How often do you find yourself wondering if you’re going to continue seeing that one annoying ad on your feed?

We’re all familiar with the situation: at first, the advertisement starts well, the statistics go up, and as time passes, people get tired of it and its conversion rate is no longer as pleasing as before.

If you don’t notice your audience getting tired right on time when this starts, users will begin to block or ignore your advertising, your CPC will go up high as a kite together with your CPL, ROI will go down, as well as your mood, in proportion to all these changes.

These are all symptoms of advertising fatigue. This phenomenon is called ad fatigue or audience saturation, and among those who drive traffic, this causes death of their ad creatives. Today, we’ll talk about how to extend the life of your campaigns so that they don’t kill your performance and brand loyalty over time.

When are ad creatives considered dead?

In affiliate marketing forums and chats, you can sometimes see messages like this, “I started working with Facebook ads, and before, I was getting 40 applications a day, whereas now, I barely get 5 or 10. Some of my accounts are even completely idle,” or, “During testing, we managed to generate about 200 leads with an ROI of 100%, but we found it impossible to scale these ad campaigns in action – at first, the leads come every 5 minutes, and after a couple of hours, the flow either stops or drives traffic without leads.”

This problem arises when the audience sees the same advertisement too often, and the affiliate does not eliminate unprofitable campaigns in time. So next, they see their CPC, CPM and CPL (banner blindness) increase, the accuracy of advertising positioning decreases, conversions go down and, as a result, so does their ROI.

Advertising doesn’t just stop being useful – it starts working against the brand, so it’s very important to learn to recognize when your creatives begin to fall in the eyes of your audience.

At first, you may think that since you work with an overall profitable offer, you can just change your creatives and GEO, get new landing pages and your ad will work as new. But in reality, everything is somewhat more complicated.

Here’s an example of driving traffic to a keto diet offer in GEO Kazakhstan. The first bunch of columns is Statistics, the second bunch is Orders, the third one – Finances.

You can see that from mid-March for the first two months, the number of leads was more or less at the same level, while the approval rate went down, despite all the actions taken by the affiliate.

And the share of trashed leads, at the same time, only grew bigger.

Why do ad campaigns burn out like so?

If advertising campaigns did not lose their effectiveness, the work of an affiliate marketer could eventually become a source of passive income, and these experts would already be on the list of the richest people on the planet.

Some offers can live for a very long time, but only due to the fact that they get complete makeovers from time to time (more on this below). For example, such offers as minoxidil or money amulets.

The first offer was changed from male to female audience, the second became “an amulet of wealth from Baba Nina” (Baba Nina being a symbolic mysterious Slavic wise woman).

There are several reasons as to why not a single ad campaign can live forever:

–   Seasonality. Every advertising campaign has a dead season when nothing will drive you conversions. During this period, you can try anything and it won’t help. For example, garden plants won’t have success in the fall, and you will have to wait until spring to solve the problem.

–   Trendy analogues. If your product has an analogue that has gone viral on the internet, then you will have to wait until the hype calms down, or even completely shift your efforts to a new offer.

–   Spying services. Indirect cause, but still a cause. Their popularity leads to the fact that beginner affiliate marketers find what they think are working ad campaigns, copy them in detail, and speed up the lifecycle of creatives for both themselves and those who made them in the first place.

Fighting ad fatigue

Every campaign you run will inevitably become old over time. You can even spend a fortune on setting up a campaign, the algorithm works the same.

To eliminate ad fatigue, you first need to be able to recognize it. To do this, firstly, you should analyze your return on advertising spend (ROAS).

If ROAS is negative, this means that advertising is running at a loss. If ROAS was normal, but began to fall, the campaign is losing effectiveness, which means it needs to be either optimized or disabled.

Next, you need to look at four indicators: cost per result, impressions, CPM, and relevance.

To analyze the metrics, take a period of 1 week.

When you reach ad fatigue, you will notice a decrease in ROAS and an increase in frequency of impressions. This leads to a decrease in relevance, an increase in CPM and cost per result. And this reduces ROAS even more.

Let’s select the most common and helpful measures that work in simple situations and will save even a beginner affiliate marketer. The main thing is to remember that what worked in one situation will not necessarily work in another:

1. Creative rotation: Even the best advertising you’ve ever done won’t work forever. Know how to stop in time and cut out the waste material.

2. Don’t skimp on creatives: the more of them you have, the less chance that your advertising will soon annoy people;

3. Audience segmentation: divide your target audience into smaller groups and launch different creatives for them.

4. Launch ads on multiple platforms: this will help you reach different audience segments.

5. Interactivity and gamification: if the budget allows this, make the advertisement interactive. You will see a big difference.

If ad fatigue has set in, sometimes the best solution is to pause the ad and then relaunch the campaign with a new creative and approach.

Let’s also look at some cases when the conversion rate decreases, but NOT due to advertising fatigue.

What else should you beware of?

Sometimes, advertising that before drove stable leads suddenly drops all indicators and becomes ineffective. In such cases, most affiliates immediately put an end to that ad campaign approach – and voila, it’s dead.

However, it is important to understand that the campaign never burns out suddenly – it is a process. In this case, advertising fatigue is not to blame.

A sharp drop in leads can happen, for example, due to incorrectly targeting set up, a drop in the auction bid, and so on.

Some affiliate specialists also suspect that allegedly, the market giants deliberately target the most profitable segments first, and then rapidly reduce the effectiveness of the campaign so that the advertiser throws in more money.

Though note that this guess has never been confirmed and it isn’t 100% reliable information that large companies actually do such things.

Some more tips affiliate marketers

If rebooting the campaign doesn’t help, there are a few other measures that can turn the tables in your favor:

–   Reduce your budget for high-frequency ads;

–   You can also set them up to pause automatically if they show up too often;

–   Launch several different creatives in one ad set. If users start to get tired of one, the system itself will start pushing the next one;

–   Use different placements for different ad groups, especially when launching to a large audience;

–   Try changing your audience slightly to update your hook;

–   Consider a new offer: perhaps the current one is now old news in your selected GEO.

P.S.

Ad fatigue is not a sentence, but a challenge that requires creativity and flexibility. In affiliate marketing, as in any other business, the key to success is your ability to adapt. The main thing is to always be ready to find new solutions.

Nevertheless, there is no point in fighting algorithms endlessly either: if after 5 or 10 days, you find that no actions you’ve taken have helped, you should stop that traffic.

The tips and suggestions we gave above will help, if not all, then many affiliates, not to go astray and run ads with maximum efficiency.