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Are your once-successful Facebook ad campaigns no longer effective?
Wondering if ad fatigue is responsible?
In this article, you'll learn how to recognize the signs of ad fatigue and tweak existing Facebook ads for better performance.
Determine Whether Ad Fatigue Is Impacting Campaign Performance
Ad fatigue is an issue that will affect even the most successful Facebook ad campaigns. It occurs when your campaign frequency gets too high, causing your target audiences to see the same ads again and again, and therefore become less responsive to them.
That's why Facebook isn't a “set it and forget it” ad platform. Your campaigns require ongoing management via testing to continue to deliver exceptional results.
Ad fatigue affects other core campaign metrics. It decreases relevance scores, which in turn increases your CPM and cost per results. Ultimately, it decreases the number of results your campaign gets, reducing your overall return on ad spend (ROAS).
Every campaign you run will eventually encounter ad fatigue. It doesn't matter if you're spending millions or just a few thousand on your Facebook campaign. The ad algorithm works the same way for every advertiser.
To combat ad fatigue in your campaigns, you need to be able to identify it. To do this, analyze your campaign's ROAS, which measures how profitable your ads are. Then focus on four core metrics at the ad level: cost, relevance, frequency, and CPM. This analysis will help you identify which ads within your campaigns are decreasing in performance.
Calculate ROAS
To add the ROAS metric to your conversion reporting column, navigate to your Ads Manager dashboard and select Customize Columns from the Columns drop-down menu.
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In the Customize Columns window, select Website on the left. Then scroll down to Conversion Value: Website (Facebook Pixel) and select Website Purchase ROAS. Then click Apply to save your changes.
If you aren't using the purchase conversion to measure your campaigns, you can also calculate your ROAS by measuring the difference between the revenue generated from your campaigns and your ad spend.
If your campaign isn't ROAS-positive, meaning the revenue it generates is less than the amount you spend on the campaign, that's an indication your campaign is decreasing in performance and you need to look deeper at it.
Review CRFC Metrics
Next, you want to analyze the specific ads in the campaigns that aren't ROAS-positive. To do this, look at the changes in the cost per result, relevance scores, frequency, and CPM (CRFC) metrics. You want to measure the change over a 7-day period of your number of results and CRFC.
Campaigns suffering from ad fatigue will be decreasing in ROAS and you'll see that your frequency is high. This can decrease your relevance score, which in turn increases your CPM and cost per result, ultimately reducing the number of results and negatively affecting your ROAS.
To combat ad fatigue, you want to refresh your campaigns. We'll look at five different variables you can adjust to improve your performance: creative, copy, targeting, objectives, and the offer.
#1: Change Your Ad Creative or Your Facebook Ad Copy
An ad refresh consists of changing either the creative or copy of your ad.
Start with changing your creative because this is the ad component your target audiences see first. The ad creative is what grabs your audiences' attention and stops them from scrolling the news feed. It can include both the format of the ad and the content of the creative such as the image or video.
When doing an ad refresh, you want to duplicate your original ad within your campaign and ad set. Then in the new draft ad, make the relevant change.
To change your creative or copy, navigate to the ad level of your campaign. Then select the ad you want to change and click Duplicate.
In the Duplicate Ad Into window, make sure your current campaign and current ad set are selected. Then click Duplicate and a new identical draft ad will be created.
Now edit the ad and make the changes you want.
For this example, you want to make a creative change and switch the format from single image to single video. To do this, select the Video/Slideshow option and then choose or upload the video you want to use. Review and publish your changes to set your new ad live.
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FIND YOUR NEXT FAVORITE TOOLTip: If you're an ecommerce company and currently use product images in your sales campaigns, here are two of the most common ad creative changes you can make:
- Change your creative from single image to the carousel format.
- Turn your product images into a slideshow video and use video creative instead of images.
#2: Adjust Your Facebook Ad Set Targeting
Another way to fight ad fatigue is to refresh your targeting. Keep your campaign objective and ads the same, but test a new targeting at the ad set level.
To implement a targeting refresh, first navigate to the ad set level of the campaign you've identified as decreasing in effectiveness. Then select the ad set itself and click Duplicate. This will bring up the Duplicate Ad Set Into window. Ensure you're duplicating into the original campaign and click Duplicate.
Now open the draft ad set and adjust your audience, but keep the other ad set options (such as placements, bidding, and optimization settings) the same.
Depending on which level of your advertising funnel the campaign is in, you can test new cold audiences such as those targeting similar interests in your industry and also different lookalike audiences.
Or further down your advertising funnel, you might test new video custom audiences for different duration video views. And right at the bottom of your advertising funnel, test new website custom audiences targeting people who have visited your website.
Once you've changed the Audiences section in your ad set, navigate to the ad level. Then select Use Existing Post and enter the post ID to use the exact same ad as in your original campaign. (Refer to tip #7 of this article for details on how to use this tactic.)
By using the same ad via the post ID, you can preserve social proof such as likes, comments, and shares on the Facebook ad.
#3: Choose an Alternate Campaign Objective
Refreshing the campaign objective is another way to combat ad fatigue. This occurs at the top level of your ad campaigns and involves changing the objective to reach a new segment of your target audience.
To implement an objective refresh, navigate to the campaign level of the ad campaign you've identified as decreasing in performance. Then select the campaign and click Duplicate.
In the Duplicate Campaign window, choose how many times you want to duplicate the campaign. In this example, you want to change the objective just once, so ensure that 1 is selected. Then click Duplicate.
Next, when the edit menu appears, choose your new objective from the Objective drop-down list.
To illustrate, if you're running an ad using the Post Engagement objective that drives people from Facebook to your website, you might switch it to test the Traffic objective.
With this tactic, you could also test new conversion events within the Conversions objective. Changing your optimization event for a conversion event high up in your sales funnel means that your campaign will be shown to a larger group of people (within your target audience) who are likely to take the action you're optimizing for and therefore improve your results.
Suppose you run an ecommerce company and your campaign optimizing for purchases is increasing in cost per purchase. Try switching the Facebook ad set optimization to an action higher up the funnel such as initiate checkout or add to cart.
Once you've chosen your new objective or event optimization in the case of the Conversion objective, don't change any other variables at the ad set level and use the post ID method to keep the same ad as in your original campaign.
#4: Replace Your Offer
Now let's look at a fourth way to combat ad fatigue: an offer refresh. This involves completely changing the offer you present to your target audience.
You can change your offer at every stage of your advertising sales funnel. For instance, if you're running top-of-funnel content to warm up cold audiences and your cost per video view is increasing, add new content ads to your campaign.
To implement an offer refresh, just like with the ad refresh, navigate to the ad level of your campaign. Then select your ad and click Duplicate.
In the Duplicate window, ensure that you're duplicating into the same campaign and ad set. Then click Duplicate.
In the ad edit window, modify your offer as desired. This includes changing your copy and creative, depending on the offer.
To visualize this, if you're running a sales-based offer for a product and find that your cost per purchase is increasing, you could use this offer refresh to introduce a new offer for a different product or a site-wide offer.
Click here to learn how to use the Facebook Audience Overlap tool to prevent ad fatigue.
What do you think? Do you use any of these tactics to combat Facebook ad fatigue? What tips can you share? Please share your thoughts below.
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