Ad fatigue sets in when an audience has seen an ad so many times that it stops reacting. People scroll past it or hide it, and its performance slides. Look for these signs together, over several days:
- Frequency, the average number of views per person, keeps climbing.
- CTR falls steadily.
- CPM and CPA rise.
- Comments turn repetitive or negative.
Fatigue comes faster with small audiences, high budgets and a single creative. Scaling speeds it up too, since a bigger budget in the same audience means more views per person. To handle it, keep a steady pipeline of new creatives, refresh the hook, format or angle of a winner instead of starting from scratch, and widen the audience so the ad reaches new people.
Common mistakes: killing an ad after one bad day, since normal day-to-day swings are not fatigue, and editing a winning ad until it stops working.
A competitor's ad that has run for months has held up against fatigue. In SellWinners you can filter ads by days running, and follow a brand's launches and creative tests in the Brand Tracker.