Almost every Facebook advertiser has been in a situation whereby ad performance gradually declines after several days without even making any significant changes to the campaign setup. Usually, most people say that their Facebook campaigns are dying. What happens here is something that is called Ad Fatigue.
Ad fatigue is the situation whereby the target audience has grown tired of seeing your ad, after which you can notice an increase in CPA and a drop in your ROAS.
And that doesn’t sound good, right?
So in this article, we are sharing tips from Artur Razdorozhnyi, an e-commerce and Facebook ads expert from Poland who addresses the issue of ad fatigue and shares tips on how to pre-determine the situation before it happens, what to look at and what to do when it starts happening so that you can keep your campaigns positive.
About Facebook ads Fatigue
Facebook ad fatigue happens when your ad frequency is too high, forcing your target audience to view the same ads repeatedly. When consumers watch the same commercial over and again, their performance suffers, which is what ad fatigue is. Ad fatigue will affect important metrics such as the cost per 1 000 impressions (CPM) and the return on ad spend (ROAS). Every campaign, no matter how effective, will eventually encounter creative ad weariness.
Often we see posts in Facebook groups or blog articles advising us to look at the ad frequency, but Artur suggests that this is not entirely correct. He says that high frequency is not in itself an indicator. Facebook ads can still perform well with frequencies of 10, 20, and more.
How to Analyze Facebook ad Fatigue
To analyze ad fatigue, we need to analyze it in the same way as we do in all other cases of advertising analysis. We have to take into account the correlation of several metrics.
Artur came up with a simple theory to analyze ad fatigue which is:
If the frequency of impressions grows simultaneously with the growth of interactions, it’s more likely that your performance is growing before reaching the peak.
If the frequency increases and the interactions go down, you can assume that the saturation of the audience has been reached, and the repeated displays have started.
And this is a signal that ad fatigue is starting to take over and something needs to be done.
How to Treat Facebook Ad Fatigue
Artur came up with two principles that can help solve any case of ad fatigue for both acquisition and retargeting campaigns:
- If you encounter ad fatigue in retargeting campaigns with a reach objective, usually it’s Mid of the Funnel, you can set a custom frequency cap in Adset settings.
- If it happens with the acquisition campaign, there are several options depending on the situation which are explained below:
Note: Do not forget in the acquisition campaign to exclude people who have already purchased, already subscribed, or did a conversion event on your website. Many make this mistake.
Here are the 3 ways to get rid of Ad fatigue:
1. Expand your audience targeting
If you have enough data in Adset to optimize your ad delivery and there is an opportunity to expand your audience targeting, it’s high time to do it.
2. Add new creative, refresh your ad copy, and try out new ad formats
When you notice signs of ad fatigue, it’s always better to set up 3–4 ad creative in one Adset, so when advertising fatigue sets in and the effectiveness of the ad drop, Facebook automatically redirects reach to the second winning ad creative. And it’s more efficient than doing it manually.
But when you see that all winning creatives burned out after some time of Adset work, try adding new creatives first and see if it fixes the situation, in most cases, it gives a second wind. Because there are accumulated data in Adset, you won’t spend the budget on the learning phase again. But sometimes also happens when adding new creatives to working Adset only holds back the drop in results for a while but does not change the situation. In this case, it is worth relaunching the Adsets with new ad creatives.
3. Change the message
In cases with large budgets or when running a campaign for a while, you may find that even changing ad creatives doesn’t help much. This may mean that the audience has grown tired of your message, and only by changing it you will be able to improve your performance. That’s why we’re always testing new messages, even if we get great results.
Conclusion
The tips shared above by Artur Razdorozhnyi will help you to shake up your ads from time to time so that you can provide yourself or your clients with a more unique and versatile experience.
There’s more to running a successful Facebook campaign than knowing how to target the right audience, and how to create copy for every stage in the buyer funnel.
In an environment where your ad creatives and the audience stays the same for extended periods, ad fatigue is a very real and complicated problem. Although you want to continue increasing your chances of a purchase from a lead, you don’t want to hound them with the same offer every day.
