by Ana Bedoya
Ad fatigue is when your audience has seen your ad multiple times, gotten bored of it, and begins to ignore them. As a result, the targeted audience does not take the action you want them to take with the ad, and your results are also going to drop off.
Lack of creative iterations and refreshes can result in a visible decrease in CTR and conversion rates, therefore resulting in a higher CPA. You’ll end up paying for your ads that no one is taking action on!
With Jump's 70/20/10 approach to creative testing, we refresh our client's creative before the audience even has a chance to fatigue.
We have found that at a minimum, an account performing at goal should be testing around:
- 70% proven creative
- 20% iterating off proven creative
- 10% new (within brand) concept creative
The Hack: Multivariate Creative Testing
Multivariate creative is the main component to avoid ad fatigue and making an audience take action on the ads at hand. At Jump, we recommend massively increasing the volume of creative testing to unlock continued growth.
It's understood that creating a net new ad or concept can come at a hefty price and is not necessarily the best approach when trying to test to see what works and what doesn’t work.
Jump's in-house creative team is able to iterate and create dozens of new ads by using a client's proven creative and chopping them up into pieces such as adding new openers, audio, text treatment, etc.
Multivariate testing means you change up multiple variables in a piece of content or advertisement in order to test a hypothesis about that content. At the root of it all, we are trying to figure out which combination of elements is the highest-performing out of all possible combinations.
Methodologically, Jump uses a 2-3x CPA guideline to rapidly test through creatives while also keeping an eye on statistical significance. Using this, we would increase the sheer amount of creatives being tested in the account by 2-3x.
Once statistical significance is achieved, the data from each variation is compared to find not only the most successful design but also to potentially reveal which elements have the greatest positive or negative impact on a visitor's interaction.
Responsive Ads × Multivariate Testing
Responsive ads automatically adjust their size, appearance, and format to fit available ad spaces. So a single responsive ad may appear as a small text ad in one place and a large image ad in another.
Google’s responsive ad formats make it easy to multivariate test many combinations of videos, images, headlines, and body copies.
Limited reporting means Google is probably optimizing for CTR over the business outcomes you care about most. An ad with fewer clicks but higher conversion rate and AOV means revenue for you but less revenue for Google.
Jump “hacks” the system by testing many, many variations of the same ad but changing one element in each variant.
Robust ad naming allows us to aggregate the data across ad groups and campaigns, then extract insights about which elements actually drive performance.
