11 Ways to Combat Facebook Ad Fatigue

If you advertise to the same audience, with the same ad creative for an extended period of time, Facebook ad fatigue will set in.

And Facebook ad fatigue very often leads to a drop off in results. When your prospects become bored with your ads, they are very unlikely to take the action you want them to take.

Fortunately, there are ways to combat Facebook ad fatigue and here’s 11 of my favourites…

#1 Refresh Facebook Ad Creative

Changing the images, headlines, text and even videos that are used in your Facebook ads is one of the most effective ways to combat ad fatigue.

I would recommend that when using this technique, you make significant changes to your ad.

Your new ad should not look very similar to the original, otherwise your target audience will recognize it.

The most recognizable parts of a Facebook ad are the image, followed by the headline. So make sure you change at least one of those when using this method.

Here’s an example of an ad that performed well until ad fatigue started to set in:

We changed the image, some of the text and the call to action, and the cost per lead went back down to what it had previously been:

#2 Use A Different Ad Format

An almost guaranteed way to overcome Facebook ad fatigue is to change your ad format.

Most Facebook advertisers stick to image ads. But offering the same product or service in a video format can be more effective.

I would also recommend testing Facebook slideshow ads as well.

And it can give your campaigns a lot of extra life if you’ve got ad fatigue issues.

Here’s an example of a video ad that’s promoting my Facebook Ad Template:

Below is an image ad that does the same thing, but looks very different:

As you can see from the number of likes, comments and shares, the video ad performed much better.

#3 Offer New Products & Services

Offering a new product or service is not possible for every business. But for those that can, it’s a very obvious way to overcome Facebook ad fatigue.

A lot of Facebook advertisers are reluctant to change their offer and that’s understandable. When you’ve got a profitable Facebook ad campaign, it’s difficult to stop running it.

But when ad fatigue sets in, that campaign’s performance will suffer.

It’s much better to get out in front of it, and preemptively change what you’re offering in your Facebook ads.

And doing so may actually improve your results. The best people to advertise to on Facebook are often previous customers.

#4 Reach Objective

There are currently 13 different Facebook ad objectives you can use when you create a new campaign.

The first one on the list is the Reach objective:

The Reach objective is designed to serve your ad to as many different people as possible.

This is not how most ad objectives perform. Facebook campaigns are automatically optimized for the selected objective, which means the same ad may be shown to a small percentage of your audience many times.

For example, if you use the conversions objective and Facebook’s algorithms determine that a certain section of your target audience is more likely to convert, those people will receive the vast majority of your ad impressions.

The Reach objective on the other hand, distributes your ad impressions over a larger percentage of your audience. This means it will take longer for Facebook ad fatigue to become an issue.

#5 Use A Frequency Cap

To make reach campaigns even more effective at preventing Facebook ad fatigue, you can use a frequency cap.

Frequency caps limit how often people within your audience are served your ad within a set time period.

Frequency caps are set at the ad set level, and the settings displayed above would prevent anyone within your target audience from seeing an ad in this ad set more than once per week.

#6 Keep Things Fresh with Content

Facebook advertising experts often recommend advertising content for many reasons.

And it’s a great way to combat Facebook ad fatigue.

You can advertise video or written content alongside your conversion campaigns to help keep things fresh.

By doing so you can also deliver a lot of value, that can really help you achieve your sale and lead generation objectives.

#7 Respond to Comments

Ads that successfully engage target audiences generate a lot of comments. Some of which will be questions.

Whenever possible, Facebook advertisers should jump in to the comments section and have real conversations with their prospects.

This will help improve results overall, and it helps prevent ad fatigue.

People within your target market are not going to become bored with your ad, if they are engaged in a conversation in the comments section.

And for every person that comments, there will be many more that follow these conversations.

#8 Change Your Target Audience

There’s often more than one target audience on Facebook that will deliver great results.

If Facebook ad fatigue has started affecting your campaign and you’re reluctant to change the offer or the ad itself, you can try targeting new audiences.

Facebook’s audience insights is great for finding new audiences.

One thing you want to watch out for here, is audience overlap.

Similar targeting options can contain a lot of audience overlap, so I would recommend that you exclude your original audience for the new targeting.

You can do this in the 2nd text-field below:

#9 Target Lookalike Audiences

If you’re looking to target new audiences, one of the best options is to create a lookalike audience.

Lookalike audiences contain people that are very similar to another group of people.

If you use an existing customer list to create a lookalike audience, it will contain people that are very similar to your existing customers.

This is unsurprisingly a fantastic targeting option for most Facebook ad campaigns.

In fact, lookalikes audiences will often deliver the lowest CPA of any cold targeting option.

In this campaign, the original audience generated leads for £1.55 each:

Whereas the lookalike audience generated leads for £1.04 each:

#10 Don’t Spend Too Much on Retargeting

Retargeting on Facebook refers to targeting people that already know your business.

This can be very effective, and retargeting audiences often deliver the lowest CPAs.

But unless you’re advertising for a massive brand, the number of people that know your business is going to be much smaller than cold audiences.

This means that you need to set a lower daily budget, otherwise you will have ad fatigue issues very quickly.

I would recommend that you monitor your Facebook ad frequency:

If that Frequency number increases dramatically over a short period of time, your budget is too high.

#11 Create Holiday Themed Ads

Making your ads holiday themed can boost your results, and make them more relevant to your target audience.

It also forces you to regularly change your ads, because you can only use a holiday themed ad around a holiday.

Holiday themed ads don’t make sense for every business, but in certain industries they can deliver fantastic results.

For example, the Easter carousel ad you can see above performed much better than similar ads that weren’t holiday themed.

Conclusion

Here’s the 11 ways to combat Facebook ad fatigue:

1. Refresh Facebook Ad Creative
2. Use a Different Ad Format
3. Offer New Products & Services
4. Reach Objective
5. Use a Frequency Cap
6. Keep Things Fresh With Content
7. Respond to Comments
8. Change Your Target Audience
9. Target Lookalike Audiences
10. Don’t Spend Too Much on Retargeting
11. Create Holiday Themed Ads