
Facebook Advertising Done Right: 10 Tips to Combat Ad Fatigue
Everyone who deals with Facebook advertising knows that the life cycle of any campaign is limited. Sooner or later it runs out of fuel, resulting in a poor relevance score, low CTR and high conversion cost. The real challenge for marketers is to breathe life into campaigns that are getting stale.
The average person sees up to 10,000 ads every day. The American Marketing Association. Why Your Customers’ Attention is the Scarcest Resource in 2017

Users tend to get tired of ads. If they get bombarded with a single creative for a month or two, in most cases they end up blocking or simply ignoring that annoying ad. There is a well-documented psychological phenomenon known as banner blindness: when people are shown the same ad from a brand for a long time, they simply stop noticing it, even if the proposal is meaningful and relevant to them.
86% of consumers suffer from “banner blindness.” Adotas Study

If you are experiencing a decrease in performance and feeling like you might be wasting your advertising budget in vain, you may have fallen victim to ad fatigue. If so, it’s time to change your advertising strategy.
10 SMART WAYS TO COMBAT AD FATIGUE
1) Constantly refresh ad creatives
For Facebook advertisers looking to effectively acquire traffic or raise brand awareness, constant production of fresh content is a reliable way to grab the audience’s attention. It is also the most cost-effective solution to drive sales. If you want to maintain a healthy CTR and maximize user engagement, it’s highly recommended that you refresh ad creatives at least once a week, or even every few days. This will allow you to beat ad fatigue and keep people interested in your brand.

If your creatives are not refreshed on a regular basis, Facebook may limit your reach and the number of impressions to your target audience. According to the Facebook Advertiser Help Center:
“Ads that are shown around 3 times or more tend to decline in performance, even if they were initially very successful. We recommend creating a new ad with a new image or text about once a week. Make sure to stop your previous ad before running the new one so that they don’t compete with each other.”
2) Optimize frequency
For campaigns using the reach objective, Facebook provides tools to control the frequency of impressions. Frequency capping reduces “banner burnout” and helps you save money that would otherwise be spent on fruitless impressions. For example, you can schedule your banner or video to be displayed 3 times per 24h for any one user.

A weekly frequency of 2 is an effective rate for capturing 95% of potential brand lift. Effective Frequency: Reaching Full Campaign Potential | Facebook IQ
Another way to manage the number of impressions is to set the optimization to “Daily Unique Reach”, where one ad will be shown to one person only once per day, as shown in the following image:

3) Use ad rotation
If you are not able to frequently offer something entirely new, you can make your ads look visually different by assigning multiple creatives with different images/videos and CTA variations to a single placement. This will keep your potential customers from becoming “blind” to your offer even if they see it regularly. The more creatives you have in rotation, the more visible your content will be.

For example, if you work in the travel industry, you can alternate images or cinemagraphs with beautiful landscapes of various countries.
Bear in mind that, typically, only about half of ads are viewed by the target audience, so make sure to deploy more creative variations than you would need to achieve your goals.
Fan acquisition campaigns with automated ad rotation get 60% higher CTRs and 75% lower costs per fan than those without ad rotation. Ginny Marvin, The 4 Top Facebook Advertising Trends and the Stats Behind Them
4) Bring uniqueness
The effectiveness of a banner or video depends, among other factors, on how eye-catching it is. Best practices for producing conspicuous creatives include using bright colors, a large button to make an ad look more clickable, and a compelling call-to-action. To make a creative stand out, it should create a sense of exclusivity and uniqueness.
The creative is 5 times more important than targeting in driving ad awareness. Marketing Land
For example, in the e-commerce industry, the most popular items, such as shoes, have been overused and worn out, which may cause ad fatigue. To produce attention-grabbing ads, you should always seek out distinctive goods that pique users’ interest.

“Up to half of the probability that an ad will be looked at depends on the creative itself (47.3%); this is five times more important than targeting (10.7%). How long the attention is then focused on the ad is as equally driven by the creative (30.1%) as the targeting (32.8%.).” — Peter Minnium, Marketing Land
5) Focus on versatility
When choosing visuals for their ads, most advertisers mistakenly believe that professional-looking stock pictures and videos attract more user attention. In fact, such content is typically ignored by the jaded audience. Moreover, if a stock photo you are using has appeared in the creatives of another advertiser, there is a risk of targeting people who have had negative experiences with that company and may then project that experience onto your ad. Using photos and videos of overexposed models may ruin your Facebook campaign and bring your efforts to naught.

Producing high-quality ad creatives not only implies using beautiful imagery, but also requires deep study of consumer behavior patterns, preferences and purchase intentions. What drives conversions in one business vertical may not work at all in another. It’s important to understand that people are heavily influenced by emotions, and picking the right emotional trigger can greatly increase your campaign’s effectiveness.
One way to improve CTR and conversion rate is to use original content that looks authentic and realistic. According to Nielsen’s research, pictures that look genuine evoke the audience’s trust and empathy, while generic stock photos are perceived as merely decorative.

Studies show that photos of real people are 35% more likely to take site visitors further towards conversion, compared to generic stock photos. Marketing Experiments
6) Leverage personalization
Data-driven personalization is becoming increasingly important for building strong connections with consumers. Tailoring the content specifically for each user based on their individual preferences, search history, location and previous behavior patterns results in a 42% higher conversion rate compared to nonpersonalized content.
A good example of personalized advertising is the Airbnb campaign based on retargeting: the company tailors their ads to those users who recently searched for flights or accommodations at particular destinations, but did not complete the purchase.
The idea behind this approach is that potential clients are provided with custom information regarding specific countries or cities they have recently checked, including apartment rental prices for particular dates, the number of guests and photos of rooms.
Ad campaigns can also be targeted at those people who have booked accommodations with Airbnb in the past and might be considering another trip in the near future.

54% of consumers find personalized ads more engaging. The Adobe 2017 Digital Advertising Report
7) Deliver a story to the audience’s mind
Storytelling takes Facebook users on a journey and presents a company in an appealing but not aggressive way. By using multiple images or videos in succession that are united by an overall theme, you build a compelling narrative around your app, product or service. By doing so, you can get your positioning just right and elicit emotions that encourage people to get involved.

Storytelling allows mobile app developers to feature the product line (in the case of e-commerce) or, for instance, create engagement with games by telling a character-driven tale (in the case of the gaming industry). If you tell a good story, it cultivates relationships with users; your app will be recognized and remembered in the long run.

People are 22 times more likely to remember and internalize a story than facts or bullet points. Jennifer Aaker: Harnessing the Power of Stories
8) Optimize for mobile
The transition to mobile behavior is causing the evolution of content to be visual-first, which is why you should invest heavily in creative production. Make sure your content, especially video, is mobile-optimized.
If you are promoting your product or service with video ads, make sure to provide high-speed and high-quality playback on any device, delivering a seamless user experience. The better your videos, the more likely you will be able to retain and convert viewers. Bear in mind that mobile-oriented people have incredibly short attention spans, so you should mention your brand and get to the point within the first six seconds.
The 6-second ads deliver an 11% increase in ad recall, 12% increase in return on ad spend and 271% increase in video completion rate. In a Mobile-First World, Shorter Video Ads Drive Results | Facebook Business
“Because people can watch virtually anything at any time, they’re only going to watch ads that grab their attention, reward their time, and are immediately relevant. As a consequence, even though aggregate ad view time is up, individual session times are down. People aren’t watching ads for as long as they used to, on any medium.” — Mark Rabkin, Facebook’s VP of Ads & Business Platform
The type of branding also plays an important role in recall. Mobile-first videos tend to have stronger brand presence (where the brand is the main focal point) and shorter ad length (an average of 20 seconds) compared to traditional narratives or adapted videos. The performance of this type of videos has proven to be higher.

Mobile-first video ads have 2x longer view time compared to traditional narratives. Stand Out in Feed: Optimizing Video Creative on Mobile | Facebook IQ
9) Add motion to still images
By adding lightweight motion to still images, you can greatly increase the conspicuousness of your ads in the newsfeed and grab the attention of your audience. Motion graphics, such as cinemagraphs, make your brand highly visible and memorable, which drives performance and leads to a higher conversion rate.
According to Facebook recommendations, there are several categories of animation that can be added to static images to make them eyecatching:
- Basic motion: slight movement added to the images with the same level of messaging
- Brand in motion: animation is focused on the company’s logo or brand elements
- Benefit in motion: motion highlights a specific benefit or USP, often with kinetic text
- Demo in motion: a video focused on a demonstration of an app, product or feature.
Various types of motion can be combined in order to determine what best drives sales figures for your business.

Tips to make your cinemagraphs stand out:
- make sure to use a strong, clear call-to-action
- keep the length of your ad to around 5–10 secs
- aim to create 1:1 square video format
- promote a single benefit
10) Keep text short and clear
When creating your ad content, carefully read the Facebook Ad Specs, as there are certain restrictions for each ad format. The more text you have in the headline and description, the more limited your reach, and creatives with a higher percentage of text might not even be displayed. Minimize the text on your ad in order to maximize your reach and build stronger-performing ads.
The optimal length of a Facebook headline is just 4 words. Research reveals what makes an effective Facebook ad | Smart Insights

On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest of the piece. Copyblogger. How to Write Magnetic Headlines

KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The Facebook newsfeed is a competitive place, and with the inundation of ad content that users see every day, make sure to create relevant and engaging ads that boost your income
- Don’t let your brilliant ad campaign fade. Refresh ad creatives on a regular basis, limit the frequency of impressions and evenly rotate ads to rekindle your audience’s interest
- Learn the behavior patterns and preferences of your potential customers to predict their purchase intentions and deliver unique, highly personalized and compelling content for each user
- Leverage technology-driven solutions to maintain the high quality of your ads and increase the visibility of your brand.
GO WITH THE FLOW OF FRESH, HIGH-QUALITY CREATIVES
A long-term marketing strategy on Facebook requires a steady stream of potent fuel to ensure that your ad campaigns never burn out. Whether you have an inhouse media buying team or work with freelancers, the endless production-editsimplementation cycle takes a lot of time and financial resources. The efforts required to maintain your advertising fresh are almost identical to efforts that you put into developing your brand idea.
Another challenge comes when you are entrenched in your internal policy and in a rut of strategies that worked years ago, and thus not able to see your business as your customers or clients do. When you’re inside the bottle, you can’t read the label, meaning that your dedication to the business narrows your perspective and gives you tunnel vision.
Appness recognizes all the challenges that businesses face in implementing ad campaigns and maintaining a consistent creative strategy. To address this, we have launched a creative and media buying lab to provide advertisers with access to the human cloud: freelance designers and media buying talent powered by the platform’s intelligent ad optimization algorithms.
Our unique techniques were designed to eliminate the major problem encountered by advertisers when working with creatives and to support companies that lack expertise in traffic purchasing by streamlining and automating media buying on Facebook, Google, Instagram, Snapchat and other traffic sources. Access to the human cloud ensures diversity and quality of ad content produced in accordance with the advertiser’s guidelines.
