Ad Fatigue: The Rundown

Have you ever been scrolling through social media and seen the same ad over and over and over? (You get it.) Well, then you’ve experienced ad fatigue, friend! 

What is Ad Fatigue?

Ad Fatigue, or creative fatigue, isn’t some new tech jargon. It’s simply the term used for when an ad (or ad set) has been running for an extended period of time without being updated. 

Basically, ad fatigue is when your target audience is getting tired of seeing your ad. 

For example: Say you’re running a targeted 90-Day PPC campaign on Instagram with one photo. After 60 days it’s been seen by 260,000 people and has 875,000 impressions. 

That sounds great! Great work, Marketing Team! But look closely. The ad—due to the targeting parameters—is beginning to feed multiple times to the same audience. 

This audience has now seen the same ad image an average of 3+ times and there are still 30 days left in the campaign.

This audience is going to start experiencing ad fatigue, and the platform knows it and will start limiting the reach of your ad. That means your target audience that *hasn't* seen your beautiful, well-crafted ad probably won’t get a chance to. 

Why Does It Matter? 

We know what you’re thinking, “Hey, Growth, our ads are just fine, and ad fatigue won’t impact our bottom line.” 

You might want to rethink that. 

Ad fatigue can have a direct impact on every aspect of your marketing campaign and can create a massive pain point for you AND your clients. 

Here’s what we mean by pain: 

• Increased cost-per-click (CPC) means decreased return-on-investment (ROI).
• Decreased click-through rate means decreased conversions.
• Decreased conversions mean your sales pipeline is empty. 
• An empty sales pipeline means - well, you get the idea by now. 

How Can You Avoid It? 

Now you’re probably thinking, “But I have ads that are running for 90 days! What do I do?” 

Have no fear—Growth is here.

Here are some best practices to keep your ad account healthy and your ads relevant: 

• Dynamic Ads - Dynamic Ads give you the ability to have multiple graphics rotate in and out to pair with your provided ad copy. It’s like a data-driven carousel that feeds your target audience the right ad at the right time. 
• Create Templates for Graphics - Templates give you the freedom to swap in and swap out layers to keep the look and feel of your ads consistent across your ad set. Different photo? Different font color? All of it can be changed at the drop of a hat (especially if you’re using Canva, one of the “must-haves” in our Tech Stack)
• Marketing + Sales alignment - Your marketing goals should be consistent with the goals of your sales team. If your ads are speaking to the wrong audience, that’s a problem. Are you tracking the same KPIs as they are? Keeping your target audience defined will help avoid ad fatigue and avoid wasting creative assets. 

Growth has been working with dynamic ads from the get-go. 

And since they’re the perfect way to avoid ad fatigue with efficiency (and are pretty much a requirement if you want success), now’s the time to ask one of the marketing experts on our team to help you out with them if you’re still a little shaky about this approaching deadline. 

We’re here to help.