Market, Scale, Grow: Facebook Ad Marketing Strategy for Teacherpreneurs

185 | Are You Experiencing Campaign Fatigue?

• Jenzaia • Episode 185

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Unlock the secrets to identifying and overcoming campaign fatigue to ensure your advertising efforts hit the mark every time!  Have you ever wondered why your ad performance dwindles despite a perfect start? Tune in as I help you navigate maintaining a healthy ad that your audience is excited to see!

In this episode of Market, Scale, Grow as we chat about...
✨ Understanding campaign fatigue and how to identify it
✨ Managing Frequency and the impact of audience size
✨ Three recommendations to fix campaign fatigue

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Speaker 1:

happy saturday. Let's dive in. Today we're talking about campaign fatigue and, trust me, she's real. Campaign fatigue is uh, can be, not always, but can be a real problem. So today we're going to talk about exactly what campaign fatigue is and why it's important, why it matters. We'll talk about how it happens and what you can do about it, plus my recommendations for preparing a campaign successfully, including images, ad copy and audiences. So let's dive in.

Speaker 1:

First of all, what exactly is campaign fatigue? This is when people have seen your campaign so many times that they are now ignoring it. There's a sweet spot and it's a bell curve. So the first typically, especially with people who don't know who you are the first couple of times they're probably going to scroll past you and your ad, having no idea what it is or who you are and not recognizing it at all. And then they'll start to become familiar with your colors, your branding, your imaging, your messaging, like that piece. It'll start to be something familiar in their brain and they will probably slow their scroll, actually look, maybe read the caption right, and then, once they've seen it enough times, they've probably made a decision on whether or not they're going to click on the ad and if they're going to click, they've clicked, and if they're not going to click, they're not going to click, right? So this switch kind of happens somewhere like the third to sixth time that they're going to see it, and then more than that again, if they're going to click, they have already clicked on the ad to go do the thing that you want them to do. And if they're not going to, then they're really just not going to. And this is important because it will impact all of your results.

Speaker 1:

If people are seeing your ad and not clicking, then it lowers your CTR rate. The CTR rate is your link or your click through rate, and I, specifically, will look at the link click-through rate. But there's also all clicks that include clicking on anything from your profile to the image itself to the read more button. The link is included in there, right? It's going to impact that and you want the CTR to be at least one percent so that 1% or more of people who see your ad are clicking on it and doing the thing you want them to do. If it's lower than that, it indicates a problem. So if people have seen your ad and seen your ad and seen your ad and seen your ad so many times and they're not clicking. Even if they already did a couple of times or once before now, they're not clicking. That brings your CTR down. Couple times or once before now, they're not clicking. That brings your ctr down.

Speaker 1:

When you have a low ctr rate, like the click, the click-through rate, the algorithm goes hey, nobody's clicking on this. We don't like that because facebook wants people to to interact positively with the ad, because if people are positively interacting with your ad, then it's good for them, because you keep running your ad, they make more money. And so if an ad isn't doing well and a low ctr is one of the ways that facebook says, okay, things aren't going well they will start to increase the cost of the ad by increasing your cpm, the costing, and so when an ad starts to become fatigued, you will often see CTR rates go down, the CTR percentage go down and then CPM costs going up. And that is one of the main ways that the algorithm is trying to tell you to change something like this isn't working, let's change things. To change something like this isn't working, let's change things.

Speaker 1:

So, depending on the ad type and the timeline that you have, this does vary slightly, but actually I don't. There's one outlier case and that is a campaign that has a short timeline, so something like a launch, like post launch, open cart sales phase. You might want people to see that ad 5, 10, 15, 20 times in that single week. Right you're, this isn't in a long ongoing campaign, it's a very short timeline. There's a very specific call to action Buy this thing. And there's this timeline Buy it before Friday or it's gone. That might be the only case where I would say you don't need to worry about campaign fatigue, because it needs to be just like the forethought of these people's brains.

Speaker 1:

Also, typically with an open cart, these ads that are going to be going out to people 5, 10, 15 times are retargeting ads. So the person has expressed interest in the program. They signed up for the the program, they signed up for the webinar and they showed up for the webinar. They've gone to the sales page. Maybe they've been in your dms talking about it. They've done some sort of trigger action that says, yes, I'm interested in what you have to sell and so showing them that ad way too many times compared to normal circumstances is okay, but outside of that very condensed, specific open cart sales period, I would not. I'm choking, okay, outside of that period, I'm. I would not recommend that you show the ad to people too many times.

Speaker 1:

The way we measure this is through the frequency. Frequency is calculated by taking the total number of impressions and dividing it by their reach. So impressions is the total number of times people have seen the ad, whereas reach is the number of people who have seen the ad. So if they send it out to a reach of 10, so 10 different people have seen the ad, whereas reach is the number of people who have seen the ad. So if they send it out to a reach of 10, so 10 different people have seen the ad and there are 20 impressions. That means the frequency is going to be two on average. Each of those 10 people the 10 reaches have seen the ad twice. Two impressions per person.

Speaker 1:

I'm currently looking at an ad right now. I actually have the wrong setting open, so I'm just changing the setting. This ad has a reach of 5,000 and 5,400, and it has 16,600 impressions, which leaves us with a frequency oh. It's making me refresh my screen. It's not telling me what my frequency is, um, which leaves us with a frequency of oh, and it changed. It changed. Okay, let's try again. Let's try again. So 5,600 reaches 5,000. People have seen the ad, 17,400 impressions. That gives us a frequency of 3.1. So on average, those 5,600 people have each seen the ads three times. Right, that's a really, really great frequency. I like that frequency. It's getting on the higher end, but as it is currently, that's totally fine.

Speaker 1:

Where I start to get worried is when the frequency gets above four, because remember the first couple of times cold audiences, people have never heard of you before. The first couple times they see your ad, they probably aren't even going to consciously register it. It does take a few times, especially if you have really high quality branding colors that are used consistently throughout all of your platforms your ads, your social media, your emails, your blog posts, like all of it. People will quickly start to recognize like, oh, that's Gen Zaya's burgundy color, I guess you could call it. Like my purpley pink color, that's Gen Zaya's burgundy right. Like that is her and I use like a puff of smoky kind of thing in my podcast cover that I really love. So, like, if you see that purpley color, the puff of smoke, on a couple of different things, you're going to go okay, that's Shenzhen's branding. Like I, you start to recognize it, and so we don't want to have a frequency that's so low that people aren't starting to recognize the branding, but we also don't want to get it so high that people are really angry. So it's the frequency measure that we keep an't want to get it so high that people are really angry. So it's the frequency measure that we keep an eye on, and I do typically like to look at it as the last 30 days, because if you have a campaign that's doing really well and you're able to run it for 30, 60, 90, 120 days, the people who saw the campaign 120 days ago might not be the same people who saw it 30 days ago. That's the first thing. And also, seeing it repeatedly over four months is very different than seeing it like. Seeing it 20 times over four months is very different than seeing it 20 times in a week, and so we do want to keep that recency piece in our minds too. So I filter for last 30 days and I look at that frequency score, making sure that it is below four. As it starts to creep up towards four, that's when we start to wonder about what can we do about it.

Speaker 1:

If you think about how you interact with ads. When you're scrolling through your news feed on Facebook or your Instagram feed, you're noticing the image or the video first, and then the headline. Typically, the thing that you're probably not going to remember at all is the ad copy. It's the image and the headline that will stick out, and primarily the image. So when the frequency starts to increase, my first step is always to update the visual assets. So, whether it's images or video, that's our first step to refresh the campaign. Typically, the ad copy can stay the same. We might play a little bit with the hooks, so that's that first line, but generally when an ad is fatigued, it's the images, ad copy that we're looking at. You want to be looking at this as well because you don't want people to be like over it and just like want nothing to do with your campaigns.

Speaker 1:

This is going to happen more frequently with smaller audiences, so audiences can definitely impact your campaign fatigue. When you're running ads to a warm audience, typically those are smaller. Most people don't have millions of people in their warm audience. Most people have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands in their warm audience, whereas cold audiences, when you're using lookalike audiences or you're using demographic based or interest based audiences. Those are going to have millions of people Typically. There are definitely cases when they're smaller, but, yeah, typically we're talking about millions to tens of millions of people. It's a lot harder to fatigue a large audience than it is to fatigue a small audience. Now, I do know that when you have one of those really big, million, 10 million people size audiences, the algorithm is finding a smaller pocket of people within that audience and they're not going to be showing it to all the tens of millions of people they're going to. The algorithm filters out and finds the best group of people within that 10 million people audience. But it still is much harder to fatigue that. So you also need to keep that in mind. What audience are you running the campaigns to? I always recommend running ads to your warm audience, but including also lookalike audiences and interest-based audiences, so that when the warm audience is fatigued because it's going to fatigue first, when it becomes fatigued, you can turn it off and continue running those ads to the cold audiences. So that's recommendation number one If your frequency is pretty high, especially for a warm audience, you want to supplement or transition into cold audiences.

Speaker 1:

I personally love lookalike audiences and I really, really have been finding a lot of success for my clients with lookalike audiences using Advantage Plus. I do not use Advantage Plus for warm audiences, but I love using it for-alike audiences as well as interest-based audiences. I have done a lot of a b testing between like identical audience criteria and the only thing that I change is the advantage plus, and I would say eight out of ten times the advantage plus wins. So, um, that's the first recommendation. If your frequency is getting high, think about the audience you are using. If you're running it to warm audiences, only transition into cold audiences as well. If you're running a mix of warm and cold audiences, you can turn off the warm audiences and filter all of your budget towards the cold audiences, because typically the warm audience will fatigue first.

Speaker 1:

My second recommendation is to refresh your images and or videos. If you are running it to cold audiences and they are fatigued, which absolutely happens, then your next step is to update those images and add copy. Not add copy, just the images and video. I typically like to have one or two images like static images and one or two videos. Often I actually find that static images will outperform videos when the video looks kind of more edited and more like a slideshow type video. But that face to camera videos are a bit more natural and they will tend to outperform static images as well. So it does depend on what you're promoting, who you're promoting lots of different like pieces there. But just to consider testing, I would say three, two to four yeah, two to four images and videos and being ready to swap those out if your frequency gets too high. So that campaign we were looking at before that has a frequency of three. That's actually when I start to kind of plan out what are we going to do, what is our next step so that by the time it hits four, we're ready to start implementing those refreshes.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that I think is really great to do is, while you need to keep your branding, your colors, your visuals similar across the board, is to flop them. So if you had a white background with the burgundy accents, swapping it so that it's a burgundy background with a white with white accents is going to maintain that brand consistency. So people recognize the colors, they recognize you. But flipping it so that they're not, their brain knows instantly that it's a different image. Right, like they're not thinking, oh, I already saw, already saw this, oh, I already saw this. Like they want to be thinking, oh, what did Gen Z do now? Oh, what did Gen Z do now? Right, having that thought. So one way to do that is to flip the colors. Another way to do that is to completely change the type. So if you were running more of a slideshow type video, change the type.

Speaker 1:

So, if you were running more of a slideshow type video, where it was Canva images going through and like flipping, kind of like a slideshow, would to change to a face to camera video, because it does the same thing, keeps the branding available and like your face forefront, but they're not confusing. Is this the same image that I've been ignoring for the last two weeks? You want to keep it fresh, you want to keep it different and you want to be constantly testing things. Right, maybe face to camera didn't work for you six months ago. Try it again, because you never know it could work this time.

Speaker 1:

The slight difference of time of year and the campaign you're promoting and the message and the way you speak, all of it is continually changing and, like I was going to say tweaking, but that's not the right word ever. It's constantly changing and evolving and growing and so testing out different types of ad creative is going to be really powerful and is really going to help you to refresh that campaign and continue to have success. I especially if you're having really really really great success with a campaign, it can be hard to turn that off. So make sure that you give yourself a bit of time to transition, where you have both of them running the old ones that you're continuing to see that success that you were having before, but then also starting the new one and testing the images to make sure that you're going to see the same success going forward. And then, once the new campaign is up and running successfully, you have time to have tested and verified that these new images are going to be doing just as well. Then you can turn off the old campaign.

Speaker 1:

So first, again, just a quick refresh. First recommendation was to turn off those warm audiences if they're the ones getting fatigued and transition the budget to exclusively cold audiences, if that's possible for the campaign you're running. Second one is to update the images, because visually that's the first thing we see and that will stick in our memory the longest. And my third and final recommendation if you've already done all that and you still are feeling okay, I need to update it more is to change out the headline, because that's the bolded text that shows up and that will also, especially if you're using short, catchy punk, punctuated, punctual punk. Short and catchy headlines. Those will also stick in people's minds.

Speaker 1:

So, swapping that out, considering a different type of headline, I like to use ones that are calls to action Download your freebie now or grab it, grab the bundle and save 20%. Call to action, right. Or ones that are calling the ideal audience, so calling all fifth grade teachers, so that instantaneously you know that this is talking to you. And then you can also use headlines or, um, yeah, headlines that are things like problem driven, save time in your classroom, or solution. Well, I guess that one's solution driven save time in your classroom would be a solution driven one, where a problem driven one would be something like are you wasting time in your classroom, right? So someone who's like, oh, yeah, that's me, I'm wasting time, what can we do that about? This is going to click on it and also like, okay, I need to save time in my classroom. So the either problem driven or solution driven can bring in the right people who identify with what you're trying to sell. So those, those are my three recommendations If your campaign is showing signs of fatigue.

Speaker 1:

Again, signs of fatigue are your frequency is above four and also your CTR is declining, it's dropping below 1%. And also I guess this is an and or, so your frequency is above four and either your CTR is dropping and or your CPM is increasing. For there to be fluctuation in the CTR day-to-day and the CPM day-to-day. But if you notice that CTR is dropping and dropping, and dropping and dropping, and staying below 1% and staying below 1% and staying below 1%, then that should be a red flag for you, same with the CPM. If that is increasing day after day after day, then that should be a red flag that tells you okay, something's going on here. I need to figure out what. It shouldn't be just going up and up and up and, especially if it's pretty significant increases day over day. So I really hope that this was a helpful episode. Thank you so much for being here, and I'll be back next Saturday with a brand new Saturday strategy session.