In the early days of Facebook advertising, marketers quickly learned that one of the most valuable optimization techniques was to swap out ad creative frequently to avoid the pitfalls of ad fatigue.
What is Ad Fatigue?
Advertising that has been in-market too long can begin to lose its effectiveness as the target audience simply stops engaging with it because they’ve seen it too many times. There have even been instances where consumers have become frustrated or annoyed at seeing the same social banner over and over. Lower engagement generally means that click-through rate decreases over time, but for social advertising, it can also mean fewer interactions such as Likes, Comments, Shares, etc.
“Success on Facebook requires driving deep and sustained engagement with audiences,” says Skai’s Senior Product Manager, Christian Tabing-Dalit. “It’s essential for Facebook advertisers to identify and combat ad fatigue early and effectively.”
For an engagement-heavy channel such as Facebook advertising, a drop in audience interaction is alarming, and one of the best fixes to combat ad fatigue is simply to rotate out the creative before this begins to happen. Of course, creative isn’t inexpensive to produce as well as swapping out tons of creative for a massive social ad account can waste valuable marketer time which could be spent on higher-value tasks.
The best strategy for this issue is to swap out creative just as its effectiveness begins to fall so that you can avoid the drop in engagement but also get the most out of your assets. Skai has a variety of tools that can help to both identify and combat ad fatigue.
Skai Social Ad Fatigue Solution #1 – Identify the Problem with the Analysis Grid
The Skai analysis grid makes identifying any performance issues—including ad fatigue—fast and easy. Being able to slice and dice your ad performance has become a hallmark of the entire platform including Skai Social, Skai Search, and Skai Ecomm.
Within the Skai grid, marketers can quickly find high and low performing images, headlines, and ad copy. Standard metrics such as click-through rate and engagement can be used or clients can create their own custom metrics in the system.
Skai Social Ad Fatigue Solution #2 – Smart Tags as Your 24/7 Assistant
Skai Smart Tags work across the entire platform to proactively surface insights to common challenges that marketers face. In fact, ad fatigue was the very first problem that Smart Tags were created to fix.
Smart Tags use deep machine learning to automatically flag ads that are indicating signs of fatigue without any prompting from a client. Any problematic ads are flagged via a tag in the platform. If clicked, these tags open up potential recommendations to fix. Clients can use the suggestions from the system or take action themselves.
Skai Ad Fatigue Solution #3 – Automated Actions & Creative Manager for Refreshing & Sequencing
As highlighted in a recent Friday Feature Focus, Skai’s Creative Manager helps marketers manage their ads across the biggest advertising platforms in the world.
It serves as a media library hub where an entire marketing team—including partners and agencies with Skai logins—can upload images and videos to be used in ads. There’s also integration with Dropbox and Box so that teams already using those folder-sharing services can simply sync the tools so that the media assets automatically show up in Skai.
With regards to combatting ad fatigue, pairing Automated Actions with Creative Manager sequencer can automatically swap out visual assets within social creative to keep ads fresh.
Skai Creative Manager’s sequencing feature
Marketers can both plan our creative refreshing to happen on a set schedule or let the system monitor performance goals set by the practitioner. Then, if an ad doesn’t meet those goals, the system will automatically pause it and create a new ad using the next image or video in the sequence. Skai clients can also choose the desired threshold before the system checks the ad’s performance, such as after 100,000 impressions in order to give the ad enough time to prove itself.
Conclusion: Fight Ad Fatigue to Optimize Your Facebook Advertising
Ultimately, the three Skai solutions presented in this post for ad fatigue are exactly the kinds of things that marketers should be leveraging their technology tools for:
- To be able to quickly identify potential issues
- To use machine learning to find issues in big datasets to both notify and offer suggestions to fix
- To proactively take action either scheduled by the marketer to optimize campaigns behind the scenes.
All of these things can be done manually—and in many cases are still being done manually throughout the industry. However, by freeing up your marketing team’s time with technology, it opens up more room for higher level tasks and creative thinking that humans are best equipped to perform.
For more information on Skai’s ad fatigue solutions and the rest of the platform, please contact us today or schedule a quick and easy demo of Skai Social
