How to prevent creative fatigue in your ad campaigns
Creative fatigue can be a roadblock to maximizing campaign performance. As ads repeatedly appear before users, their engagement rates decline.
Networks like ironSource Ads and Unity Ads offer advertisers the ability to run dozens of creatives per campaign - an opportunity that, when used strategically, can help prevent creative fatigue and keep your ads fresh and engaging. Let’s explore some actionable best practices to maintain creative performance throughout your campaigns.
1. Use more creatives to drive better machine learning
When it comes to combatting creative fatigue, variety is your closest ally. The more creatives you have, the more varied concepts your audience is exposed to. Diversity in your campaigns captures attention and delivers a fuller picture of your game, increasing engagement and interest over time. Diversity here refers not only to the concepts you utilize but also to the formats - use a variety of video, playables, and a mix of both in your campaigns to fight fatigue.
Networks like Unity Ads and ironSource Ads have sophisticated machine learning models monitoring performance. Having a rich pool of creatives boosts their ability to determine which ads resonate the most with an audience. This process is critical to finding high-impact creatives and scaling their performance. By running multiple creatives, advertisers can more quickly identify what works for different kinds of users, enabling better segmentation on the model level.
2. Optimize your creative rotation strategy
To avoid creative fatigue, it’s essential to be strategically rotating your creatives. This is not a one-size-fits-all process, but there are some general basic practices which can be leveraged depending on the stage of your game’s launch.
For new or not-yet-live games, it’s recommended to start small and scale gradually. After launching your campaign, add new creatives 3 few days. When adding new creatives, ensure your previous creatives have achieved sufficient impressions to successfully complete the learning phase.
For existing games, your campaigns should start with existing (pre-learned) creative sets that can be launched with up to 30 creatives. Add new creatives every 3 days to gradually reach 30-creatives. It’s important to keep your creatives in active "exploration" while reviewing performance to ensure every new addition gets the impressions required for a thorough learning phase.
3. Refresh your best performing creatives with incremental modifications
Regularly refreshing and analyzing your creatives is vital to long-term success and avoiding creative fatigue. That means consistently uploading new creatives. But that doesn’t mean removing top performing creatives to make space for new ones. Rather, adjust your existing top performers with incremental modifications to keep your creatives fresh while still leveraging the creative concepts that are resonating.
Some easy opportunities for optimization for your best-performing creatives are usually incremental adjustments like the duration, color scheme, theme, or even swapping in new characters or scenarios.
Follow these tips to help ensure that your campaigns stay effective and continue to drive growth. Reach out to your account manager to learn more about how you can drive impact with your Unity campaigns.