Definition

Ad Fatigue happens when users see your ad too many times, so they lose interest in those ads and stop engaging with them.

Description

You can’t eat pizzas every day. It will give you a stomach ache or no pleasure in eating because it tastes the same every day. Similarly, when a user browses a website, they cannot click on the same ad every time each day.

Studies from Survey Monkey show that 74% of the people are tired of seeing ads. Nearly 3 out of 4 users think there are too many ads.

With too many ads popping, users can have ad fatigue. When visitors do not click on the same ads, it reduces the Click-Through-Rate (CTR), which implies that the campaign has become less effective. Ultimately, the campaign will fail and there will be no return on investment, and the purpose of business falls.

To prevent ad fatigue and still attract the users towards a brand’s campaign, companies must find alternatives because social media is full of competitive content.

A campaign on different platforms can face its plight because different kinds of people are using different platforms daily.
Brands cannot sit and wait to see the damage happening.

Instead, they must monitor the ad- fatigue early and build new alternative campaigns.

Example

You run a flight booking website that allows travel planners to book tickets to travel worldwide. Some of the visitors to your website are frequent. Every time they are on your website, ads about hotel booking companies pop up.

After every 10 seconds, the ad pops, which disturbs the visitor.

The user then uses the ad blocker to avoid seeing such ads repeatedly. But as a business owner, you suffer the loss because the advertising company will not pay you in this case for publishing their ads. Hence, you must use precautions to prevent the losses from happening.

What should marketers do to remove Ad Fatigue?

These are the steps to avoid Ad-Fatigue and save the fall in your revenue:

1. Monitor your ad campaigns: Track your ad performances to find whether the users are bored of seeing your ads. The content you post should engage users with it. You can learn about the campaign’s performance by measuring frequency and CTR. When you monitor the campaign’s output, you can point out the ad fatigue faster and fix it sooner to drive better results.
2. Create multiple versions of ads: All Tom Hanks’ movies kept the audience excited because he played different characters in each of them. From Forrest Gump to The Shawshank Redemption, the art and calibre displayed of the actor captivated the audience. Same in theory, to avoid ad fatigue, brands can create multiple ads, to attract the audience to their website. Different ways of telling the same information will not bore the audience. The best is to use the ads in rotation to keep the viewers excited about the information.
3. Play with colours: If you can’t create more than one ad, you can play with colours. Vibrant hues catch attention faster, so you can try and change the colour schemes. Changing colours will make your ad look fresh even though the information is similar.
4. Reword the content: Reword the ad content and try to make a compelling ad copy for your viewers. Create catchy lines that attract the users’ attention and get them interested.
5. Change the visuals: Change the images in your ads because visuals create high engagement of audiences. So if you are selling chocolate chips and have used brown cookies in one ad, you can use an image that has pouring chocolate in another ad.
6. Use a different CTA: When experiencing ad fatigue, you must reconsider changing your CTA also. If your current CTA reads “Fill in Details here”, you can change it to “Learn More”.

Negative influence of Ad Fatigue

Ad fatigue can affect your ad campaign. This is how you can see how it affects:

• High Cost per Click: When users see repeated ads, they may not even refer to a word from the post. But you still have to pay for the ad display. So, the click through rate decreases but the cost per click starts to rise. Hence, your budget gets wasted.
• Wasted Ad Set: When your viewers stop seeing the ads, the Google algorithm thinks that your target audience is not interested in your ads. As a result, it stops showing the ads and amidst this there is a high chance of you losing customers.
• Harm brand image: Ad Fatigue can harm brand image. Overseeing the ad can deteriorate the customer’s experience and they might perceive your brand to be of low repute.
• Low conversion rates: Studies have shown that people who saw ads more than 10 times, were less likely to buy the products. So ultimately, you have a low conversion rate.

Future of Ad Fatigue

Showing ads is something which cannot be changed when it comes to online marketing and advertising.

But with that there should be no end to advertisement.

These are the ways in which you can battle ad fatigue in future:

1. Target new audience: Absolutely worth doing it, but it is a simple trick. Why should you show your ad to the same set of audience. Broader your audience, because if that is too narrow which is why you may not be getting a response.
2. Try different ad placements: Same ad placements cannot work the same way. You can place ads at the bottom also.
3. Ad Rotations: Create 3-5 types of ad creatives and rotate them every few days.
4. Create user-generated content: Focus on different types of user-generated content to capture the audience.

FAQs

How can you identify that your audience has Ad Fatigue?

If you do not observe any growth in the number of visitors, and the sales seem to decline rapidly; it can be the case that your audience has Ad Fatigue.

This is how you can identify Ad Fatigue:

1. Less Engagement: Observe how people engage through your ads. If they just see your ads and move on, there is less engagement in your ad. Another way you can identify less engagement is if you have less social engagement.
2. Lower Click Through Rate (CTR): CTR indicates how compelling your ad is to motivate users to visit your site. You can play with words and numbers to infuse excitement in the viewers so that they engage further. If your ad reads “10% discount on new stock”, the CTR gets better. It is because of the 10% and words like “new”.
3. Lesser Impressions: If your audience is not interacting with your paid advertisement, there are chances that the ad will not appear for them in future. This will reduce impressions for yoIt is the same as social media algorithm where the posts you like will appear on the top along with similar content.

What to do to a campaign to reduce ad fatigue?

This is how you can reduce ad fatigue for a campaign:

1. Pause ads
2. Create new ads and campaigns
3. Decrease budgets for your ads
4. Exclude audiences that are already engaged with your brand
5. Extend the reach of the audience

Also Read –

• Ultimate Facebook Marketing (meta ads) 2024
• How to build an effective marketing strategy