Ad Fatigue: What It Is and What Real Estate Agents Can Do About It
Ad fatigue is real. It wastes your money and decrease your ROI. Learn how you can avoid it by making few small changes to your ads every once in a while.
Even if you’re unfamiliar with the phrase “ad fatigue” we have all been there, some ad seems to be everywhere; on tv, billboards, pop-up ads, or sponsored content on social media. And it’s too much. Some of these ads don’t even offer things you need. On the other side of this, do you ever feel like your ads aren’t achieving the results they did before? If you do, chances are you have created the same experience for your audience we’ve outlined. This is ad fatigue. Luckily, there are simple solutions to help you avoid this issue. This will lead to more desirable results with your ads. In this article, we will explore ad fatigue and the actions you can take to avoid it.
What is Ad Fatigue
Think of the times you have changed the TV channels because you were sick and tired of seeing the same ad over and over again. In some cases, ads can bore you so much that you turn the TV off completely. This is ad fatigue and it can happen for all kinds of ads TV, print, radio, internet, social media, etc.
Ad fatigue is a phenomenon where your audience sees your ads too much, they get bore and they stop paying attention. When the audience stops paying attention, ads become less effective hurting your ROI. Ad fatigue exhausts the audience instead of driving them through the sales funnel. It renders your ad campaigns less effective. Ad fatigue affects other campaign metrics like relevance scores, increasing CPM and CPR, and consequently decreasing ROAS (Ad ROI).
Ad fatigue can happen for everyone and all the ads. It even happens for most successful ad campaigns. With digital ads, when your campaign frequency gets too high your target audience sees the same ad again and again hence becoming less responsive.
This goes to show you that platforms like Facebook are not “set and forget” options in your marketing efforts. Ad campaigns require consistent testing, evaluations, assessment, and management to deliver desirable results.
Avoid Ad Fatigue
As marketers, it is critical that you consistently present fresh, high-quality, and highly targeted ads to make sure that they keep inspiring your audience to do what you want them to do. Otherwise, your efforts will only serve to disappoint and frustrate them. In the worst-case scenario, they might even hate your brand as a result of ad fatigue. The ultimate goal behind avoiding ad fatigue is avoiding wasting your money on ads that don’t work anymore.
The first step in avoiding ad fatigue is monitoring your ad campaign and tracking its performance. This is a key stage in terms of finding out if your audience has lost interest in your ads. If you don’t track your ads’ performance, you won’t know if ad fatigue is occurring. Consistent monitoring of your ads will allow you to see when your ads performance starts to drop. Frequency and CTR are two of the metrics you should be watching with your ads.
Frequency: The average number of times people see your ad.
CTR: The number of times people click on your ad divided by the number of impressions.
Symptoms of Ad Fatigue
Here are some signs of ad fatigue:
Low CTR
Your click-through rate is one of the most important metrics to monitor and measure ad fatigue. It shows how engaging your ad is. When your already satisfactory CTR falls dramatically over time it means it is time to change the ad.
Low Engagement
User and audience interaction with your brand are what is called engagement. This one applies to your paid and organic content. When people see your content but do not care to share, like, or comment on it, there is less engagement which shows something is wrong.
Low Impressions
Social media is evolving all the time. It is a fluid industry always aimed at showing the most relevant content to its users. It aims to appeal to users and that occurs when users find content they like on their news feed. The same thing applies to ads. Social media platforms try hard to show relevant ads to users to increase their conversion rate. This will in return do everybody good, including the business, the customer, and in the end the platform.
When people do not interact with your ads, this means they are less likely to see the ads in the future. Low impressions are a sign of ad fatigue that will harm your business even more in the future.
How to Avoid Ad Fatigue
Now that you know what ad fatigue is, here are a few things you can do to avoid it.
Change Ad Creative
A creative is the ad served to users on a webpage, app, or another digital environment. Creatives can be images, videos, audio, and other formats that get delivered to users. Your ads’ creative is the first thing your audience sees and grabs their attention and stops them from scrolling down further to other content on their newsfeed.
Changing the creative can help the ad look different and stop ad fatigue. Change the video, images and/or the audio of the ad every once in a while. We recommend that you change the ad after it is seen at most 5 times by your audience. That’s where the ad fatigue kicks in.
Change Colors on Your Ad
One of the small changes you can make to your ad creative is changing the colors in it. It is a pretty small change to make and can be done quickly to give a fresh look to your ad. Generally it is recommended that you use the colors in your ad color scheme. Do not use very different colors as they might make your brand and business unfamiliar.
Adjust Ad set Targeting
Another way to avoid ad fatigue is to refresh your targeting. You can keep your ad campaign objectives and creative the same but test new targeting. You can keep all the other ad settings like placement, bidding, and optimization setting the same. Depending on the real estate advertising funnel you are targeting, you can use cold audience targeting methods as well as lookalike audiences. However, the best method to target your audience is through accurate understating of your current and past clients and making adjustments to them accordingly.
Change Campaign Objective
One of the first things you need to define while designing ad campaigns is the objective of the campaign that will change segments of your target audience.
Change Your Offer
Your ad offers something to the audience which users need to click on the ad to get it. One of the ways you can avoid ad fatigue is to completely change the offer you make in the ad. This change can be done at every stage of your ad sales funnel.
Try Different CTAs
Call to Actions (CTAs) are critical elements of your ads. They finish all the efforts you have made in the ad. They ask your audience to take the next step. If your ads are underperforming and suffer from ad fatigue, changing the CTA might do the trick. You need to change your CTA when enough people see your ad, but few click on the CTA. In this case, your CTA might be the culprit alongside other elements like the copy, offer, etc. try out different CTAs to see which ones work best and replace the weak ones.
Change Ad Format
If you are experiencing ad fatigue you could also try out different ad formats on social media. Different social media offer different formats including:
- Image ads
- Videos ads
- Carousel ads
Changing ad format presents the same ad in a new way that might be more interesting to your audience and will not look the same.
Ad Rotation
Apart from changing different ad elements, you can also change the ad completely. In this case, you can create different versions of the same ad and deliver the same content and message in various ways. This keeps your ad campaign fresh to your audience since they appear different and new by rotating versions of the ad. This also allows you to pull off versions that are underperforming and remove them from the ad set.
Who Are We?
As described in inman news:
“roomvu is centered on lead generation, providing customers with a categorized library of ready-to-share video content on a range of real estate topics, such as trends and forecasts to seller tips and neighborhood profiles.”
Ad Fatigue: Final Words
Like almost all the other problems in life, you cant solve ad fatigues until you have recognized the underlying problem. The problem causing ad fatigue can be anything from the creative to the format of the ad that has become problematic after the ad was seen too many times. The solution, however, is simple. With a few changes in targeting, creative, copy, or the CTA you can get your ads back up and running again. However, make sure you always monitor your ads and how they perform so that you can stop ad fatigue early on and avoid more waste of money.
