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You have put a lot of time and effort to create a good Facebook ad, and watched it exceed all your expectations only to find that a short while later it’s not driving results anymore… Why is this happening and what you can do about it?

With so much talk lately about Facebook ad fatigue, we decided it was time to explain the concept and how it can affect the efficiency of your Facebook advertising campaigns. In this article, we will offer some tips on how you can prevent audience fatigue before it becomes an issue.

What is Facebook Ad Fatigue

Essentially, ad fatigue is exactly what it sounds like. You’ve been targeting the same audience for too long using the same ad and they just get tired of hearing your message. But how do you know for sure that your ad has now fallen victim to the dreaded Facebook Ad Fatigue?

Determine Whether Ad Fatigue Is Impacting Campaign Performance

If some of the key metrics in your campaign start to drop and the “frequency” metric is increasing at the same time, it is safe to assume that you are suffering from audience fatigue.

Here are the 3 key metrics you should keep an eye on in order to recognize ad fatigue:

• Ad Frequency (The average number of times that each person saw your ad over the lifetime of your campaign). – If it is increasing, it often marks the beginning of ad fatigue.
• Click-through rate (CTR) – If you notice a slow decline in CTR, it might be a case of audience fatigue
• Cost-per-action – If you notice an increase, you might be dealing with ad fatigue. An increase in Cost per 1000 Reach is definitely a sign of audience fatigue, especially if it’s correlated with changes in the other metric mentioned above.

You can also detect audience saturation by using Facebook’s delivery insights, available at the ad set level. Hover over the audience name and select inspect. If you click on inspect you will be directed to the delivery insights page where you can analyse ad set’s key properties including the bid strategy, budget, optimisation event, and attribution.

Audience saturation – Helps you understand the relationship between your cost and the audience you’re reaching. If the ads are not reaching new people and costs are increasing, this means audience saturation is high and it’s time to create new audiences.

Auction overlap – According to Facebook, ‘This graph shows how often your ad set ended up in the same auction as another from the same account. To prevent you from bidding against yourself, we remove the less competitive ad set from the auction.’

When you’re experiencing under-delivery and you have high auction overlap, it is recommended to merge similar ad sets to potentially improve delivery.

Consistently keeping an eye on audience saturation and overlap is vital to your Facebook ad campaigns success.

It’s important to realise that if you fail to optimize your ads constantly, every campaign may experience ad fatigue sooner or later. Campaigns with a large daily ad budget may be affected by ad fatigue within three to four days, while campaigns with a smaller ad budget might go on for a couple of weeks before experiencing the effects of ad fatigue.

If this sounds like what you are experiencing, here are some ways to fight ad fatigue:

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Create new ads

You can refresh your ads by changing either the creative or copy of your ad. You can do so by duplicating your original ad within your campaign and ad set. Then in the new draft ad, you need to make a relevant change.

If you think changing your ad creative is not enough, you can step it up a gear and change ad format. For example, a lot of advertisers could boost their results and overcome ad fatigue by creating video ad versions of winning image ads. For example, if you run a campaign for an e-commerce shop, you can turn your product images into a slideshow video.

Adjust Your Facebook Ad Set Targeting

Just because a certain audience has become fatigued with your ads, that doesn’t mean that you have to abandon that campaign altogether. Perhaps other audiences could also generate great results.

Here is what you can do:

• Create lookalike audiences based on key conversion metrics (purchase, time spent, engagement, etc.)
• Create lookalikes by uploading customers or syncing your CRM
• Create audiences based on users’ behaviour

Advertise High-Quality Content

Another way to combat audience fatigue is to advertise other types of content which could warm up cold audiences. For example, promoting a blog post or video alongside your main offer can offer the target audience extra value, and buy you some more time.

Regularly Change the Product or Service Being Offered

If you sell a small number of products or services, it may be difficult for you to diversify your offer. But if you offer a wide range of products or services, you could regularly switch between them to combat ad fatigue. And don’t wait until your results start to drop off before you do.

Excluding people that have already interacted with your website or engaged with your content, limiting ad deliverability by running ads on a schedule, using the reach campaign objective and creating different ad sets for different placements are also winning strategies for overcoming Facebook ad audience fatigue.

But sometimes, no matter what method you use, the public just gets tired of your offer showing up in their feed and there is no other way to get their attention again. Always be ready to rethink your campaign, create new content and appealing offers that continue to generate leads and sales.