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May 29, 2023

Prevent ad fatigue by controlling ad frequency

Dayna Lang
Author Dayna Lang

It is of the utmost importance that advertisers prevent ad fatigue among their target audience. Almost every advertiser is well aware of their customer’s pain points – the areas of discomfort that lead to lost sales and churn.

One crucial consideration is that not every pain point is product related, some of them are hiding in your ads themselves. This can be the type of humor you use in your messaging, the celebrities you choose for endorsement, or most likely, the frequency in which your customer sees your ads. Ad frequency that is too high can lead to annoyance and ultimately, can put off customers who might otherwise love your product. 

Not only can over-showing ads put off your customers, it’s extremely expensive. If an ad is not only unnecessary, but potentially detrimental, then that money is far better saved than spent. You don’t want to keep running ads that will ultimately have a low rate of return. Sometimes, quality is better than quantity. In this case, running too much of your ads can be detrimental.

Ad fatigue can bore your customers or even push them away. It can also damage your brand and, in the worst cases, even harm your relationship with distributors. By planning advertising journey’s to account for multiple views across platforms, marketers can avoid ad fatigue among their current and potential customers. 

 

Know your audience

To know your audience, you need to understand more than just their needs. As a marketer, you need to understand their personalities, their ages, their interests, and what irritates them. This makes it possible to create the messaging, visuals, and frequency that is best suited to them and optimizes your ad spend. It is also important to understand their cross-channel behavior. This can mean knowing how likely they are to watch ads on instagram (and whether or not their audio will be on), how likely they are to skip a longer ad on YouTube, and whether or not they even have a TV. 

It is also important to understand how demographics can play into behavior, and therefore the frequency with which your ad is seen. For instance, while younger demographics are less likely to own a TV, older generations may only own a TV (and not a computer). Some demographics may be viewing your ad on both a traditional, programmatic platform as well as on a CTV service. Understanding your viewership demographics can help you ensure that your ad isn’t seen too many times, even when it is viewed cross-platform. 

 

Data is king

Like with most areas of marketing, data (and accurate data at that) is essential for effective decision making. Gathering data on who is seeing your ads, when they are seeing them, and how often they are seeing them across platforms is critical to avoid ad fatigue. Not only that, but stale data is without purpose, so it is also important to ensure that your information is fresh, up to date, and relevant to your audience right now. If possible, you want to be looking at cross-channel, real-time data. By looking at what data works for your audience, you are able to target your ads more effectively to your target audience without worrying about the risk of ad fatigue on them. 

 

Prevent ad fatigue with Illumin

Is your brand or agency looking to optimize for ad frequency? Book a demo and find out how illumin can help you target, engage, and convert online consumers like never before.

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