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Online Marketing 101: What Is Ad Fatigue And How To Avoid It

Online Marketing 101: What Is Ad Fatigue And How To Avoid It

Online marketing is the only best practice to spread a message about a company’s brand, products, or services to its potential customers as today, almost the whole world's population is wired to the internet, and the ever-increasing connectivity has created global shifts distorting industry after industry, sector after sector.

Ad fatigue refers to the quick and often steep drop in the performance of your advertisements. Generally, this is because consumers on the Internet see the same ads over and over again. Your ads may not be unique, and they're just like all of those other businesses selling the same or similar products as you. You're ineffective, therefore.

Because of ad fatigue, it's going to be more expensive for you to maintain and run your ads. Additionally, all the cost isn't worth it as your ads aren't really effective and this leads your campaign to fail.

Ad fatigue is a dangerous trap in online marketing and advertising. To ensure that this doesn't happen to you, keep in mind these tips on how to avoid it:

1. Use The Reach Objective

Reach objective is one of the campaign objectives that you can choose to apply on your site to prevent ad fatigue from happening. 

In using the reach objective, the goal generally is to get as many people into your ads, as possible. This strategy is best applicable only if you've got a limited audience, but despite this restricted audience, you want to reach a high number. 

Here are pointers to apply, in using the reach objective:

  • Set up a reach campaign strategy for your ad
  • Create a budget based on the audience size of your reach
  • Choose an audience and your placements
  • Use frequency capping, to reduce the chances of ad fatigue
  • Choose your ad creative

2. Lower The Frequency Of Your Ads

One of the strategies for making your ads more efficient is to post ads frequently. But, you've also got to balance this out as there are instances when a frequency that's too often does more harm than good. Ad fatigue is one of them, so to combat it, you have to lessen the frequency of your ads.

Lowering the ad frequency means that you're limiting the instances when viewers see the same ad. You're reducing the chances of your viewers getting bored with seeing the same things over and over again. An excellent numerical value is to make sure that the same audience doesn't see your exact same ad at least three times a day.

Put a break to monotony by not only advertising promotional offers of products and services but also that of your content. This applies, therefore, if you've got a blog. If you don't, then perhaps it's time for you to have one as well. In business, keeping a blog helps promote your products without it looking too much like an ad. 

An excellent strategy to go about with this is also to post links to your blogs, which contain write-ups about your products and services. This is the power of content marketing. In advertising content, you get to speak in-depth about your products and services. Most importantly, you get to answer the question, how are these products and services of importance to your life?

Other benefits that you can gain from advertising content include the following:

  • It increases the visibility of your brand
  • It creates loyalty and trust
  • It develops lasting relationships with your current audience
  • It puts you at a better position as a reputable name or an expert in the business industry that you belong in
  • It improves your level of brand awareness and recognition

4. Practice Non-Stop Rotation

When your team works on the creation of ads, do make it a point also to create at least two or three different ads on the same product or service. That way, you've got various options to rotate at any given time.

This tip is also in correlation with the advice mentioned earlier about the frequency of ads, where your viewers shouldn't view the same ad for the same product at least three times daily. When you've got two or three options of ads to rotate, then you're lowering the chances of your audience getting exposed to the same thing over and over again.

5. Change Up Your Ad Creative Regularly

The ad creative here refers to images, text, and other graphics that make up your ad. As you make two or three different advertisements for each product, you can also go one step deeper by changing the creative of the ad regularly. By this, you're giving all of your campaigns the extra boost of life that it badly needs.

When you change up your ad creative, it should look like you're posting a brand new ad. But, little do the audience know, it's only a variation of the same product or service that you've already advertised before.

6. Optimize Your Audience

One of the best ways for you to optimize your audience is for you to practice A/B Testing. This is also referred to as split testing, in other terms.

This fact refers to the tactic or strategies in place, by which you find out which body copies, headlines, and call-to-action work best for your current and target audience. The conclusion that you should come up with is that decision as to which copies of the ads have outperformed the others.

Here are tips to follow, when running A/B testing:

  • Run the tests over 30 days, for you to get the best metric results
  • Test one variable at a time
  • Use the right campaign structure
  • Set sufficient budget for you to have continuity in testing

7. Change The Offered Product Or Service

One of the most common mistakes done by advertisers is that when a product or service is selling well, they become even more aggressive in their advertising strategy to market that particular product. The point is in striking while the iron is hot.

Advertisers don't want its popularity to go to waste. But, this can result in ad fatigue. No matter how tempting it might be to stop advertising that product, do so.

One of the best ways to ensure that people don't get bored with your ads is to change up the offer regularly. This means taking turns between all the products and services that you have by making sure that you provide ample time to market each of them periodically. Make it a habit to regularly switch between the products and services that you have, before it even drops.

Conclusion

In simpler terms, ad fatigue means that your ads are no longer effective. Unfortunately, this is one of the most severe problems that advertisers can face. When ad fatigue happens, your audience is no longer responsive to your advertisements, no matter how well made they may be.

If you feel like you're suffering this problem, start over again. These tips enumerated above are going to help you along that line.

Sam Makad is a business consultant. He helps small & medium enterprises to grow their businesses and overall ROI. You can follow Sam on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.

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