Did you know that over 90% of web users form their first impressions of your business based on your creative assets? These impressions come well before they consider purchasing your products or services. This is just one reason brands should be nimble and pivot outdated advertising that either fails to appeal to a targeted audience or that they’ve simply seen one too many times.
We want your digital marketing to succeed, so we turned to our design team to share their best tactics for mitigating Google Ads fatigue and improving performance.
The Consequences of Google Ads Fatigue
Ad fatigue happens after encountering an unappealing ad repeatedly, engaging with an advertisement at odds with a landing page, or simply seeing the same design over and over. A company’s losses from ad fatigue are far from inconsequential—and they’re expensive. Ramifications could include:
- Higher ad spend
- Wasted ad spend
- Missed conversions
- Negative brand perception
- Decreased click-through rates (CTR)
- Reduced conversions
- Low engagement rates
- Poor quality score
Investing in refreshed creative could lower your return on ad spend (ROAS), convert customers, and keep them engaged.
What types of Google Ads feature customizable visuals? Performance Max campaigns utilize both images and videos. Dynamic display ads retrieve images and headlines directly from landing pages. Additionally, YouTube ads, responsive display ads, and other formats are available.
Note: For Performance Max campaigns, it’s best to create the maximum number of ads initially to kickstart your campaign effectively.
Design Tips That Prevent Google Ads Fatigue
The start of any creative advertising plan requires attention to detail and a list of goals. When working with clients, Mad Fish Digital always outlines a robust strategy based on data-driven insights and a detailed plan of how our experts will refresh visual ads to maximize their potential.
This is how our design team crafts expert solutions for clients across myriad industries.
1. Follow Brand Guidelines
Every marketing team needs brand guidelines to ensure alignment with the brand throughout creative development and marketing execution. These guidelines ensure your advertising will be consistent and effective.
Brand guidelines should include the following:
- Definition of correct and incorrect logo usage
- Primary and secondary color palette definitions
- Typography requirements for print and digital assets
- Brand story and mission statement
- Defined brand tone and voice
- Photography, icon, and design element usage recommendations
- Brand expression (brand examples in digital and physical spaces)
Do your ads represent your business and follow your brand guidelines? Or do you need a style guide? If this tip is new, we recommend downloading our sample brand guidelines for added education and inspiration.
For any campaign, delivering a consistent omnichannel experience that follows your company’s identity is tied to increased engagement and revenue.
2. Make Decisions Based on Data
Our team is composed of talented, data-driven individuals. Our designers continuously review any available information before refreshing ads to ensure we make the right decisions and not hinder the success of well-performing existing assets.
For example, Schoolhouse was able to increase year-over-year transactions by 60% by iterating on Google Search Ads, social advertisements, and creative assets where needed based on updates and suggestions that our team developed from referencing data.
Assessing your Google Ads account, RoAS, social platforms, and overall performance are the easiest ways to understand whether or not your ads are connecting with your target audiences. Knowing where to make changes provides a clear path toward improving performance.
Still, if you’re overwhelmed by the numbers and need additional help, we’re always eager to collaborate with new partners. Simply contact us to get started.
3. Use Variety, but Stay Cohesive Across Channels
Balancing consistency with ad variety is crucial to maintaining a positive user experience and ensuring the success of any digital advertising campaign—that’s why brand guidelines are so important. Consistency is also one of our best practices for showcasing brands through design.
For example, we designed a consistent cross-channel experience by leveraging Performance Max and TikTok ads for our friends at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV). Our paid, creative, and content teams developed a strategy offering consistent messaging and design principles as well as satisfied each platform’s strengths by supplying variety.
Taking that approach increased conversions by 42% and provided a 203% increase YoY in new and transfer student leads.
4. Create Custom Assets for Specials & Sales
While using the same design for all your ads is convenient, it will eventually result in audience ad fatigue. When you’ve got special deals and sales going on, it’s smart to create custom design assets. That way, your ads will look fresh and exciting to make your marketing efforts count.
Like our work with WSUV, we helped Solmate Socks avoid ad fatigue by individualizing designs to specific platforms. After implementing this strategy, we saw an 833% increase in ROAS and a 174% increase in website purchases year-over-year.
Our “Early Black Friday Sale” campaign won awards due to its innovative copy, audience targeting, A/B testing, and stellar design elements.
We recommend reviewing the design requirements of every digital ad platform you use. Are you following them to a tee? If not, adjust your assets to the criteria to improve ad performance.
Avoid Ad Fatigue & Awaken Your Digital Campaigns
Partnering with an experienced and forward-thinking digital agency is a great step toward helping your organization increase performance through visually captivating and user-friendly content. We encourage you to check out our latest design portfolio highlighting our creative that converts.
In our first month working with Mad Fish Digital, our conversions doubled. — Shelly Valentine, Modulus Product Marketing Manager
We invite you to reach out to our team for a complimentary consultation so we can chat about your goals and challenges. To do so, simply contact us today to get started and we’ll do the rest.
