As promised on Wednesday, I’m back with Part 2 of this little examination of ad fatigue. In Part 1, we talked about how some demographics may be more prone to experiencing ad fatigue than others, and I promised to give you some ways to fatigue-proof your own ads. So that’s what we’re going to do!

Before I get to the tips, I want to reiterate that there is likely no concrete, specific way to eradicate ad fatigue entirely. People that aggressively dislike ads will use ad blockers and other things, and for those that don’t use that sort of software, you’ll find they often have a sort of mental or visual block when it comes to ads on a site – they see them, but they don’t see them. Unless the ad is somehow egregiously annoying, of course. But then you’re not doing yourself any favors by annoying the faces off your potential clientele, right?

But for those others, there are many things you can do to prevent ad fatigue as much as possible, and I recommend taking this stuff into consideration when you run your next campaign:

• Put a cap on it.When an ad is performing well, you might be tempted to just run it forever, on the assumption that it will continue to do just as well indefinitely. Don’t do that – at least, don’t do that in the same spot/channel/network/venue/whatever, anyway. When an ad is performing well, it’s best to give it a rest after it’s been going for a bit of time. Whether you make up a certain time period (“I’m going to run this one for 1 month, and then switch it out”) or stop it once you see numbers starting to fall off slightly, put a cap on it. If people see your ad too often, they’ll start to ignore it. By rotating your top performing ads in and out, you keep things fresh and avoid having people get tired of them, and you can keep using that great ad effectively much longer than you might be able to otherwise by spreading it out.Think of it like a Top 40 pop song or something: when it’s new, people love it, so the radios keep playing it. Over and over and over again. Eventually, you hear people say things like, “I used to like that, but I hear it everywhere I go now” or “That’s so overplayed.” They were hit over the head with the song too many times, so much so that they started to dislike or be bored by something that had previously captured their attention. Don’t overplay your ads.
• Remix it. Have multiple versions of the same ad ready to go. Try taking apart your best performing ads and then stapling them back together differently to see if it will still be as effective. For example, image from Ad 1, headline from Ad 2, body text from Ad 3.
• Swap images. Maybe you have an ad with copy that you love, that you know performs well, so you don’t want to dump it entirely or take it apart to Frankenstein a new ad. If this ad also features an image, such as with Facebook advertising, try just swapping the image out for a new one. The image is usually what attracts attention first in an ad like that, so you may be able to keep the ad effective by just giving it a new picture.

This stuff is especially important if you are running ads on Facebook. So many people use Facebook all day, every day, so they see a lot of ads. And since Facebook gives you a way to really drill down and target a specific audience, chances are high that your desired target audience will see your ad quite frequently.

So work on fatigue proofing your ad campaigns, and you’ll likely see that your most effective ads end up with a lot more staying power than you may have previously experienced.