For most things in life, Balance is the key to success and happiness. They say the key to a happy marriage is the balance between your work and personal life and a balance between the amount of attention and space you give your spouse. The same goes for being healthier, there needs to be a balance between your diet and physical activity. Speaking as a depressed Packers fan, if you want to win a Super Bowl, there needs to be a balance in the way your Offense, Defense and Special Teams perform. Otherwise, you end up losing to an average team with a below average quarterback in the divisional round of the playoffs and you go back to another offseason of headaches and staying off social media because you’re tired of Bears and Vikings fans being delusional about their teams now owning the North.
Anyway… The same goes for running a successful ad campaign: There needs to be a balance in your ad strategy. Too much of the same ad or having very little change in the content you push out can cause ad fatigue. Ad fatigue is when your audience sees the same ad too many times causing them to lose interest and stop engaging with your ads. When this happens, your Click-through Rate decreases and your Cost-Per-Clicks increases. So you end up paying more money for underperforming ads.
How to Monitor Ad-Fatigue It’s important to monitor your ads performance weekly, by doing this you should be able to prevent ad fatigue before the ads fatigue. These are 3 things you should look at to spot ad fatigue early:
High CPC’s (Cost per Clicks) – If your CPCs have increased dramatically without reasonable explanation, it could be ad fatigue. We’ll dig into this a little further into the article.
Declining Click-Through Rate – If your CTR goes from 30% down to 10%, this could be caused by Ad Fatigue. Ad Frequency – How often are people seeing your ads? If it’s 6+ times, you might have ad fatigue.
How to Tackle Ad Fatigue If your campaigns are suffering from ad fatigue it’s time to switch things up. Here are 4 Things you can do to save your ad campaign and increase your audience engagement.
Refresh your Copy and Creative One of the most important factors in how successful your Ad Campaign will be is your creative. Recycling the same photographs, designs and colors can easily bore your audience and decrease the general interest in your ads. So, try refreshing your images or video and ad formats by using different combinations.
A few ways to keep your Copy and Creative fresh:
- Use different photos. Find different photos that convey the same idea and rotate the different ads after every few days.
- Use different color combinations. Not only will this look fresh upon your audience’ eyes but you can also split test your customer response based on the different colors you use.
- Use different ad formats. If you’re using single image ads, combine them into a Carousel or slide-show
Target a New Audience
A successful ad campaign also relies on the people you are trying to reach. And even then, sometimes your ideal audience can get tired of your ads. If you notice your ads getting little to no traction from your current audience, then it may be time to switch up and look for a new audience.
This could mean:
– a new audience in a different niche
– lookalike audiences
– or past website visitors.
Reduce Ad Frequency
If you’re advertising on Facebook, it’s highly likely your ad will be shown to the same people twice. Now, while this is fine, you run the risk of the ads being shown 5, 6, or even 7 times to the same person. That’s where you have a problem.
If this is currently happening, the best thing to do would be to pause your campaign and reduce the ad frequency.
Make sure your Automatic Rules are set up correctly so that users aren’t seeing your ads more than twice. Setting up Automatic Rules is also good practice as it serves as back up for those busy days when you don’t have time to check on the campaign.
Try different Ad Rotations. Create 5 different versions of your ad and set it up so that they rotate every 3 days. This will ensure that your audience is seeing fresh ads more frequently.
You can also try Ad Schedulers which allows you to show custom ads on specific days. This gives you more control over what your audience sees and when, so that it reduces ad fatigue and keeps them interested.
Create New Content
Lastly and possibly the most important thing you can do is to create new content. Refreshing your creative and using different forms of the same ad is useful but not as effective as creating completely new content. Although it may be that creating brand new content can be a bit expensive it’s also well worth it. Studies show that organic, user generated content is 35% more memorable than branded content which will help you stand out from the clutter of your other ads.
The Bottom Line
As we mentioned earlier, it’s all about balance. Ads are great to increase your business’ visibility but, like anything else, they are better fresh and in moderation. So, use these tips and ensure that all your ad campaigns remain successful. Oh, and while you’re here, Consolidata’s new customizable dashboard feature is a great way to monitor your ad campaigns so you can adjust them accordingly.