The Two Best Ways To Combat Ad Fatigue

Running effective advertising campaigns on social media can become quite complicated, due to all the different options that Facebook Business Manager offers as far as objectives, targeting, bidding, placements, optimization, etc.

But then, you finally did it. You published that ad, and it’s now bringing you results. Slowly but surely, you see your CPA (cost per acquisition) lowering over time, the result rate increasing and everything is looking good for a few weeks.

However, there comes a time where the ad that you put so much effort into, suddenly its performance starts to decrease. You know you didn’t change anything, but you start getting fewer and fewer results, the cost starts getting very expensive, and you don’t know what is wrong.

Well, a good guess why your ad is now under-performing is due to ad fatigue. If you haven’t heard the term, ad fatigue refers to when you’re running a Facebook ad campaign, and the frequency or the number of people watching that ad is so high that the performance suddenly starts to decrease over time.

This is a signal that people are getting tired of seeing your ad, they’re just scrolling right past it, causing the algorithm to think that your ad is no longer being relevant or interesting, thus increasing your CPA.

Well, fortunately, there are many easy solutions to these types of issues.

One way to combat this ad fatigue is by duplicating the same ad and only changing the creative.

That’s right, and it sounds so simple, right?

Well, indeed, by duplicating the same ad within the same campaign, same ad set, and keeping all the other variants the same (i.e. not changing the headline, the caption nor the description), and simply changing the creative, this alone can significantly improve the performance of your campaign.

Note: This is not a one-suit-fits-all solution. Meaning that changing the creative may or may not get you back to your ideal target cost, but it’s definitely worth testing!

Going back to the creative… If before you were using an image, then you can try a different image, or change it to a carousel or even to a video. Same thing if you were using a video, try a shorter one, or a longer one, or use an instant experience, etc.

If you apply this strategy and after a few days, you don’t see your costs decreasing, then move on to the next strategy:

The second way to combat ad fatigue is just to keep everything the same, and changing only the targeting.

Now we’re assuming that your ad is actually good, the text, the creative, the headline, etc. everything at the ad level is working well. Hence, we can assume that we’re not reaching the right audience, or perhaps the audience we were reaching isn’t engaging anymore with our ad.

Well, now you duplicate your campaign at the ad set level. Keep the new ad set in the same campaign, keep the same ads, but when you edit this new ad set, only change the audience. It is wise to have a few different ad sets targeting interests in one, behaviors in another, demographics in another, etc. However, if your ad is from a special category (housing, employment, credit, or social issues), then you can only test with different interests.

You can also try narrowing your audience by targeting the overlap between interests, or you could try entirely new interests. Whatever you do, keep the bidding, the optimization, and the placements unchanged.

There you have it, two simple and effective ways that you can apply to combat ad fatigue. Have you tried any other simple strategies that have worked for you? Please share them!