Have a high CPA? Don’t know why your ads are not working? Ad fatigue could be hurting your campaign performance in more ways than one and you may not even know it.
In a world where audiences are everything (they are the key way we target fans, customers, and anyone else we think might be interested in our product, service, or cause), understanding when we’ve maxed out reaching our audience is an important determination.
Audience fatigue is a real issue when it comes to running campaigns, especially when we have larger budgets and a relatively small audience. It’s not uncommon to realize that we’re basically reaching the same people over and over again as our frequency numbers climb off the charts.
This is where the fatigue issue (also known as “Audience Saturation”) comes into play as people just stop responding to the ads, at best, and at worst they actively hide them hurting performance and relevancy metrics.
So, what can we do?
Besides the frequency metric that tells us (within our chosen time frame) how often someone is seeing our ad on average, we can now look at Budget Optimizer to get more granular in understanding audience fatigue.
Budget Optimizer is a Dentsu Marketing Cloud tool that allows us insights on performance-based budget split across campaigns and adsets. With the recently launched Audience Saturation feature, we’ll now be able to utilize the metrics provided to build an understanding on who we want to pay most attention to.
The progress bar tells us what percentage of the audience is saturated.
When the bar is low (green) it means that a larger amount of people are being exposed to our creative for the very first time and it’s the right opportunity to push more budgets.
However, if the progress bar is high (red) or moderate (orange), it means we’ve reached (or almost reached) a majority of the current audience and very few people are seeing the ads for the first time. That’s a solid indicator that we’ve likely maxed the audience.
It’s either time to refresh creative on this audience and/or create a new audience to start fresh all over again. If the audience has performed well there is always the option to use it as a source audience for a lookalike.
Conclusion
Understanding audience fatigue on your campaigns is an important part of diagnosing performance declines and getting the best performance you can. Make sure to include Dentsu Marketing Cloud’s Budget Optimizer in your toolbox of ways to analyze your campaign performance.
