Ad Fatigue – What Are The Symptoms & How To Avoid It
What is ad fatigue? It’s something that most clients don’t really consider but it is really important to get the best ROI from your paid advertising campaigns. If you’re doing pay per click advertising and one of your campaigns starts off doing great, but then suddenly things seem to go wrong, it could be because of ad fatigue. Whether you’re just a person managing your own pay per click advertising or an agency that is managing multiple campaigns, you’ll eventually face this situation. And a lot of times it’s caused by something very simple but overlooked.
Ad fatigue is when your advertising campaign gets neglected and basically continues to be shown over and over again. No changes get made, old content is still there, and any special offers have now expired. People who once clicked on your ad are now tired of reading the same information and start looking elsewhere. Paid advertising campaigns need to be monitored and managed on a consistent basis, or their performance will drop and your marketing costs will increase. Not only that, if you’re getting paid a management fee, it’s your duty to manage it. It’s just that simple. It’s something that can be easily overlooked, but could be the primary reason why your click through rates start dropping and sales declining.
A good example would be a very popular TV commercial during the Super Bowl. A Super Bowl ad costs millions of dollars so getting people to love them is extremely important, but unfortunately a lot of these ads basically flop. At the same time there are a handful of these commercials that people love and remember, but after they’ve seen them a few dozen times, they aren’t as cool as they used to be. Chances are if these ads come on again they will want to change the channel. The reason for that is ad fatigue.
Fortunately, you can avoid this problem by being proactive in taking the following steps:
- Use different headlines
- Change your descriptions
- Change your call to actions
- Test different ad copies
- Manage ad schedules
As good marketers, we are always monitoring what’s going on with our clients’ paid search campaigns, analytics numbers, costs per click, click through rates, etc. We also need to remember what we like and don’t like as consumers. If we do, our ads will be fresh and up-to-date avoiding ad fatigue, keeping people engaged, and getting the best ROI for our advertising dollars.
