Facebook advertising is getting worse. How to solve it?
By: Jakeson Christopher
Tags: Advertising, Facebook Marketing, PPC Marketing, Facebook Ads, Plus Marketing

When we were doing Facebook advertising, did we find that the cost of each click began to rise and the frequency of advertising continued to rise after only a few days of Facebook advertising.

In other words, you often find that your advertising effect will gradually become worse and worse. So why is this?

I think there are a few points:

First: From the perspective of Facebook, it is impossible for an advertisement to perform well all the time. If an advertisement can always perform very well, then Facebook will make less money.

You may be wondering, why users’ ads have been performing well, but not what Facebook likes?

It pays attention to a degree, no advertisement can perform well from the end, and the product has a life cycle, so is the advertisement, right?

Second: From the user’s point of view, many times the user’s aesthetics will be fatigued. For example, if you see an advertisement every day, it will be really annoying.

Now that information is flooded, who can withstand the bombardment of advertisements several times in succession is because the aesthetic fatigue of advertisements will cause the effects of advertisements to become worse and worse.

So if we look at the data from a data point of view, open the development of Facebook’s advertising data background, we can find the following data:

As shown in the figure above, if you see similar data in the Facebook Ads Manager, most of your ads have entered a period of fatigue.

Okay, then today we will talk about Facebook advertising, how to improve the efficiency decline caused by advertising fatigue.

01 Reasons and results of advertising fatigue

Q: What is advertising fatigue?

A: Facebook advertising fatigue is a phenomenon in which ads have been shown to the target audience many times, the frequency of ad display has increased, and the click-through rate of ads has decreased.

Q: Why is there advertising fatigue?

A: The reason why advertisements cause audience fatigue is because:

1. The ad is displayed too frequently, causing users to see this ad every time they log in to Facebook

2. Ads are competing with the photos and status on the user’s News Feeds

3. The advertising audience is already familiar with an advertisement and no longer feels fresh, so the click-through rate will drop

Q: Advertising fatigue will reduce the relevance score. What if the relevance score is low?

A: It will increase the cost per thousand impressions and the cost per search result. It will ultimately reduce the number of results obtained by the campaign, thereby reducing the overall return on ad spend (ROAs).

02 FB advertising performance indicators

Monitoring the effectiveness of ads in Facebook Ads Manager mainly focuses on three indicators:

1. Frequency

Frequency is how many times the audience will see your ad. If this number exceeds 3, then you should consider changing the creative.

To view the frequency of the ad, in the Ads Manager, click on the campaign and select the delivery view in the report section.

When the click-through rate drops and the frequency rises, it means that the same group of people are watching your ad repeatedly but not taking action.

When the ad is displayed, people who have clicked on the ad are less likely to click, and those who have not clicked will still not click, so the ad has actually saturated the target market.

2. Operational behavior

What are the actions taken by the advertisement? Within 24 hours after viewing the advertisement, or within 28 days after clicking the advertisement, you can get discounts, click links, install apps, like pages, send activities, etc.

If you want a higher conversion rate, then operational behavior is a very important indicator. You can use conversion tracking tools to track and understand.

3. Click rate

The CTR is calculated by dividing the number of times a user clicks on an ad by the number of times the ad is displayed.

Click-through rate is an important indicator of advertising fatigue. Through these two indicators, click-through rate and frequency, you can find the click-through rate and frequency that suit you, and you can determine when you need to rotate the creative.

Of course, you can also pay attention to other indicators, such as: CPM, ROAs, correlation.

You can use the Facebook ads cost analysis tool-ADCostly to view the average CTR, CPA, and CPM costs of different industries and publishers.

Of course, you also need some Google extensions to help you quickly calculate these indicators: CPC, CPM, CPA, ROI, Roas.

CPC & CPM Calculator

ROI & ROAS Calculator

Every advertisement that runs will eventually fatigue. If Facebook ads enter a period of fatigue, how can they be adjusted and resolved to restore the effectiveness of the ads?

Since advertising fatigue means that the advertisement is displayed to the target audience many times, then we can set some conditions in the facebook advertisement manager to limit the number of times that the advertisement is displayed to the same audience.

In addition, you can also use advertising rotation strategies to optimize advertising effects and solve the problem of advertising fatigue. Overcome advertising fatigue through advertising rotation strategies.

Because users are prone to fatigue after seeing an advertisement for a long time, by rotating advertisements, so that the advertisements continue to have some new ideas, it can effectively solve the problem of advertisement fatigue. It is best to use a rotation strategy as soon as the advertisement shows signs of fatigue.

03 Solutions to audience fatigue

If an advertisement is displayed for the same group of people for a long time, then they are easy to feel tired, so to keep the advertisement fresh to the audience, some methods are needed.

1. Use reach coverage targets

When starting to create a Facebook ad, set the ad goal to reach to reduce the chance of ad fatigue.

The goal of the campaign, Reach, means that the ads will reach as many people as possible, and the ads will be distributed to as many people as possible, so the chance of advertising fatigue is even smaller.

2. Set frequency cap

A sign of audience fatigue is that advertisements are displayed too frequently, so by setting a frequency cap and limiting the frequency with which the selected audience sees your advertisement, audience fatigue can be avoided.

To set the frequency cap, select the setting here in frequency cap.

3. Exclude people who have participated in advertising

Because when the frequency of the advertisement increases, the audience may have seen the advertisement over and over again. If these people can be excluded, the fatigue of the advertisement will be reduced.

First, use the Facebook pixel to create a custom audience, users who have visited the site in the past 60 days; you can also create a separate list of people who have recently registered for the service or filled out forms.

Then, use Facebook Ads Manager to exclude audiences who have clicked on ads from the target list, and only serve ads to audiences who have not clicked on ads.

4. Change the background color to show different visual effects

We all know that Facebook’s ad color scheme is blue and white. You should avoid using the same color scheme when creating ads, otherwise it is easy to be submerged in newsfeed and ignored by the audience.

Therefore, the color scheme used in our advertisement should be conspicuous enough. If it is a blue advertisement, at least the advertisement should be placed on a colored background to attract attention.

Different colors can cause different emotions. Blue makes people feel calm, yellow makes people feel happy, and green is a feeling of vitality. The use of different colors in advertisements will give people different psychological effects.

Use advertisements with different visual effects to do a separate test to find the best advertisement. The frequency of advertisements should be kept between 2.5–3.

5. Use different copywriting

Modify the copy, use brand titles, call-to-actions, and question sentences in the copy. However, the title of the copy should be within 25 characters, the main text should be limited to 90 characters, and the language that can directly talk to the target audience can be used to better attract them.

Everyone will be more interested in humorous content. There are more humorous elements in the advertising copy and wording, which is very helpful to enhance the advertising effect. Therefore, a little modification of the copy can make the advertisement more attractive.

6. Keep the picture concise and easier to understand

It is recommended that the advertisement pictures should be kept concise. For details, you can refer to several aspects:

Choose a picture that catches the eye, and the visual effects of zooming in, zooming out, or zooming in are good.

Do not include text in the picture. Avoid using pictures with many details

Pay attention to separate test ad pictures to see which picture works better.

This picture looks good whether it is full-size or thumbnail. There are not many details on the picture. The model looks very charming with these glasses. This image ad can produce some conversion materials, such as:

For male audience statistics, you can separately test a picture of the same pose but a male model;

The focus of the picture is on the eyes and glasses, with eyebrows raised

The content of the picture is a pair of broken glasses with humorous questions in the text or title.

7. Use a clear call to action to ensure that the ad is informative

The advertisement must have a clear call to action, otherwise the effect of the advertisement will be greatly reduced. When testing different creatives and finding the most suitable rotation ads, test at least 5–6 calls to action.

Example: Sign up for our 6-week SEO accreditation course now This call-to-action can derive many variations, as shown below:

1. Spots for our SEO Accreditation course are disappearing fast. Enter now! 2. Need a resume boost? Earn SEO Accreditation with AcmeCert! 3. Now until September 31st — save 50% on our SEO Accreditation course 4. Optimize your company’s internet presence with SEO Accreditation. Apply now! 5. Boss breathing down your neck about ROI? Sign up for our 6-week SEO Accreditation

In addition to making some changes to the advertising elements, you can also change the target audience.

If you are very optimistic about your creative, but the click-through rate is still decreasing and the frequency is still increasing, try to change the target audience statistics before publishing the ad.

Changing the target audience can minimize advertising fatigue while maintaining a stable click volume.

My own experience is that changing the target audience is very useful for Facebook contest ads. Because competitions are very attractive, changing advertising audiences can keep competitions attractive and avoid advertising fatigue or a drop in click-through rates.

8. Increase the value of advertising offers

We can also increase the attractiveness of advertising by increasing the value of advertising offers. You can also conduct separate tests for different advertising offers, so that we know which offer has the best effect.

For example, for the New York Times subscription discount, the first offer is “99 cents for 4 weeks”, and the second offer is “free use for 8 weeks”. The appreciation of this discount will have a great impact. Because after everyone has a comparison, it is easy to make a decision.

9. Change ad placement

An ad set uses desktop, mobile devices, and audience network (Audience Network) placements at the same time. Each ad will have more likes and shares.

But this will also allow Facebook to do automatic optimization, and then all budgets will be inclined to the lowest CPM placement.

For example, if the CPC of your ads displayed on the Audience Network is significantly reduced, then Facebook will allocate more budget to this placement.

If you want to use multiple ad placements, create a separate ad group for each placement, copy the ad group and assign a different placement to each ad group.

10. Connect with customers

By providing the audience with valuable information and useful guidelines, rather than direct sales promotion, customers can build interest and trust in the brand.

There is a saying that the best way to sell is not to sell. That is to say the truth.

If you use Facebook ads for direct sales on the one hand, and use it to cultivate potential customers and establish connections with customers, you can make full use of Facebook ads to achieve your dual advertising goals.

There are many ways to achieve this effect, such as creating e-books, sharing blogs, and giving away completely different types of products. Using these methods to increase customer subscriptions will help increase potential customers, build brand awareness, and promote sales.

The above are some methods to solve Facebook advertising fatigue. The first three methods are to control the speed of advertising fatigue by setting Facebook ads, and the latter method is to overcome advertising fatigue by rotating advertising materials. You can use the A/B test to see which method is more effective.