In this episode Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss the problem of ad fatigue—when audiences see the same ads repeatedly and performance drops. They define ad fatigue, outline early warning signs (rising frequency, declining click‑through and conversion ratios, increasing CPA), and explain why relying on a single or few creatives is risky. The hosts recommend benchmarking against competitors using LinkedIn, Google, and Meta ad transparency tools, then expanding creative assets by generating multiple hooks, bodies, and calls‑to‑action to create many permutations. They stress the importance of proper audience targeting—broadening personas beyond narrow job titles—and of excluding past viewers or converters, applying frequency caps, and rotating among newer ad formats (Meta Advantage+, Google Performance Max, Instagram/Facebook formats) to lower costs. Continuous testing is urged for new creatives, landing pages, offers, and audiences, including remarketing strategies that flip the messaging tone (emotional vs. logical) for non‑converting users. Storytelling, intentional ad planning, and regular rotation are presented as overarching principles. The episode ends with a call to action for listeners to rate, review, and subscribe.
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All right, so we are going to talk about how to deal with ad fatigue. We are basically into 2024 now as of this recording, and ad fatigue is a big thing even in today's day and age. Well, here's the thing. Creative is the X factor as ads get a little more difficult and marketing gets more difficult. So we want to help you combat that. So first, Neil, do you want to— Here, I'll just define what ad fatigue is. So ad fatigue is when people keep seeing the same ads over and over and Your performance starts to suffer because you aren't switching up your creatives. So let's talk about how you can deal with it.
So typically, depending on the platform that you're using to show your ads, you'll see the frequency. So when someone sees your ad multiple times, your frequency will start going up, goes above 1s or it's getting to 2, et cetera. That's an early indicator of ad fatigue. Another early indicator is look at when your ad first came out, the number of impressions it received, and then the number of clicks it received. And compare that with what's happening right now. And if you see that ratio getting worse and worse, again, that's another sign of ad fatigue. And the last sign of ad fatigue that we really see is people clicking on the ad, but the conversion rate's dropping from that same ad.
Yep. The other thing too is in terms of how you want to actually deal with it, one is, look, if your frequency is getting too crazy and your performance is starting to suffer, your CPAs are starting to get higher, it's probably a sign that you're dealing with ad fatigue. But You should be changing up your ads. So this is most people think it's okay to have just one creative running or maybe two, three creatives or whatever. But when you look at your competitors as an example, you can use LinkedIn's Ad Transparency Center. You can use Google's. You can use Meta's as well or Facebook's. You can see how many ads your competitors are actually running or how many active ads they have. And that's a nice comparison to tell you, hey, do you need to up your game? And usually for most people, the answer is yes. You usually do need to up your game when it comes to the number of creatives. And so the way you might do this is let's Let's say this video itself is a creative, right? So the meat of this podcast, but we might come up with, in the beginning, we might come up with 4 or 5 different hooks and then we might have a different body and we might have 5 different call to actions, right? And so at that point, you're actually able to multiply these and you're able to create these different permutations, right? So it might be 5 times 5 as an example. And so that's how you can create different ones. They don't have to be completely different, but you should try to continually test different call to actions and different hooks.
Yeah. The other thing that people get mistaken with ad fatigue is they're like, wow, our ads are converting lower and lower and lower, but your targeting may be off in which you're not targeting enough people or you're targeting the wrong people. But a lot of times if you tweak your targeting and you say, oh, why? You know, people who are interested in SEO services aren't just people who work in the SEO department of companies. They may also work as a VP of marketing or in the paid advertising department, or heck, even some people who are in charge of product may need SEO help because they're releasing or creating new products and they need someone to help them with their SEO for that product. So expanding your targeting, and you have to be careful about your conversion rates and make sure that they're staying the same, if not increasing, but expanding your targeting really can help with fighting quote unquote ad fatigue as well.
You can also exclude your past viewers. So people that have seen your ad already, or maybe even the converters, you can exclude them, right? That will help you a little bit as well because you don't want to keep running the same ads to the same people. You can run some form of frequency capping as well to people. And the other thing you can do is you can utilize different ad formats too, right? So especially with the Advantage+ stuff that's coming out from Meta side, the Performance Max stuff, they're constantly, they're helping They're trying to help their customers, more so the advertisers rotate more creatives. And so there's a lot of different ad formats on Google, for example. There's a lot of different ad formats on Instagram or Facebook. Think about using those ad formats, especially when they're new, because when they're newer ad formats, you tend to get lower costs because they're trying to push it harder.
Yep. So look, you're going to deal with ad fatigue. This is common. This is normal. We all experience it. The goal that you should have is continually test new creatives. Test new landing pages. You're not just going to have fatigue on your own, your ads, you're also going to have fatigue on your offers on your website, your landing pages. And the other thing you need to really do is test new audiences as well. And as Eric mentioned, exclude showing the same people over and over again the ads. Also consider doing some stuff that's remarketing related in which you remarket the people who saw the ad, went to the website, but didn't convert, and you show them a new ad, new landing page. And the way this works really well is, let's say if your ad is really emotional and you're, you know, trying to hit hard on emotions to try to convert someone, then consider running an ad to those same people who didn't convert, a logical ad using stats and data. You're pretty much using the opposite pitch, To see if you get them to a landing page that is more logical and if you can get them to convert.
Yep. Look, we can go on and on. I'll just give you a couple more things that we can get out of here. So, I mean, obviously with your ads, consider storytelling. There's different stories you can tell. There's different customer stories you can tell as well. And again, just switch up the variations, but also rotate ads as well. I think we talked about that as well, and you should be doing well. The key thing here is, again, we mentioned in the last episode in terms of being intentional, If you're going to run ads, you want to make sure, especially in today's environment, that you're being intentional with how you're doing it. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we will see you tomorrow. And check out this video over here.
