool is too small. A narrow audience reaches saturation quicker than a large one which means you’ll experience ad fatigue. 

You can expand your audience in a few ways:

• Connect your audience data - Use the Meta Pixel and Conversions API to track all stages of the purchase journey. You should also upload your offline conversion events like phone calls, in-store sales, and messages. If you do this, it gives Meta an accurate set of data for the algorithm to find similar accounts and even more potential customers. Furthermore, uploading customer lists helps Meta to create lookalike audiences of users who match your customer criteria.
• Mix and match - Create lookalike audiences of your better-performing ones and try different combinations in the hopes of unlocking a superstar. You can do this easily in the Madgicx Audience Studio.
• Discover new interests - Explore new overlapping interests of your existing audiences to market to in your ad campaign creatives and copy. You can use the Audience Studio to do this in a few clicks. 

Madgicx has several time-saving solutions to enhance your targeting.

4. Set frequency caps

If your audience is small, like your retargeting or retention ones, you should set a frequency cap to prevent your ad from being shown to your audience too many times.

You can set this on Facebook under “Automated Rules” or with Madgicx in “Automation Overview” automation to ensure you don’t overwhelm your audience with the same ad too many times.

You can also implement frequency capping on Google Ads depending on the campaign you’re running; Display, or Video..

5. Track campaign performance and optimize

While this is the last tip, it’s certainly one of the most important. 

The best way to prevent ad fatigue in your online advertising campaigns is to monitor your ad performance and optimize accordingly.

The only way to spot the warning signs of ad fatigue is to keep a close eye on your ads, and the metrics we mentioned earlier on. The best tool to do this is Madgicx’s One-Click Report where you can drag and drop to create custom reports or use our prebuilt templates. It took me just a few minutes to create this one.

One Click Report is a live analytics dashboard that shows your ad performance and the metrics you care about across multiple advertising channels. You can customize your reports, use our prebuilt ones, and edit them by simply dragging and dropping. 

One-Click Report connects to Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, Shopify, TikTok, and Google Analytics to give you a comprehensive snapshot of your advertising performance overall. Try it for free - you get one free live dashboard.

Lastly, you should use the learnings from your analytics data to optimize your ads and create new campaigns. If you see your frequency rate and cost per purchase creeping up or your engagement rate and CTR dropping, take a deeper look to see how long your ads have been running. 

You’ll also be able to see which of your audiences and creatives perform better, so you can use them again in the future or create new lookalike audiences or creative combinations.

Ad fatigue tips by platform

Not all social media or advertising platforms are the same. Here are some hacks and best practices I found to help treat ad fatigue.

Facebook and Instagram

1. Exclude audience segments from your acquisition advertising campaigns like

• People who have purchased or visited your website in the last 30 days
• Fans of your Page, depending on where they are in your sales funnel

You should still market to these people but in different campaigns, and you should pay close attention to the frequency these segments experience.

2. Decrease the budget of high-frequency ad sets if the results are deteriorating. 
3. Show your ads on the best days and times based on your ad account history and your target audience. Madgicx’s Auction Insights gives you this information in the ‘Days & Hours’ widget.
4. Use dynamic creative and create dynamic experiences using Advantage+ to create multiple variations of your creatives

Meta’s Ads Manager alerts you when your creative encroaches on ad fatigue territory. Here are some of the warnings you’ll see in the delivery column of your Ads Manager and what they mean:

• Creative Limited or Creative Fatigue - This is when your cost per result is more than your past ads but less than 2x as much.‍
• Ad Fatigue - When your cost per result is more than or equal to double your past ads’ cost per result

Google Ads

There are many similarities between Meta and Google Ads when it comes to dealing with ad fatigue. On Google Ads, you should:

1. Ensure your Ad Strength is rated Good or Excellent, otherwise, it shows you don’t have enough depth and breadth of ad assets or variables to diversify how your ad is shown, which will likely mean ad fatigue is on the horizon.
2. Set a schedule for your ads to run at the best times 
3. Complete all the copy variations available to you like headlines and descriptions to create different wording to pair with your ad creative.
4. Use negative keywords to refine your audience to ensure your ads are relevant and shown to the right target market.
5. Use Dynamic Search Ads to create multiple ad variations and use Google’s algorithm to create ad variations based on your input, then use Ad Rank to monitor performance and optimize based on the results.
6. Check your Quality Score as this is a direct result of the metrics to monitor your ad’s performance, which addresses ad fatigue.
7. Set that frequency cap we spoke about in the previous section.

TikTok

Now, TikTok works a little differently. Audiences on the platform experience creative fatigue much faster than on Facebook or Instagram.

1. Repurpose your videos - TikTok recommends refreshing your ad creatives every 7 days (!), which is pretty labor-intensive. However, you can use the same creative but try different angles and hooks to connect with people. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time if you’re smart about repurposing your content. 
2. Use Automated Creative Optimization - TikTok offers advertisers a way to optimize ad creatives automatically with Automated Creative Optimization (ACO). This tool is akin to Facebook’s Dynamic Creative which allows you to make creative variations easily. 
3. Use the Smart Video tool - Not all advertisers have the time to edit videos, which is why TikTok has introduced their Smart Video tool. It allows you to efficiently create and edit videos using AI to suggest music and apply basic video edits like transitions, cuts, and align video to the rhythm of the music; plus you can create multiple variations of your video in different styles.

Notes

• If you’re just starting out and aren’t using ACO, you should create multiple diverse creatives to test.
• TikTok’s learning phase needs 50 conversions so you should hold out until then for each creative version to complete it before adding more so you create ads based on what works.

Snapchat

Snapchat advertisers say that creative fatigue is higher than Facebook and Instagram, similar to TikTok.

Like TikTok, Snapchat users are predominantly Gen Z and are vocal about seeing an ad over and over or irrelevant ads. It’s important to know who your target market is on the platform you’re advertising on.

Here is what you can do on Snapchat to combat ad fatigue:

• A/B Testing - Snapchat allows advertisers to test 4 variables in their split testing feature. These are your ad creative, target audience, ad placement, and advertiser goal.
• Dynamic ads - Just as the other platforms we’ve looked at, Snapchat has a dynamic ads option. As long as you connect your Snap Pixel and Product Catalog to your Snapchat Ads Manager, you can create personalized creatives for your audience.

Conclusion

It’s obvious that there’s a lot to lose as a brand if your audience has ad fatigue. It’s also obvious that prevention is better than a cure. This is why having a streamlined creative automation workflow process in place and keeping a close eye on your ad performance is critical to avoiding this high-impact problem. 

Madgicx’s Creative Workflow is your ad production sidekick to ensure you constantly create converting ads and don’t let ad fatigue set in. Get started with the Ad Library today for free.