If you’ve ever run social ads, this scenario is pretty common: one ad creative performs really, really well. It’s the big money maker; you’ve run it over and over again for weeks (maybe even months).
But time passes, and performance dips. Eventually the ad doesn’t convert. You’re asking yourself, “Why is this happening to me?!” after so much success.
It’s called “ad fatigue.” Your audience is no longer engaging with the ad because they’ve seen it time and time again. They’re scrolling past it because it’s become so familiar.
When I worked on Costco’s digital team, I wrote and launched an ad for a popular supplement called Amberen.
The first time we launched the ad was alongside a savings period. It was a huge success; the post (which frankly isn’t super exciting!) had so many comments raving about the supplement. We saw the attributable sales data through Adobe Analytics. The buyer and client were understandably elated: they’d found a new channel to drive significant sales.
But continuing to spend months at a time with the same creative would’ve been a mistake. After the savings period ended (about 4-6 weeks), we strategically paused the ad. Oversaturating our Costco member list with the same ad (each person getting 15+ impressions) was not a responsible use of funds. The CPM would rise and we’d see sales trail off on Costco.com.
Waiting until we had an updated member audience list, new Lookalike lists created, and fresh creative, we could restart the ad and feel confident about the results.
Comparing your reach and impressions can inform you about the number of times your ad is being shown to the same people. For example, if your reach is 1,000 but your impressions are 3,000, you can assume that each person has seen the ad on average about 3 times (3,000 divided by 1,000 = 3). Depending on your campaign and dashboard setup in Ads Manager, you can also see this metric for each ad.
Setting up a campaign with some ad types allows you to limit the number of impressions per person, too.
What can you do if your audience is experiencing ad fatigue?
Update the ad creative with small tweaks
One of the easiest ways to combat ad fatigue is to create alternate versions of the existing creative, just different enough to not be passed by in the feed.
For example, if you have a short-form video that performs really well, you could:
- Try 3-4 new hooks in the first 5 seconds of the video
- If using an influencer or on-camera actor, switch to a new persona with the exact same script to see how it impacts performance
- Change the text that appears on the video in the first 5 seconds (e.g. “Help relieve menopause symptoms” vs. “Menopause symptoms are killing me”)
Change or broaden your audience
Having a narrow audience can contribute to ad fatigue. Broaden your audience and you may be surprised by sales volumes increasing, or learning some valuable information about audience preferences.
There’s a lot of ways to broaden your audience if you’re manually setting up ads, including:
- Creating Lookalike lists based off your primary list upload (or reuploading your primary list if it’s been awhile)
- Broadening age groups or removing them altogether
- Remove gender restrictions
- Remove or switch demographic or interest-based targeting
Need help designing or setting up an acquisition and retention strategy? Reach out: lindsey@paperraccoon.com
