Find out why you should keep ad creative fresh if you want to keep your leads rolling in.
Stale Facebook Ad Creative Could Be Costing You Clicks
Have you ever poured a ton of time and resources into creating the perfect ads for Facebook, but after a few weeks, or maybe even months, the conversions drop off, and the cost per acquisition goes up? Well, you’re not alone. There are multiple reasons why your ads are becoming ineffective, but the good news is that there are ways to fix them. Below we’ll discuss a few things you’ll want to keep an eye on and give some simple tips on how you can get ahead of potential problems with your Facebook ads, and minimize lost revenue in the process.
What is Frequency and How Does It Affect Your Ads?
In the advertising industry, frequency is a metric we often turn to when diagnosing an ad that is failing.
What is frequency you ask?
It’s how many times an ad has been shown to a user. Most platforms, including Facebook, will show you how many times a user has come across your ad. Why should you care about this metric? Well, think about this for a minute. You open Facebook – or any website for that matter – and you see an ad for a product, then it’s shown to you again on Facebook, and again the next day, until it gets annoying. If it’s not annoying the user, then more than likely they’re just tuning it out altogether. That is what we call banner blindness or ad blindness, and it often occurs when an ad has been shown to the intended target too many times.
Another reason to care about your ad frequency is relevance scores. If your ad is being shown to a user too much, the user can report the ad to Facebook, garnering negative feedback. The more negative feedback you receive, the more your relevancy score goes down — which can cause a ripple effect on your ads, making everything from the cost per click to cost per acquisition to go up.
“Analyzing many campaigns, we saw that as the frequency went up, angry comments started to appear in the ads with angry users asking that they stop if not outright insulting the advertiser.” – Adespresso.
Is There A Seasonality To Your Ads?
Maybe you created your campaign during the winter months and decided to use photos with snow or some other identifier of the season. If you’re running that ad in the middle of summer, and your targeted persona is currently in experiencing a heatwave—they won’t identify with that ad. Also, if you’ve been running that ad since the winter, the frequency could be playing a role in your increased cost per acquisition. Take those ads and shelve them until the next winter.
What Can You Do To Avoid High-Frequency Ads?
The answer is simple, create new ads. You don’t have to start from scratch and write all new copy. If the solution you are providing to the user isn’t seasonally specific, you can more than likely easily refresh your ads by changing the creative. Consider simple changes, such as adjusting the call-to-action (CTA), adding it to the image, or testing without one. Sometimes, the simplest changes can dramatically increase ad awareness and impressions. Just remember to test multiple versions of your ad images.
You can also lower your daily budget on the ads or move the target if the creative still fits the persona, but that may only last for so long.
Pro tip: Keep any creative you’ve made, even if it’s not successful the first time you use it. That ad may have failed to gain traction because of your targeting, not your creative. I’ve come across ads that totally flopped when we launched it, but once we pushed it out to a different target, it skyrocketed and became one of our highest-performing ads.
The most common question is, how much is too much when it comes to frequency? Depends on the industry, and how your ad is performing. Personally, I start to think about a new set of creative once the ad frequency starts to go above 3. Once it goes 5 and above, it often becomes less effective, and you should consider lowering the campaign spend to minimize frequency while your new creative or targets are being finalized.
Don’t let ad frequency get out of hand, make sure your agency is watching the numbers and working with you to avoid it. Looking for a team to manage your paid social or pay-per-click campaigns? Send us a message and let’s work together.
