How to Spot Ad Creative Fatigue Before it Tanks Your ROAS

Great performance marketers operate right at the point of diminishing returns.

They spend enough on each ad, audience and channel to maximize the efficiency of their ad dollars - no more.

Creative fatigue can sneak up on you, though. Sometimes it settles in right when you think you've got targeting, and bid and budget management really dialed in.

Creative fatigue is often what pushes ads into the “this-is-becoming-less-worth-it” realm: the land of diminishing returns.

But the worst part of ad fatigue is that you often find it after it’s already affecting customer acquisition costs, driving ROAS down for your entire campaign.

Then you’ve got to request new creatives, wait for the team to build them, wait for approvals, etc. By the time you've got a refresh, you have have missed weeks of more efficient ad spend.

How to find Signs of Creative Fatigue on Meta

In the "Delivery Insights" section of your campaign overview, Meta will tell you if your ad’s cost-per-result is 2x higher than ads you ran in the past.

That’s helpful!

But there are some limitations that make it less so.

• It only applies to ad sets with one creative or those with Advantage+ catalogue ads, dynamic creative ads or Meta Advantage+ app campaigns.
• Once an ad set is live, you only get the “Creative Fatigue” label after an ad creative is already affecting your ROAS.
• It’s a bit of a black box. Beyond the fact that Meta says they look at the 2x cost-per-outcome of the ad, they also say they show this “when we think people have seen your ad too many times.”

Obviously, the biggest problem there is that only tells you after an ad is already 2x worse than all your other ads.

It'd be better to uncover creative fatigue before that point.

Spotting Creative Fatigue Early

To identify creative fatigue early, we recommend watching two key leading metrics:

1. Click through rate. Specifically, we look for declines, and moments when the decline becomes more pronounced.

   That would mean the ad is becoming less effective specifically because it's being clicked less often than it was before.

2. Frequency. Take a close look at ads whose frequency is above 2 if your goal is acquisition.
   
   There's some "it depends" here on the frequency front. The further down the funnel you go, and the more creatives you have in a campaign, the more frequency you can tolerate. But as a general rule - if an ad is showing more than 2 times to each audience member on average, it's time to consider a refresh.

A high frequency paired with a declining click-thru-rate is a signal that an ad is becoming less effective because it's being shown to the same people too many times.

And each time they see it, they only become less likely to click, so that's a problem that only gets worse with time.

To do this manually, you could pull up a trend chart in Meta Ads Manager and select CTR and Frequency as your two metrics. But you'd have to look at each ad one at a time.

Or you could create a custom report comparing two time periods and include the CTR and frequency metrics.

We believe you should be able to just ask the question to get the answer. 

Here's How Pixis Customers Catch Ad Fatigue Quickly

With Prism (in beta as I write this), we just ask it in plain english to find ads from the last thirty days with higher frequencies, but dropping click-through rates.

Prism, unlike ChatGPT, doesn't need me to create the custom report and export a csv to do the analysis. Prism has direct access to my Meta Ads manager and knows how to pull multiple reports in sequence to get the information it needs to answer my question.

And unlike ChatGPT (or really any other LLM on the planet), Prism was built from the ground up to be specifically for performance marketers. It's trained on ad performance data from over $2.5b in spend, so it actually understands performance marketing.

The End of Creative Fatigue?

Right now, Prism makes it easy to uncover creative fatigue quickly when you ask it. This feature (and any other prompt you can dream up) is available right now in beta for Pixis customers.

We envision a future, though, where you may not even have to ask for Prism to alert you. It'll look across all your creatives on every channel, learning from them all, letting you know in real time when something appears to be nearing the point of diminishing returns.

The goal here isn't to take the job away from whoever is doing this work right now.

It's to take the work from them, and give them more ability and time to do the work only a human can do.