Battling Today’s Digital Ad Fatigue

This has happened to all of us, and it has a name – ad fatigue. Like any other campaign performance metric, it's important to diagnose and modify your campaign and creative when fatigue sets in, your campaign depends on it! 

Ad fatigue can happen to any campaign, including your streaming TV ads, social media ads, digital ads, etc. It may not be sudden, but it can be easy to spot when ad fatigue starts to set in. The first thing to look for is a sudden, unexpected drop in campaign performance. Unless there is another reason behind this (i.e., a pause in your campaign being run, or a drop in budgeted funds being put towards your campaign), you’re most likely facing ad fatigue. The good news – there is plenty that can be done to drive the performance of your ads back in the right direction! 

Apart from setting an ad frequency cap to your campaign, here are three simple recommendations to utilize as a starting point for fighting ad fatigue:  

Modify Your Target Audience 

As we mentioned in our last article about ad fatigue, drilling down your target audience can hurt your campaign. The more qualifiers you add, the more your audience will shrink, and although you put a lot of hard work into your ads, your target audience might not appreciate seeing the same ad 5 times in a row. You can combat this by doing something as simple as rotating your network - target mobile users first and then swap to desktop once fatigue hits. 

Test or Modify Creative 

This may seem like a no-brainer, but often, the lack of diversified ad creative can impact the performance of a campaign and contribute to ad fatigue. Even if your ad is performing well, it's only a matter of time before your audience has seen it more times than they would like to have. Not only will rotating your ads help to keep them fresh, but you can even test ads against each other to find out what your audience responds to better.  

Rotate Your Ads Indefinitely  

Although it may be more appealing to advertisers to optimize for clicks and conversions, this opens up the possibility of showing your audience the same ad too often. When setting up a campaign in Google, there is the option to rotate your ads indefinitely. By doing this, Google will not favor better-performing ads, which means all of your ads will have their fair share of frequency.  

These steps are the foundation for fighting ad fatigue, however it is crucial to ensure that your ads remain impactful and effective to your targeted audience. It could very well be the key factor in making sure your ads perform as intended. Reworking your existing ads to ensure that they look and feel new, revisit your targeted audience parameters, and drive home the goal of your campaign, remain strong tactics in fighting ad fatigue. These simple changes have the potential to drive your ad campaign back to, and even beyond the heights they reached when your campaign was launched.