4 Ways to Overcome Ad Fatigue

Ad fatigue is real. Most AdWords advertisers are all employing the same strategies to improve keyword relevancy and score—dynamic keyword insertion, keywords in the headline, etc.

Ever seen this sort of search result before?

If ads for your search term all seem to say the same thing, you have the opportunity to stand out from your competition.

Ad fatigue happens whens all the search ads look the same. It results in no ad standing out. When ad fatigue occurs, customers see a lot of the same words in different ads and can’t easily choose which ad to click on. Question is, how do you stand out?

Here are 4 ways to overcome ad fatigue:

• Focus on what makes you unique
• Use ad customizers
• Rotate indefinitely
• Change ads regularly

These four ideas will help your ads stand out from the mumbo jumbo of identical search results on Google.

Focus On What Makes You Unique

If you quickly Google your keywords you can see ad fatigue in what benefits everyone else is focused on. Chances are they are probably all offering the same thing. It might be price, shipping, free trial, or years of experience.

Once you know what your competition is focusing on, you know what not to focus your ad on, unless you can beat the competition at their own game.

Instead, brainstorm other benefits of your product in the consumers eyes that the competition isn’t talking about. It might be your customer service, your amenities, your quality, or quantity.

Wordstream recommends focusing on a narrower subset of customers and what they really want. For example, in the hotel industry, many people focus on amenities to appeal to as many people as possible.

Instead of catering to the majority, Wordstream suggests focusing on a narrower group of customers and what they want.

For example, if your hotel receives a majority of business travelers, focus on the amenities that appeal most to this demographic—conferencing facilities, fast internet, etc. On the other hand, if your resort caters to honeymooners, focus on the charm and peace and quiet.

By focusing on the benefits no one else is, you attract the people no one else will by standing out from the crowd.

Use Ad Customizers

Ad customizers are only a year old on Google. They let advertisers dynamically update their ads and create a time-sensitive message in order to create a sense of urgency to customers. They can be used to count down to one-time or reoccurring events.

Ad customizers provide useful messages to customers to help customers differentiate between different ad offers. Unique ad offers reduce ad fatigue.

Setting up ad customizers is easy. All you have to do is use the parameter format of {=COUNTDOWN (“yyyy/mm/dd hh:mm:ss”)} in your ad (make sure to customize the date and time to your end date).

When you’re done, the ad will look like “Only {=COUNTDOWN (“2015/10/31 01:00:00″)} days until Halloween” in AdWords and will read “Only 17 days until Halloween” when shown on Google.

The ad customizers customization prevents ad fatigue to customers who don’t convert on the first search.

Rotate Ads Indefinitely

AdWords gives you the option of rotating your ads evenly or to rotate them for clicks or conversions. Rotating ads for clicks or conversions lets Google show the one ad that gets the most clicks or conversions most frequently which creates ad fatigue. Rotating indefinitely evenly rotates your ads which doesn’t create ad fatigue as often.

Change Ads Regularly

At Disruptive, we recommend always split-testing two ads against each other. This allows you to gather objective data about which ad performs best and this will help with ad fatigue. We also recommend setting your ad rotation settings to rotate indefinitely to further ensure that ad fatigue doesn’t happen.

Ad fatigue can also be prevented by regularly changing ads. It can be as simple as changing the headline or the call to action or by changing the whole ad. Any change will help prevent ad fatigue.

Summary

Standing out from the crowd is hard in search results, but it is possible with a few tricks. Try out these ideas and let us know how they work for you!