Ad campaigns face many challenges. One of the most serious, especially in today’s modern digital landscape, is ad fatigue. Ad fatigue is exactly what it sounds like. Ad fatigue occurs when potential customers see an ad so many times that they stop paying attention. For example, imagine someone watching live TV zoning out when a car ad they’ve seen 100 times already comes on the screen.
Ad fatigue will make a marketing campaign much less effective. An audience that is not being engaged by ads means fewer sales. Ad fatigue can result in you spending a lot on a campaign to only achieve lackluster results. Clearly, ad fatigue is something that must always be counteracted.
While ad fatigue is always bad, it’s an even more significant problem if you are trying to scale up your marketing campaign. How can you increase your marketing efforts if your audience is already in danger of experiencing ad fatigue? Luckily, it turns out that there are actually ways to accomplish this tricky goal. Here are the five steps to follow:
Have a lot of different ads
It’s pretty simple. What is the simplest way to avoid ad fatigue? Have more ads. The more ads you create for a single campaign, the fewer potential customers will get sick of any one particular ad. One strategy is to have a variety of ads all in rotation at once. Or, keep just one ad up at a time, but replace your ads regularly. Creating new ads for a campaign is a worthwhile expense to prevent your marketing campaign from becoming useless.
Monitor your ads
One of the most important elements of combating ad fatigue is to watch for signs that it is occurring. After all, there is no need to worry much about ad fatigue if your ads are still connecting with your audience. A key piece of data to track is CTR (clickthrough rate), which is the number of clicks an ad gets divided by impressions. A plunging CTR is a strong indicator your audience is becoming fatigued with your ads. Also, monitor which of your specific different ads are most effective. Pull the worst-performing ads sooner.
Make small updates
Time and money are often barriers when fighting ad fatigue. A simple way to work around this problem is to make smaller updates that still are effective against ad fatigue. For example, simply changing the background color on a display ad is often all that is needed to regain someone’s attention. Modifying a few sentences in ad copy can have the same effect.
Use different kinds of ads
Updating your marketing campaign with new ads is one smart move, but trying a completely different kind of ad is also wise. For example, video affects an audience in a totally different way than an ad that uses just images and text. Depending upon the platform, you may have lots of opportunities to vary the kinds of ads you use. For example, on Facebook, you can use image or video-based ads. In an Email Marketing campaign, you can send an email with lots of images, or one with none.
Modify your target audience
If you want to expand your marketing campaign even while avoiding ad fatigue, you are probably going to need to expand and/or change the audience you are targeting. If you are targeting only a tiny group of people, ad fatigue is almost impossible to avoid. Don’t just rotate the ads you show, but also the audience you are targeting. One way or another, you want fresh eyes to be viewing your ads.
