You’ve probably had the experience of searching for a term or product on the web and having to wade through a sea of ads before finding what you’re looking for. We’ve all gotten to be experts at ignoring this stuff – which is terrible news for digital marketers and their ad campaigns. But it’s important to be aware of the dangers of ad fatigue.
Ad fatigue refers to the quick drop off in performance of your creatives because consumers are seeing the same ads over and over again. This can make your online advertising much more expensive and much less effective – something that is pretty hard to justify as good marketing spend. Here are 8 solutions that can help you avoid ad fatigue and get the most Return on Investment (ROI) from your digital ad spend.
1. Lower Ad Frequency
The number one way to avoid ad fatigue is to limit the number of times viewers see the same ad. Unless you have an audience of millions, platforms like Facebook will start repeating your ads over and over. Viewers could even see the same ad five or 10 times! This can get annoying and is not a good way to woo your customers into exploring your brand. AdEspresso tested the effects of ad frequency of click-through-rate and found that when people saw the same ads twice, CTR fell by 8.9 percent. And by the 4th time, the CTR decrease was already 23.3 percent. At the same time, Cost-per-Click was rapidly increasing. You want to keep an eye on your ads to make sure they aren’t shown more than three times to the same audience.
2. Non-Stop Rotation
Make sure that you have more than one or two ads in rotation at any given time. This reduces the chance of viewers being exposed to the same thing over and over. And, even if they do get shown your ad more than three times, at least they will likely have seen different ads in between. Anything you can do to change up the monotony of looking at the exact same content time after time is a good move on your part.
3. Spice Up Your Creatives
Facebook’s advertising best practices suggest changing your creatives every one to two weeks in order to combat ad fatigue. That way users will get to see fresh ad designs all the time! And you can make sure your ads are current and on top of seasons and trends, etc. This requires you to produce a high volume of ad creatives for constant refresh, which can be expensive and time-consuming. However, you can now achieve this with ReFUEL4’s scalable creative production in a turnaround of less then 72 hours.
4. Refresh ALL Elements
Ad visuals aren’t the only thing that need refreshers during a campaign. There are other elements that can be altered as well, including links, copy, CTAs, etc. Try rephrasing your copy and doing split testing to see which versions are more effective.
5. Optimize Your Audience
Regular A/B testing can help you optimize your creatives to reach the most valuable viewers. This means testing all different elements as you refresh them, from images and colors to CTAs and headlines. It’s important to run tests over a period of at least 30 days, when possible, to get an accurate sense of what appeals to your audience. Over time you can start to glean insights into which general elements work and which ones are falling short.
6. Use Different Ad Placements
Make sure to use Desktop, Mobile and Audience Network placements for each of your ad sets – this ensures a higher number of likes and shares for each ad. To make the most of multiple ad placements, just create a separate ad group for each and assign a different placement for each so that your ad spend is delivered equally among them.
7. Exclude People Who Have Engaged With Your Ads
One super effective way to make sure you’re not bothering people in your audience is to exclude the ones who have already visited your advertising campaign’s landing page. This is easy to do on Facebook by using Facebook pixels to create custom audiences of people who have visited your site in the last 60 days, filled out a form, signed up for a newsletter, etc. Then use their Power Editor to exclude these groups from your targeting lists and your ads will only be seen by people who haven’t clicked on them yet.
8. Use Retargeting and Dynamic Ads
Both retargeting and dynamic ads are ways of personalizing what viewers see based on other items and sites they have viewed. This is a great way to combat fatigue because people will get customized content based on information, services and items they have previously shown an interest in. Facebook recently released the ability to use Dynamic Ads for prospecting clientsas well as for people who have previously visited products on your site. For instance, if someone has been perusing area rugs on other sites, you can serve them a dynamic ad of the area rugs that you have for sale.
Ad fatigue has a negative impact on ad performance and, over time, on your bottom line. That’s why it’s important to take these measures early and make sure that your marketing dollars are being spent wisely on ads that excite your audience instead of tiring them out.
