Authors Make Your Facebook Ads Last Longer - 10 Ways to beat Facebook Ad Fatigue
Do you see your Facebook Ads cost climbing up with no visible increase in your book sales?
If so, then your Facebook ads are suffering from Ad Fatigue.
In this article, I’ll talk about the perils of Ad Fatigue and what you can do to combat it using TEN different ways.
Based on the statistics, these are the 10 most effective tactics to ensure when, why, and how to optimize your Facebook ads.
But first, what is Ad Fatigue?
Ad Fatigue happens when your ad’s target audience sees the same ad too many times. The probable symptom of ad fatigue is a drop in your ad’s CTR or the Click Through Rate accompanied by a rise in your ad frequency rate (which denotes how many times your ad has been seen).
How to recognize Facebook ad fatigue vs something else
Spotting ad fatigue is easy.
Your campaign key metrics start to drop and the "frequency" metric starts to rise.
If in case your key metrics drop but frequency doesn't increase or vice versa, then that is not ad fatigue.
So, why does this happen?
Facebook users see your ads frequently (as per the recent Facebook data the average is 13.8 times/day for any ad)
Your ads become something that people expect and ignore when they are on Facebook and your CTR drops
People are on Facebook to view the photos and statuses of their friends and your ad is competing against these which makes it hard to clickable
Rotate Ads to Fight Ad Fatigue
Rotating or changing the variables within your ads breaks the cycle of your Facebook audience turning ad fatigued.
In an ideal world, as soon as your ad starts losing effectiveness it should be substituted with a different version.
How often should I rotate?
Some experts suggest to rotate your ads weekly or biweekly while a few others suggest having multiple (two or three) ads revolving constantly.
For me, the fact that every business is unique; every marketing goal is unique, and so are the audience will define the way you will decide this rotation frequency.
What you should track are your CTR and the Frequency metrics.
Change your ad when the CTR declines and the Frequency increases.
The range will be decided based on what you are comfortable with for these two metrics grounded on the type of your business.
Facebook Ads Manager to the rescue
You can create multiple versions of your ad, but they’re useless unless you know whether or not they’re working. That’s where Facebook Ads Manager comes in.
The three most important advertising metrics for combating Ad Fatigue:
1. Frequency: Frequency is the average number of times people saw your ad. Check that your Frequency metric doesn’t get above eight (That’s the number Wishpond found out after a lot of testing).
A swelling frequency rate coupled with a declining CTR means the same person is seeing your ads over and over without taking action.
This also means that your ad has now flooded your target market to a point where the people who are going to click have already clicked on it and the people who aren’t, are not going to click.
How to find the frequency metric in Facebook Ads Manager
In the default column layout on the Facebook Ad Manager, the frequency metric isn't included as a column.
Click the Columns dropdown to see the list of pre-built column layouts.
Choose either Delivery, Performance and Clicks, or Customize Columns and add it any view you want.
2. Actions: Actions shows everyone who took an action (like downloading your book, clicking on your Amazon Book link, liking a page, etc) within 24 hours of seeing - or within 28 days of clicking - on your advertisement. The Actions metric is important if you’re trying for conversions. Check this link on the conversion tracking tool.
3. CTR: This tells you the rate at which your ad is clicked and is derived using number of times people have clicked on your ad divided by the number of people who saw your ad. Watch your CTR closely and in combination with your frequency metric. This will help you decide at what CTR/Frequency number you need to rotate an ad.
10 Ways to Keep your Ads Fresh and Combat Ad Fatigue
Now that you know how to measure your ad’s performance, let’s take a look at the four top strategies you can implement to keep your ads optimized.
1. Automatically pause ads with high frequency
If you’ve created numerous ads and turned them all on. Once a few of them reaches a high frequency, you want to turn these ads off.
2. Create new audiences and ads
Once you pause some ads, its time to update your ad creatives or audiences.
What are the quick updates you can do in your ad creatives
1. Change the colors of your ads - Colours matter especially when you are trying to stand out. Remember, you’re competing on the News Feed with cat and baby pictures.
2. Vary the wordings of your Ad headline
Use your brand name, a call-to-action, and a question, as I did at the beginning of this article. Remember, your headline can be no more than 25 characters.
Change the main text - For the main text use language that speaks directly to your specific target audience.
3. Keep your images simple and devoid of any text to make sure that your audience immediately understands what they are clicking for.
And always test your images. See what works for you. The image should be appealing both in its full-sized version and also in the thumbnail.
4. Include a clear Call-to-Action to ensure you’re getting something out of your ad
With Ad Rotation you should test out five or six different CTAs for the same product. The five ways you can write the CTA for this statement - Sign up for our 90 days Facebook Ad course now
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Quickly test and create new audiences
Create lookalikes based on your key conversion metrics (website visit, page likes, purchase, engagement, etc.)
Based on behaviour create audiences
Create lookalikes by uploading your subscribers email ids
3. Decrease budgets for high-frequency ad sets
Pausing high frequency ads sometimes reduce their efficiency when you restart them. A way to not let this happen is by decreasing its bid/budget to decrease frequency.
4. Exclude people who have already engaged with your ad
You can also exclude people that have already interacted with your website or engaged with your content.
There are multiple ways to exclude such audiences. Two of which I have used are as follows;
Excluding website traffic (Facebook Pixel data): Create a custom audience and then exclude it in the adset audience settings.
Exclude audiences that engaged with Your Page: You can exclude all people who engaged with your page the same way as in the above step.
5. Limit ad deliverability by running ads for a limited duration during a day (also called Dayparting)
Facebook gives you power of ad set scheduling – that means you can run ads only on certain days and at certain times.
The only downside to how Facebook implements this feature.
You have to set the ad set's budget to a lifetime budget that means you have to set an end date and budget limit for the ad set.
You have to set this manually for every ad set.
But dayparting allows you to run your ads during the best days of the week and time of the day versus running them 24/7. This will cut down less useful impressions and decrease ad fatigue.
6. Use the reach campaign objective
If you are using a Traffic or a Conversion Ad then you can try duplicating the campaign and change the campaign objective to Reach.
Reach campaigns are used to reach a larger audience set.
8. Duplicate your ad set
Although There are lot of theories on how the Facebook algorithm works, no one exactly knows exactly how it works.
So, a simple tactic that I have used is duplicating an underperforming ad set that has revived the ad.
9. Manage placements the right way
My advice is to strictly avoid setting ‘Automatic Placements’, especially when the campaign targets larger audiences.
The thing is when you use several different placements, Facebook will just choose the best-performing one and allocate most your ad set budget to that one placement.
Building ad sets for different placements is good when You:
Want to reach audience across different platforms
Want equal money spent across different platforms
Want to test which placement gives you the best results
And it's also good for controlling ad frequency and avoiding ad fatigue.
10. Complete overhaul and a different campaign objective
And if you still couldn’t fight off ad fatigue any other way then the only way left is to rethink the whole campaign, create new ad and new offers to drive sales.
Conclusion
Combating Ad Fatigue is one of the most important parts of advertising with Facebook.
But more important than knowing how to combat is knowing how to prove you’re combating it - and that’s where ad manager comes in.
Remember Facebook ads are pay-per-click, so you don’t lose out for trying something creative.