You Snooze, You Lose: 11 Simple Ways to Give Ad Fatigue the Boot

If your previously well-performing ad campaign is starting to lose steam, you might be falling victim to the dreaded “ad fatigue.”

Ad fatigue is what happens when your target audience sees your ad one (or one hundred) too many times. They’ve grown accustomed to your ads and, quite honestly, they are starting to get bored of them. When they’re bored of your ads, they stop paying attention. And when they stop paying attention...well, your ads stop working as well as they once did. 

Think about a time you were watching TV (or streaming a show) and every time a commercial break came on you had to sit through the same commercials you just watched the last break. Sometimes the same commercials might even show twice in a row *shudders*. That feeling you get from watching the same commercial on repeat is pretty much ad fatigue. You’ve become so familiar with a commercial that it actually starts to turn you off from a product or service. 

That’s no good!

But unlike traditional marketing tactics (such as TV commercials)—where running a tired campaign means you miss out on opportunities—neglecting your campaigns in digital marketing can hurt your performance. 

When running paid traffic, you must keep an eye on the performance of your ads. This is what we refer to as “active management” of ad accounts, and this is a key component to combatting ad fatigue on your accounts. However, ad fatigue is bound to happen no matter what, so we’ve compiled 11 simple tips to give ad fatigue the boot. 

1. Pause your ads with a high frequency. 
   
   
2. Create new audiences and new ads. This doesn’t mean you need all new creative or completely new audiences. Sometimes even the smallest changes have a huge impact!
   
   
3. Pause your ad sets (or audiences) that have a high frequency. This is especially important for audiences used for retargeting so that you’re not flooding them with ads. 
   
   
4. Exclude custom audiences. Only show your ads to people who haven’t already bought from you!
   
   
5. Run ads on a schedule. Does it make more sense to show your ads 24/7, or limit them to certain times of the day?
   
   
6. Manage your ad placements by ad platform. This helps you get better control over ad frequency and testing.
   
   
7. Use the Reach campaign objective, which is already optimized for a daily unique reach by default. 
   
   
8. Optimize ad delivery for daily unique reach. Optimization for ad delivery defaults to link clicks, but you can easily switch between different optimization options. 
   
   
9. Duplicate the ad set within the same ad campaign. This might not work all the time, but we’ve seen this tactic work for us before.
   
   
10. Do a complete overhaul of your campaign, including a different campaign objective. 
    
    
11. Reuse existing ads post IDs and add them back into your ad set. Even though the content would be the same, Facebook would register this as a new ad plus you get to keep all that good social proof. 

At the end of the day, ad fatigue can be a frustrating problem to have but if you stay vigilant you can keep your performance from floundering!