Your team has created and deployed a successful display advertising campaign. Your targeting is on-spot, and your messaging is as good as it gets - all while staying carefully aligned with your brand strategy. But suddenly the numbers are dropping. Engagement is plummeting. You’ve created a great ad campaign, so what is going wrong? It’s time to look into creative fatigue.
Even though ad fatigue and creative fatigue sound similar, they have some very specific differences. Ad fatigue refers to the general tiredness of your audience seeing your ads. This could happen due to a number of factors, like ad frequency, poor targeting, not enough personalization in an ad campaign.
But creative fatigue is more specific. Essentially, it’s when your audience gets tired of the creative aspects of your ads. It’s the visuals that are tiring them out and driving them away from your brand. So, what metrics do you need to track to spot creative fatigue, and how do you fix your creative fatigue issues? Here’s what to look out for:
When it comes to creative fatigue, monitoring specific metrics will help you understand if a negative shift happens. Tracking these metrics, you can identify the ‘problematic’ creatives of your campaign so you can work on fixing the issue at hand:
You’re probably already tracking CTR in your campaigns. But when it comes to creative fatigue, you need to spot CTR behavior in specific creatives. If you notice a consistent drop in CTR for a specific creative, it’s time to look into it. A consistent drop in CTR suggests your audience is ignoring your ad, which is a possible sign of fatigue.
If you notice that an ad’s CPC is constantly rising, this translates to your audience being less engaged with your ad. This, in turn, means you need to spend more to achieve the same outcome. Creatives that cause fatigue to your audience often lead to higher bid prices, so make sure to keep track of your creatives’ CPC.
Again, engagement needs to be tracked per creative. Watch out for low view-through rates, video views, or specific social media engagement metrics, like shares, likes, and comments. A significant drop in engagement, or a low performance in comparison to other creatives, might be a signal of creative fatigue.
Creative fatigue is concerning, and your team needs to keep track of it. But the good news is you can take steps to prevent it. Here are some best practices to consider:
Swapping your creatives after you’ve detected ad fatigue is a standard solution. But it’s reacting to a problem that has already appeared. Instead, try to be as proactive as possible. Incorporate creative variation into your campaign planning. Mapping this up front will prevent creative fatigue from appearing in the first place.
One of the main drivers of creative fatigue is ad frequency. Get ahead of this issue by setting frequency caps for your creatives. You can use data from your previous display advertising campaigns to inform yourself on what usually works for your audience. But make sure to compare to similar audiences, otherwise the data might be irrelevant.
It’s a given that you need variety in your creatives. But another solution that can prevent creative fatigue is creative rotation. Make sure you don’t constantly expose your audience to the same creatives by setting up a rotation schedule.
If you want to get ahead of creative fatigue, you need to monitor your KPIs continuously. Pinpointing the signs of creative fatigue early will help you adjust your creatives on time, so that fatigue doesn’t become a bigger problem to your campaign.
It might not be the first thing that comes to your team’s mind when setting up a new ad campaign, but creative fatigue is real. It’s important to track metrics for individual creatives, so you can detect early signs of fatigue. But it’s even more important to take advantage of best practices so you can prevent your audience from getting creative fatigue in the first place. Don’t let a great display advertising campaign underperform because of creative fatigue. Get proactive, track the right KPIs, and secure a much better performance for your display advertising campaign.
If you're looking into learning more about tracking the performance of your display advertising campaigns, here's an article about the most important advanced metrics to track. Or, look into how to interpret your campaign's data to improve its performance with this article.