4 quick tips to overcoming ad fatigue

Ad fatigue is a growing problem for advertisers everywhere. It’92s what happens when your target audience has been shown an ad too many times, and CTR falls while the ad frequency continues to rise. In today’92s day and age, social media users have become pretty good at ignoring ads and, worse, might even choose to actively block them. In a world where advertising is around every corner, how can your brand stand out and how can you ensure your ads aren’92t the subject of ad fatigue?

Here are 4 quick tips you can implement today:

1. Monitor your ad frequency and keep it low

Targeting an audience with a combination of specific demographics, geographic location and interests will eventually mean your ads start re-appearing to the same users. When the frequency starts to build up, users will undoubtedly feel they are being bombarded with the same message over and over.

Digital and social advertising is a game of diminishing returns – each additional time someone sees the same ad, the CTR is going to decrease. Here at Paragone, we believe the best rule is to not serve the same ad to a user more than 3 times. Beyond that point, as a general rule, we tend to see CTRs fall dramatically.

Set up automatic rules – in the Paragone tool, there’92s a specific option you can select to ensure you’re in control of the frequency at which your ads are being delivered.

Here’s a screenshot with a little detail on how to set up this kind of rule in Paragone:

2. Constantly rotate your ads

Another quick way to fight ad fatigue is to regularly create multiple ad visuals for the same offer. When you see that one ad’92s frequency is getting close to 3 (or another number you choose based on testing), pause it and start the next variation. Best-practice is to rotate your ads every three or four days.

In our view, creative counts for 80% of effectiveness of an ad. Let’s be honest – very few people are going to remember your ad text. So if you’re just changing the text in the ad title, people may still fell they are seeing the same ad repeatedly. Why not try keeping the same creative but just changing the background color, or the way the product is presented?

To ensure this is even more effective, the next level up would be to use an automation tool like Paragone to quickly create hundreds of different variations of creative, title, text and call-to-action.

Below is an overview of how you can do this with Facebook canvas ads:

3. Exclude users who have already engaged

People who have already engaged with your ad are unlikely to want to see it again. To avoid annoying users and having them associate your brand with an frustrating experience, you should exclude all users who have already engaged with your ad from future targeting.

To do this, create a custom audience for those people who have clicked on a specific ad and visited your site in the last 60 days. You may also choose to segment them further by differentiating those who have already signed up, bought your product or taken some other action (NOTE: to access that kind of information you’re going to need to have the Facebook Pixel set up on your website. Here’s everything you need to know). Once you have these custom audiences set up, you can exclude them from targeting lists for the specific campaigns.

Having these custom audiences set up will be valuable for future campaigns as well, meaning you’92ll quickly be able to retarget users who previously engaged with an ad in a specific way.

4. Improve your value offer

Keep it simple. The value offer should be clear and understandable at a glance. The thing is, users aren’92t sitting there reading every element of your ad. Get to the point quickly and hook your audience.

Test things like changing the text in the ad title to highlight different aspects of the value offer. Check the data to see which headlines are resonating best with your target audience.

Going a bit further, and while this might not be such a quick fix, it’92s important to ensure more broadly that your ads’ offers are always valuable. These days ads should always aim to provide value in and of themselves, or at least point to an offer that provides something to the user rather than being a simple ‘hard sell’.

An advanced social advertising solution like Paragone will give you the tools you need to make ad fatigue a thing of the past!
Book a demo today to learn more about how we can help you take your social media advertising to the next level!