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Ad fatigue is a simple concept - it’s when audiences lose interest in an ad because they've seen it too many times. You know the drill—click-through rates drop, and conversions start to slide. It's like your audience just tunes out.
However, combating ad fatigue is much more complex and can be a real headache for marketing teams. When ad fatigue sets in, customer acquisition costs increase, and campaign performance plateaus—or worse, declines!
Quick background if you’re not familiar with our site. We’re Marpipe, a platform that helps brands unlock the full potential of their product catalog with tools to create dynamic creative for every SKU and offering in just a few minutes. We’ve worked with brands across practically every industry and have seen the early symptoms and the most effective solutions for turning ad campaigns around when faced with ad fatigue.
Recognizing ad fatigue early is crucial. The sooner you spot it, the quicker you can tweak your strategy to keep your audience engaged. With the right approach, you can keep your ads fresh and your audience interested. Keep those campaigns humming along smoothly!
Here’s an ad fatigue KPI cheat list:
One thing to watch out for when hunting for signs of ad fatigue is the trap of conflating high frequency with poor performance.
Just because your ad has a high impression share or is reaching its frequency cap limit does not mean that it’s performing poorly. Some ads can run all year round to the same target audience, a marketer’s dream, without seeing diminishing returns. So be alert when staring at your marketing dashboards and remember to never look at any single metric in isolation.
For a deeper dive into redefining creative fatigue and strategies to combat it, explore our insights on why it's time to redefine creative fatigue.
If you have determined that ad fatigue has in fact crept into your paid mix, it’s time to experiment until you resolve it. But where to begin?
Here’s a helpful three-part experimentation framework to combat ad fatigue: Creative, Campaign, and Channel.
Creative
If you're combating ad fatigue, the first culprit is most often your creative.
Maybe your team put in considerable time, resources, and thought into crafting that one high-quality creative asset in hopes that it would step change ad performance. Unfortunately, there are few silver bullets in today’s world of paid social-driven performance marketing.
You need to go broader and launch multiple creative types with different styles, imagery, and hooks in a continuous attempt to intercept potential customers as they scroll through an endless feed of similarly engagement-optimized creative.
Struggling to kickstart creative production?
Dynamic product ads, or DPAs, are an increasingly effective solution for delivering creative assets affordably at scale. Dynamic ads, also known as catalog ads, allow you to deliver customized ads for each SKU in your catalog without having to create multiple campaigns limited by individual budgets and targeting.
With Marpipe, you can take creative production for DPAs further by creating templates that dynamically insert the information from your product feed to create unique assets for each SKU. For example, in just a few clicks you can create a static or video ad template that dynamically displays the product hero shot, product name, sale price, and star review rating for each product in your catalog.
Enriched catalog ads can stop ad fatigue by allowing you to experiment with new styles and CTAs while launching a range of on-brand assets in market at once.
Campaign
Now that you’ve expanded your creative mix, if there are still signs of ad fatigue in your account, it’s time to look at your overall campaign mix.
With any campaign setup, you’ll want to ensure a mix of both audience types and placements which you can go about in one of two ways. Note that targeting parameters vary by platform, but we’ll focus on Meta due to its scale and popularity.
First, you can manually setup campaigns to each have their own audiences, placements, and explicitly defined settings like daily budget or frequency caps.
Meta allows you to create audiences by gender, age, interest groups, household income, location, and much more. Placements include Feed, Stories, Reels as well as formats like static or carousel.
However, when you consider all the combinations of audience + placement + creative you begin to see why manual setup isn’t always the most optimal approach to campaign setup.
Instead, brands can take advantage of powerful campaign automation built into solutions like Meta’s Advantage+ Ads.
Advantage+ Ads target both broad audiences and multiple placements within one campaign and one budget but leverage machine-learning to self-optimize based on a target conversion event, such as views or purchases. While not always perfect, automated bidding allows you to test a variety of audiences, placements, and creatives without the difficult manual setup and restrictions of splitting budgets among multiple campaigns.
Advantage+ Ads, and other automated campaign solutions, also support catalog ads and dynamic product ads, further unlocking your ability to overcome ad fatigue.
Channel
And finally, if experimenting with both creative and campaigns yields no improvement, your last resort to combating ad fatigue will be to test new channels. It might be time to diversify and test Snapchat, TikTok, or Pinterest to appeal to new audiences, test new placements, and stretch the limits of your creative.
We’ve written thorough guides to Dynamic Product Ads for each platform which you can find here:
TikTok DPAs
Ad fatigue can be a tricky issue for marketing teams, but understanding it is the first step to overcoming it. Recognizing the signs early means you can address them before they impact your campaign's success. It's all about staying on top of performance metrics and making data-driven decisions.
Keep an eye on those key performance indicators. Here’s what to focus on:
Implementing effective strategies and an experimentation framework (like Creative, Campaigns, & Channels) is crucial. Refresh your creatives, use frequency capping, and consider expanding your audience. These tactics can help keep your ads engaging and your audience interested.
Data-driven insights are your best friend in this journey. Use them to refine your campaigns and maintain ad effectiveness. Staying proactive and testing new solutions ensures you achieve your marketing goals without falling into the trap of ad fatigue. If you haven’t tried dynamic product ads yet, or want to take DPAs further with Marpipe, you can get started for free by clicking Sign Up at the top of this page. Upload your product feed and build your first dynamic ads for free today!
