Why You Are Misdiagnosing Creative Fatigue

Creative fatigue is not the problem you think it is.

So one of the oldest fears among advertisers is creative fatigue. But I’m convinced that in today’s Meta advertising, creative fatigue is rarely the problem you think it is.

On this episode, I’m going to discuss what creative fatigue is, when it’s most frequently an issue, why it’s rarely a problem now, and why it’s often misdiagnosed.

So, creative fatigue is a rather simple concept on the surface.

Your creative has been used so much for a particular audience that it’s no longer effective. They’ve seen the same image or video and text, and they’ve already decided whether or not they’re going to act.

Showing it another time won’t change that.

You could more accurately say that it’s the audience that is fatigued by your creative.

The most common situation when this would be a problem now is when you have a very limited audience. So that could be because you’re a local business or because you’re isolating a remarketing audience.

When that’s the case, Meta quickly runs out of new people to reach, so you just keep reaching the same people over and over.

In addition to a limited audience, you may have limited your creative assets. Maybe you only created one or two ads and used only one headline and primary text option.

Even if you created more than one, Meta may have already determined that the others weren’t effective, and focused on one.

If you give Meta limited options, both in terms of creative and audience, creative fatigue is an eventual certainty.

Now, I’ll also say that creative fatigue should rarely be a problem now.

You can’t do anything about a limited audience when running ads for a local business. But the way ad creation works now begs for more assets and creative diversity.

So if you provide five headlines and five primary text options, the text is less likely to fatigue.

If you accept some of Meta’s enhancements like AI-generated images, AI-generated videos, and other Advantage+ Creative enhancements, you are naturally generating more options.

And if you aren’t targeting a local business or remarketing, since remarketing happens naturally anyway, we’re almost always dealing with larger audiences now.

Detailed targeting and lookalike audiences are almost always suggestions for the most common performance goals, so the pool of potential people is much larger than it used to be.

The impact of these things is less creative fatigue.

A single ad should last longer because it’s composed of so many more potential combinations of ad copy and creative. And once Meta determines a person or group of people have seen your ad enough without converting, it’s easy to move on to others within the broader pool.

So unless you’re doing things that make creative fatigue more likely, like restricting your audience or limiting your ad variations, creative fatigue probably isn’t the problem you think it is.

I’ve actually seen a situation where a business was spending close to $1,000 per day for two years, showing the same two ads during that time. It’s the classic case where you’d assume creative fatigue would be a problem.

But you know what?

The ads are more effective today than they were two years ago.

The problem that most advertisers have is that they anticipate creative fatigue when they shouldn’t be. They misdiagnose drops in performance as creative fatigue when there’s often a much more obvious explanation.

Once you understand it, it’s a phenomenon that you can see and prove.

When you publish a new ad, Meta will start by showing it to the people who are most likely to convert. That means that you can expect the highest percentage of your remarketing audiences to see your ad during the first couple of weeks.

It’s also why we often hear about ads performing well initially before dropping off in performance.

What advertisers are inadvertently saying is that their remarketing audiences act on their ad, but new audiences don’t. Because once Meta exhausts the audience most likely to convert, less and less of your budget is likely to go to that remarketing audience.

You can see this happen in real time by defining audience segments and using breakdowns.

First, make sure that your audience segments are defined thoroughly and accurately. Use the broadest website custom audience and dynamically updated customer list audience for your Engaged Audience.

It should capture all of the people who are engaging with your website or email list. And then the same thing for your Existing Customers, but only capturing people who have made a purchase.

Then use the breakdown by Audience Segments for sales campaigns.

You will likely see the highest percentage of your budget is spent on remarketing during the first few weeks. Depending on your budget and size of these remarketing audiences, that percentage will eventually drop.

While your results are propped up by remarketing early, the performance with new audiences will become increasingly important with time.

What you think is creative fatigue is actually an algorithmic shift from remarketing to prospecting.

If you don’t understand that, you publish a new ad whenever you see this decline. And, wouldn’t you know it, you’ll have a perceived boost in performance.

But what you don’t understand is that this is because Meta starts the new ad with a heavy remarketing focus.

The cycle is restarted.

Advertisers can get addicted to this boost, but it’s mostly fool’s gold.

While reaching your remarketing audience certainly has some value, the results tend to be incredibly misleading.

Make sure to break down your results by attribution setting or use the compare attribution settings feature with the breakdown by audience segments.

What you’re likely to see is a higher concentration of view-through and engage-through conversions during the periods when performance appears to be at its peak.

But it’s misleading since many of those conversions would have happened without your ads. They aren’t incremental.

The true performance of your ads is found after that remarketing exhaustion is complete and Meta moves on to a more prospecting dominant audience.

This is when you know how effective your ads actually are.

And if you can get stable performance during this period, you’ll find that creative fatigue is no longer the issue you thought it was.

You can ride one or two ads for months and months because they’ve proven to work with new audiences. And the pool of new audiences is nearly inexhaustible in some cases.

So here’s the bottom of the glass.

Creative fatigue isn’t nearly the problem that you think it is. In most cases, you’re misdiagnosing a drop in performance once your remarketing audience is exhausted.

This initial period is often padded with view-through and engage-through conversions, and aren’t representative of the true value of your ads.

That value is found once you’ve exhausted the people who are most likely to convert and your ads are shown predominantly to a prospecting audience.

It's also when advertisers often overreact and turn these ads off.

This is actually when good ads shine, and when you find out whether you have an ad that can last for many months, instead of weeks.

And when you have ads like that, your job is a whole lot easier.