When an ad's click-through rate drops, try a light refresh first: change just the image, headline, or call-to-action while keeping the proven copy. If that doesn't work after a few attempts, do a full refresh with new imagery and copy. Abandon the ad only if both approaches fail.
Your winning ad is going to die eventually. We've talked about that. But before you kill it and start over, there's usually a way to squeeze a little more life out of it. That's where a light refresh comes in. Most people see performance starting to slip and their first move is to throw the whole ad away. Usually that's too aggressive. A lot of the time the message is still fine. What people are tired of is the visual. So instead of rebuilding the whole thing, you change one piece. You keep the copy and swap the image, or you keep the image and change the headline. Sometimes you leave both alone and just test a different call to action. The key is that you only change one thing at a time. To the audience, it feels like a new ad. And a lot of the time, that's enough to get performance moving again. Then there's the full refresh. That's when the light refresh stops working and you need to rebuild the whole creative with a new image, new copy, and sometimes even a new angle. The easiest way to think about it is this: if the ad has only been running for a couple of weeks and click-through rate is starting to slide, start with a light refresh. If you've already refreshed it a few times, and performance keeps getting worse, then it's probably time for a full refresh. And if you do a full refresh and the new version still flops, that usually means something bigger changed. Either the offer lost momentum or the audience has moved on. The main point is that you do not need to throw away a winning ad the second it slows down. Sometimes you can get several more good weeks out of it just by changing one element at a time. That's how the smartest accounts get more mileage out of the winners they find.
