Detect, Measure & Fix Declining Performance in Your Meta and Google Campaigns
Digital ads don’t fail overnight; they fade. You may launch an ad campaign that delivers a number of great clicks and conversions, but over time it loses some of that momentum. The reason for this is called creative fatigue (or ad decay), and it may be one of the most difficult challenges you (and your team) face with performance marketing. If you are using Meta or Google Ads in 2025, knowing how to identify creative fatigue early and take actions to course-correct will be critical to protecting your ROI.
What is Creative Fatigue:
Creative fatigue is simply when the audience has seen the ad too many times and have grown disinterested. After seeing an ad too many times, readers will typically experience ‘banner blindness’ which is when your click-through rates (CTR) start to decline, and your costs per acquisition (CPA) start to increase. Even the most magnificent creative will run its course and eventually the audience will lose interest and/or forget the value and core message of your ad.
In advertising platforms, such as Meta and Google, the algorithms will ultimately favour ads that have greater engagement. So, as your engagement declines, the algorithms will serve your ad less and your costs will increase. Unfortunately, if fatigue is not addressed, it almost goes unnoticed—and can slowly leach out your budget.
Identifying Early Signs of Ad Fatigue
Recognizing fatigue early on gives you time to refresh creatives before performance declines significantly. Red flags include:
Increased Frequency: If the average user sees the same ad more than 2–3 times each week on Meta or consistently within Google Display campaigns, you will typically see diminishing engagement.
Decreased CTR: A consistent drop in click-through rate, independent of audience targeting or budget, is a precursor to fatigue.
Increased CPA or CPC: If you are experiencing higher cost per action (CPA) or cost per click (CPC) while conversion rates remain flat, that creative may be losing relevancy.
Reduced Impressions: If impressions decline, but bids remain the same, it could signal the platform is restricting delivery to the ad due to a predicted decrease in engagement.
Utilize platform dashboards to monitor these metrics on a daily basis or automate alerts to notify staff once thresholds become unrealistic.
Using Data to Measure Fatigue
In addition to simple metrics, deeper analysis can help quantify fatigue:
Engagement Decay Curves: Take your CTR or conversions and plot them over a timeline to see if you notice when engagement starts to decay.
Audience Overlap Analysis: Verify whether any of your ad sets overlap on audiences, which could drive audience saturation faster.
Testing Creative vs Offers: Test multiple creatives or messages against the same targeting to differentiate between creative wear-out and offers wearing out.
In Google Ads, “Top Signals” or on Meta as “Break down by placement” can help determine if fatigue is platform-wide or if its specific to one audience or one ad.
Addressing Creative Fatigue
1. Regularly Update Creativity
Alternating fresh images, videos, or ad copy is essential before fatigue occurs. A good rule of thumb is to have three to five creatives within at least every single ad set ready on hand. Small updates – new headlines, colors, or updated call-to-actions can add newness!
2. Increase Targeting
If it’s in your budget, try testing some new audience segments or lookalike segments as a way to refresh when having ad fatigue. The more you can expand the top of your funnel, the more performance decreases, and fatigue is not immediate.
3. Automated Rules
Meta and Google allow you to set automated rules to pause or scale ads based on triggers in performance. For example:
Pause if CTR is below 0.8% for three days…
Increase budget by 10% if ROAS exceeds client threshold, only when your top-performing creatives are achieving those goals.
4. Ongoing A/B testing
You should have A/B tests running ongoing to determine winning combinations of visuals, copy, and calls-to-action. Leverage platforms like Google Experiments or Meta’s A/B Testing framework to be able to test and measure actual model changes in a statistically valid way.
5. Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO)
Most platforms now have an AI-driven option to mix and match headlines, images, and descriptions. These options allow DCO to choose the best performing combinations and serve them to the different segments, slowing fatigue as there is always something different.
Creative fatigue is not a failure; it’s a natural lifecycle of every ad. The important part is to identify it early, and manage it proactively. By analyzing ad performance in terms of frequency, engagement trends, and costs, marketers have the ability to refresh creatives or change the audience before performance deteriorates.
In the fast-paced Meta and Google Ads ecosystem, marketers looking to protect their ad budgets and continue to their scale have recognized that creative fatigue is not a mysterious and sporadic event, but in fact an event which is either measurable or more importantly, fixable.