How to detect ad fatigue
Don't be the dog scooting ad
Hi there,
I had a brand stalking me on Instagram recently. Their ads followed me around 3-5 times a day.
The problem? They were all about dog scooting. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, scooting is when a dog drags its bum across the floor. Now, Loki, my dog, is not a scooter (no shame if your dog is!).
Being bombarded with multiple videos of dogs awkwardly scooting across rugs and “why dogs scoot” explainer ads wasn’t just irrelevant; it was slightly uncomfortable.
And here’s the kicker: instead of making me want to buy, it had the opposite effect. Even if Loki ever did start scooting, this brand would be the last place I’d turn.
That’s the danger of ad fatigue. Show the same thing too often—especially when it’s not the right fit—and people stop engaging. Worse, they can develop a negative association with your brand.
So how do you know if your ads are overstaying their welcome and wasting spend?
Signs of ad fatigue
Here’s a simple checklist to help you spot it early. Rarely is it just one metric; it’s usually a combination that should raise a red flag:
CTR drops >20% from baseline
Weekly frequency >4 (prospecting) or >7 (retargeting)
CPA increases >25% with the same targeting
New vs existing customer ratio shrinking in TripleWhale or Polar Analytics
Blended ROAS declining week over week
The best way to catch fatigue early is to track:
Frequency vs. CTR side by side
New vs. existing customer ratio week by week
If those trends start dipping, your ads are likely exhausting their audience.
What causes ad fatigue?
It’s tempting to think the problem is simply not having enough creatives. Often, the bigger issue is that the creatives you do have are too similar week after week.
On Meta, creative essentially is targeting. If you keep optimising with the same style, Meta will serve your ads to the same pockets of audience over and over again. Eventually, those pockets stop engaging.
Other common causes I see include:
Targeting a smaller niche or country for too long
Overreliance on static ads, which skew toward a bottom-of-funnel audience
Running the same offer for too long
Little time or energy dedicated to brainstorming fresh ideas
Lack of internal resources to actually produce creative at scale
How to solve creative fatigue
Step one: diagnose the cause. If your issue is a limited market size, no amount of fresh creative will fix it. That requires a bigger strategic decision: explore new geographies or target new customer segments.
For most brands, though, creative fatigue is exactly that—a creative problem. Here’s how I approach it:
1. Test the impact of fatigue
Temporarily reduce budget on suspect campaigns and measure the incremental effect. You’ll lose some conversions, but if the cost per extra conversion is far above your CAC, that’s a sign fatigue is the culprit.
2. Have the hard conversations internally
Pausing or rotating creatives can cause short-term dips.
Make sure the team is aligned that you’re optimising for long-term profitability, not just hitting a growth number this week.
3. Rebuild your creative backlog
Don’t just recycle what worked before. Experiment with new formats (video, carousel, UGC, story-first), new angles, and a wider variety of hooks.
4. Bring in fresh eyes
Whether it’s a freelancer, another team member, or even customers, fresh input can spark ideas your core team wouldn’t think of.
Creative fatigue isn’t fixed by cranking out “more of the same.” It’s solved by shaking up how you think about creative in the first place.
Recommendation
In every edition of Growth Waves, I also share a related resource to check out related to the week's topic.
If you want to go deeper on the creative side, I recommend reading this RevenueCat article on how ad platforms accelerate fatigue by David Vargas. It’s written for apps, but the principles of why creatives burn out apply just as much to e-commerce.
If you are struggling with new creative ideas, I love ad spy platforms, like Foreplay, not to avoid competitor ads, but to explore other industries for inspiration. You can, of course, also just use the Meta ad library, which is free.
At the end of the day, you don’t want your brand to be the “dog scooting ad” for your customers.
If people are cringing or tuning out, it’s time to switch things up.
Till next week,
Daphne