Measurement

The 3 Signs of Ad Fatigue [& How to Prevent It]

By Tinuiti Team
person fatigued by digital ads on laptop

No matter how well-crafted your ad campaigns are, they can start to lose their impact over time because of a phenomenon known as ad fatigue. Understanding why this happens is crucial if you want to craft effective campaigns that resonate with your audience rather than frustrating them.

In this article, you’ll learn what ad fatigue is, how to spot it, and the strategies you can use to prevent it.

What is Ad Fatigue?

Ad fatigue occurs when your audience repeatedly views the same advertisements, causing your audience to stop paying attention. This leads to several negative effects that impact each stage of the marketing funnel. For example:

In the end, the impact of ad fatigue is twofold: It harms your long-term brand metrics, and often damages your return on ad spend (ROAS) in the short-term.

While ad fatigue can be damaging to your bottom line, it’s generally easy to prevent—you just need to be proactive. Creating compelling creative, using new ad types, and setting frequency caps are all ways to keep your ads fresh… but more on that later.

How Long Before Ad Fatigue Sets In?

The onset of ad fatigue depends on several factors, including the frequency of ads, the ad’s creative content, the channels you use, your target audience, and individual user preferences. 

On channels like social media that show many ads in succession and target smaller audiences, ad fatigue can emerge in as little as 2 or 3 weeks. However, on platforms that show fewer ads to a broad audience, a single ad could remain effective for 2 or 3 months.

Unfortunately, avoiding ad fatigue isn’t as simple as following rules like, “don’t show ads more than five times per user” or “change out your ads every 3 weeks.” 

While these guidelines are useful starting points, it’s far more effective to monitor ad fatigue trends specific to your business. That way, you can tackle the issue when you spot warning signs that your audience is becoming fatigued.

Let’s take a look at what these warning signs might look like.

Suspect Ad Fatigue? Watch For These 3 Signs

There are many subjective indicators that your audience is experiencing ad fatigue. You might notice a drop in sales or formerly high-performing ads barely having an effect. You could also see a decline in likes and comments, or worse, comments that are tinged with frustration.

These subtle signs can be your first clue that it’s time to reassess your strategy. But beyond these subjective hints, here are three more concrete ways to detect ad fatigue in your audience:

Low Clickthrough or Engagement Rates

One of the most telling signs of ad fatigue is a noticeable drop in click-through and engagement rates. These metrics are critical as they directly measure how well your audience is responding to your ads.

For example, a low click-through rate (CTR) in click-based mediums like display ads or social media shows that your audience simply isn’t engaging. Likewise, for streaming or linear TV ads, you might see a decrease in in-store traffic or website visits.

Essentially, if your ads are underperforming in driving the actions that typically lead to conversions or sales, ad fatigue could be a culprit. However, note that clickthrough and engagement can be influenced by other factors, like the quality of your creative. Think about these engagement related metrics as a clue that something’s gone wrong – but you’ll need more information to diagnose the problem.

screenshot of using Bliss Point by Tinuiti for ad fatigue using spend decay and saturation analysis

Beyond tracking each metric individually, brands can also use functionality like saturation curves and spend decay curves to accurately predict the onset of ad fatigue. The screenshot above depicts that as certain ads reach a high level of saturation, the return on ad spend falls at a comparable rate. For brands running multichannel campaigns, using an advanced dashboard like this to track spend by channel can help you easily gut check the risk of ad fatigue across all media buys.

Fewer Impressions

Another clear sign of ad fatigue is a decline in the number of impressions your ads receive. People need to see your ads to engage with them, so a nosedive in impressions is a serious issue.

One way to detect this is by tracking spend versus impressions on a long-term basis. In the example below, we can see impressions decaying despite marketing spend staying relatively constant. With this long term view, it’s much easier to tell if a decline in impressions is a one-time fluke, or truly caused by ad fatigue.

screenshot of using Bliss Point by Tinuiti for ad fatigue using with spend vs impression analysis

For those who advertise on social media, fewer impressions are particularly concerning. If you’re bidding for clicks and nobody is clicking through, then social media algorithms will often choose to show a more engaging ad instead of yours. This creates a vicious cycle where lower engagement leads to even fewer impressions, diminishing your ad’s overall effect.

Damaged Brand Metrics

A final indicator of ad fatigue is your brand metrics. If you notice a dip in positive sentiment or an increase in negative feedback, it could signal a fatigued audience.

Damaged brand metrics might manifest as declining brand recall, lower favorability ratings, or an uptick in negative comments and reviews. When your audience starts to associate your brand with annoyance rather than appeal, it’s a sign that your ads are wearing thin and need a refresh.

6 Tactics to Prevent & Remedy Ad Fatigue 

Once you’ve identified the signs of ad fatigue, you need to combat it. Ignoring the issue can waste resources and further reduce audience engagement. Here are six tactics to prevent ad fatigue, ensuring your marketing efforts stay fresh and impactful:

1. Diagnose the Problem with Marketing Metrics

When diagnosing ad fatigue, you shouldn’t rely on gut feelings. It’s crucial to use concrete marketing metrics to ensure that you’re tackling the right problem.

Start by setting benchmarks before, during, and after your campaigns to measure performance accurately. Track how frequently you serve your ads and monitor KPIs like CTR, engagement levels, impressions, and brand favorability. If you see drops in these areas, that’s a signal that ad fatigue could be affecting your audience. 

This is easier said than done if your brand runs a broad range of campaigns across channels. Ad fatigue isn’t isolated to a single ad format or channel – each campaign depends on the other. Solutions like Bliss Point by Tinuiti help marketers confirm the presence of ad fatigue through cross-channel dashboards, allowing you to quickly determine how each channel’s performance influences another. You can even measure how rolling back ad spend on one ad spot could impact metrics like CTR and sales.

Once you’ve confirmed the issue is most likely ad fatigue, consider implementing some of the tactics below to rejuvenate your advertising efforts.

2. Implement Frequency Caps

A frequency cap limits the number of times a person sees your ad within a specified timeframe, preventing overexposure. By setting caps, you reduce the risk of annoying your audience and ensure your ads remain fresh and engaging.

If the digital advertising platform you’re using offers frequency capping, or if you have marketing technology to manage media buys, frequency caps are a powerful way to tackle ad fatigue. Some platforms (like Meta and Google Ads) inherently allow for frequency caps on your paid ads. 

Setting the right cap depends on the channel, audience size, and creative elements, but the rule of thumb is that more than five or six exposures to the same ad is too much. However, ad fatigue can set in earlier or later, so let your metrics guide you.

3. Target Different Audiences

If your audience is too small, the frequency of your target ads tends to increase. To combat this, consider branching into slightly different segments. For instance, you could extend your age range or add diverse interests to your targeting strategy. 

Try using lookalike audiences that are similar to your existing customers but have yet to engage with your brand. Additionally, exclude past users who have already engaged positively. Instead of serving them the same ad again, target them with new ads encouraging other desired actions.

The exact method to do this depends on the platform you’re using. It usually requires placing a tracking pixel on your site, like Meta Pixels, to manage exclusions and optimize engagement effectively.

4. Use Retargeting Tricks

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is an advertising strategy that re-engages users who have previously interacted with your brand or website but didn’t take the desired action.

With tracking technology like cookies or pixels, retargeting lets you follow these users as they browse the web and serve them tailored ads to encourage them to return and complete the action. 

This approach helps keep your brand top-of-mind and can significantly boost conversion rates by targeting users who have already shown interest in your products or services. And, after initial exposure, you can move users down the funnel by serving them more action-oriented ads.

Many platforms support retargeting natively or through marketing technology, including most social media platforms, search engines, and display networks.

5. Develop New Creative

Developing new creative is an effective way to combat ad fatigue because it refreshes the user experience and prevents your audience from becoming bored with repetitive content. 

Testing new visuals, narratives, or messaging can capture attention and re-engage users, making them more receptive to your ads. New creative elements can also better align with audience preferences and market trends, improving your campaign performance.

The same goes for refining existing creative if your ads perform relatively well. Here are some ideas when testing ad creative:

6. Rotate Your Ads

Presenting different ads to your audience, rather than the same ones over and over again, can help you stave off ad fatigue. One way to do this is through ad rotations, by running multiple ads at the same time and rotating when they appear to your audience. 

You could also schedule ads, running one type on Mondays and Tuesdays, another on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and so on.

Another method is to use dynamic or customized ads. Dynamic ads display a slightly different version of the ad each time someone sees it. This strategy is commonly used for text-based search ads.

On other platforms, you could implement slight variations in your visual creative and store them in an asset library. This way, each ad impression can pull different images, texts, and assets, creating fresh variations.

Lastly, consider exploring new platforms and channels—just make sure to check that you’re formatting your ads to fit the specifications of these platforms and following their best practices.

Note: Keep in mind that while many of these tactics effectively stave off ad fatigue, they come with varied costs. Frequency caps prevent overexposure but might cause you to miss some opportunities. Similarly, developing new creative can keep ads effective but requires time and resources to create. Balancing these strategies is the best way to maintain ad engagement and effectiveness.

Conclusion

Recognizing and remedying ad fatigue is crucial for maintaining effective marketing campaigns. That’s why brands need to understand the signs of ad fatigue and offer strategic solutions tailored to rejuvenate your ads. However, simply detecting ad fatigue can be a serious challenge. 

That’s one of the reasons we developed Bliss Point by Tinuiti: It helps brands quickly identify (and resolve!) challenges stemming from ad fatigue. Our powerful tool can analyze each individual attribute of an ad, like color, music, and typography, to isolate the elements that drive success—and that’s just scratching the surface.

Want to see how it works? Learn more about our Bliss Point technology or contact our team today to see if it’s a fit for your measurement needs.