Overcome Ad Fatigue with these 7 Effective Strategies
Last update: 3 August 2023 at 02:31 pm
3.00/5How do you generate more leads? Most marketers would vote for aggressive advertising. But this can easily lead to ad fatigue as your audience gets bored and frustrated by repeatedly seeing the same ads.
What’s the result? Potential customers may ignore your ads, skip them, or block them altogether.
Knowing that 37% of global internet users use ad blockers is disheartening as a marketer. And the top reason to block ads is related to ad fatigue.
Is there a way to avoid ad fatigue? There is, provided you are ready to push your creative boundaries.
In this post, I will discuss ways to detect ad fatigue and share some of the trusted techniques to combat ad fatigue and create more impactful ad campaigns.
Are you ready to explore? Let’s get rolling.
What is Ad Fatigue?
Consider this. You log in to Instagram to find the same social media ads you have seen a few times on Facebook or YouTube. You switch TV channels or radio stations and watch the same ads frequently. This phenomenon is called ad fatigue.
When your audience sees your adverts so many times on multiple channels, they get ‘fatigued’ and stop paying attention to them.
When you design an ad campaign, you aim to reach more audiences, attract more potential customers and generate more leads. But when you over-serve the ad content to the same audience, again and again, it becomes less effective, and ad fatigue occurs.
Ad fatigue is a real challenge staring marketers in the face, and it can lead to ad blindness, where your target audience stops noticing your ads. If you do not see this in time and find ways to combat ad fatigue, it will directly impact your advertising ROI and sales.
How to Detect Ad Fatigue?
It’s clear. Ad fatigue is harmful to your brand and needs to be addressed immediately. Here are some clear signs you must watch out for to recognize ad fatigue early.
Higher Cost-Per-Click
When you create an ad campaign, you set goals, and one of the metrics to measure its success is Cost-Per-Click (CPC). The lesser the CPC better the results. CPC is vital while comparing campaign results.
When Google, Facebook, or other ad channels detect that audiences are tired of watching the same ad content, they penalize advertisers by increasing the cost per click or impression. This hints at ad fatigue.
Low Click-Through Rate
The click-through rate calculates the percentage of impressions per ad. It is a popular metric to measure audience engagement.
As your target audience gets tired of seeing your ads repeatedly, they are less likely to engage and click on them. If you have noticed lower CTR for your ad campaigns, ad fatigue might be creeping in, and it will harm the conversion rate too.
Stagnant or Diminishing ROAS
One of the early signs of ad fatigue is stagnant or diminishing Return on Ad Spend(ROAS). When this key metric starts to drop, it is clear that your ad campaign is not performing as expected.
Despite spending more on ads, if you cannot generate the desired traction for your brand, the chances are that your audience may be experiencing ad fatigue and has stopped engaging with your ads.
7 Creative Ways to Avoid Ad Fatigue
Changing your ad creation and marketing approach can quickly cure ad fatigue. Here are seven proven ways to create engagement-worthy ads that can be used at any sales funnel stage and successfully generate traction for you.
1. Diversify Your Image Ads
You would have put much effort into creating a compelling ad copy. But the fact is, your audience will eventually get tired of seeing the same ads repeatedly.
To combat ad fatigue, you must diversify your ad copies. When I say diversity, the stress is not on making them fancy but on finding ways to make them more creative.
Here are some proven tricks to diversify your ad creative and boost that ad’s performance.
Change Colors. Create 3-4 ad copies for each campaign by changing font colors, background, or the colors of the products you showcase.
Consider these two ad creatives by Cartier. Although they both showcase similar products, the change in the background color makes them strikingly different.
Write Impressive Copies. A straightforward approach to refresh your ad banner is creatively tweaking the existing ad copy. Instead of returning to the drawing board and changing the design, you can try changing the content to capture your audience’s attention.
For example, if one of your ad posts says “First Time Ever – Flat 40% Off’, your other creative can say “Discounts Like Never Before on the Entire Range.” It’s all about conveying the same message in two unique ways.
A tool like Semrush can help write impressive ad copies. This Semrush review by Attrock can help you understand the tool better and how it can help you.
Add Time-Sensitive CTA. A great way to fight ad fatigue is to use a time-sensitive CTA based on your campaign objective. Using terms like “Offer ends this Sunday” or “Your exclusive coupon ends in 3 days” creates excitement and urgency in your audience.
2. Leverage the power of UGC
User-generated content (UGC) can creatively create refreshing and unique ad creatives for your brand. User-generated content is organic, exclusive, and highly engaging, as your audience trusts this content more than branded content.
When you build your ads around the content that your happy customers and fans have created, you show that you care. Moreover, you don’t have to make any effort to create this excellent content.
As a brand, all you need is a keen eye to spot unique UGC and use it to promote your brand.
See how Aerie has handpicked a set of impressive user-generated images which are perfect for their advertising campaigns.
Along with UGC, you can consider collaborating with social media influencers to create fun and out-of-the-ordinary ad content. As they have a unique voice and an audience, you can use content created by them to avoid ad fatigue and boost click-through rate in an organic way.
3. Utilize Dynamic Ads
As the name suggests, dynamic ads are the ones that adjust their content automatically, thanks to ad customizers based on the reader’s preferences. Both Google and Facebook’s secret algorithm trick allows brands to create dynamic ads to deliver relevant product or service information to users based on their interests, search intent, and actions.
This is how Meta advantage+ catalog ads work. Imagine you are an online beauty and wellness brand, and one of your potential customers has recently searched for organic haircare products.
Meta’s AI can track that user’s search intent and actions to showcase your haircare product to the user rather than the generic ads you have created.
Dynamic ads, be they text, image-based, or video-based, can go a long way in preventing ad fatigue and engaging your audience most effectively.
4. Rotate Your Ads
If creating multiple ad sets is one-half of the plan, rotating them wisely is equally important to protect your audience from ad fatigue and encourage them to engage with your content actively.
As a marketer, you should make a clear plan for your digital marketing campaigns and schedule posts so that they are delivered to different audiences at a time when they are most active.
Create different versions of your ads and strategically rotate them. Hence, your audience is less likely to see the same ad formats repeatedly, and you reduce ad fatigue and boost your ads’ performance.
With ad rotation, you can successfully continue to market to the existing audiences and achieve the projected performance.
5. Adopt Custom Frequency Capping
The easiest way to prevent ad fatigue is to reduce ad frequency. This can be achieved by creating a custom frequency cap for your ad campaigns.
Frequency capping refers to the setting where you can specify how many times an ad will be shown to a particular user in a given time.
According to a Databox report, the ideal ad frequency for Facebook ads is between 3-8.
When determining the appropriate ad frequency, you have to consider the engagement rate of your previous ad campaigns. Lowering your frequency and optimizing positioning and timing can also help reduce your ad budget.
6. Modify Your Target Audience
Determining your audience is one of the first steps in developing an excellent digital marketing strategy. Marketers work at length to create the best possible buyer personas based on interests, age, sex, location, preferences, and even purchase history.
However, when you set too many qualifiers while choosing an exact audience for your Google or Facebook ads, you might shrink that group to a great extent. Expecting these people to watch the same ads and respond repeatedly would be unreal.
What’s the solution?
Adjust your target audience settings periodically and accordingly adjust your ad schedule too. This way, you can serve fresh content to your custom audiences and avoid ad fatigue while you manage business expenses efficiently.
7. Enrich Your Ads with Videos
Accordingly to the Wyzowl video survey, 92% of marketers said video is an integral part of their marketing strategy. Everything from explainer videos to product demos, video advertising, and video testimonials are some of the most preferred weapons for marketers.
And that’s because users find video content more engaging, and thus videos have more dwell time. So if combating ad fatigue is your goal, find ways to enrich your ads with videos.
Businesses can create quick 6-8 seconds video ads to entice their audiences and nudge them to explore more. Such a video ad can be inserted in reels, stories, influencer videos, and YouTube trailers to supercharge your ad campaign and achieve maximum engagement.
Combat Ad Fatigue and Create Impressive Ad Campaigns
We can conclude that ad fatigue is a genuine challenge for marketers with severe consequences. To combat ad fatigue and generate high-quality engagement, you must look beyond the traditional ad creation methods.
If you fail to identify ad fatigue and stop it early, it may drive a significant percentage of your potential customers away and long your sales and business growth with them.
That’s why I highly recommend you try the tactics shared above. Incorporate them in your future campaigns to attract qualified leads like never before.
