The creative refresh: How ad creatives affect CTRs?
A common question we receive from our advertisers is: “Why did my CTR (Click Through Rate) drop after a few weeks? My campaigns were doing well when I started.”
Apart from the optimizations on your campaign settings, such as refining your targeting or filtering your traffic sources, your creatives actually play a key role in the game. The reason is simple: eye-catching creatives entice clicks.
In this blog post, we are going to explore how ad creatives affect CTRs, why monitoring your creative performance is essential, when you should update your variations to keep campaign results high, and how to use seasonality and AI tools to stay ahead of the competition.
What is Ad Fatigue?
Even the most visually appealing ad can lose its impact over time as users become used to seeing it. This is what we call “Ad Fatigue” or “Banner Blindness,” and it’s the main reason why keeping your variations fresh is essential to maintaining high performance.
In marketing, ad fatigue refers to the reduced effectiveness of the same advertisement on consumers, resulting in lower engagement. This can be caused by many factors, including the frequency and consistency of targeted ads shown to an individual, context, portrayal, and target audience.
How can I reduce ad fatigue on my ad campaigns?
In online advertising, the most direct way to identify this is by monitoring your CTR metrics. When you see a steady drop in clicks despite no changes to your targeting, you are likely facing ad fatigue.
Monitoring your creative performance: The link between CTR and win-rate.
For Display Banners, from a broad perspective, we can generally consider that a banner with a CTR of 0.1% is performing well, above 0.12% and 0.15% is performing really well, and anything above 0.2% is considered excellent performance.
To check the CTR of your campaigns, you can simply navigate to the Statistics tab in the Admin Panel and filter the results according to your needs. From here, you can check the CTR of your campaigns or specific variations. Let’s take the 300×250 Banner as an example:
How to test and distribute your creative variations
Regardless of whether you are using Native, Banner, or Video ad formats, if your campaign requires marketing creatives, you should pay close attention to them.
For initial testing, make sure to add multiple creative variations to identify what works best. We recommend starting with 3-5 different creatives.
After running your campaign for about a week, you should examine the CTR. For the creatives with a high CTR, you can consider manually adjusting the Distribution Algorithm to put more weight on the variations that are performing well. For the ones that fall behind, it’s time to swap them out for something new.
Tips and tricks to optimize the performance of your creatives
Now let’s check out the ways you can optimize the preformnace your your creatives.
Frequency Capping: Preventing fatigue before it starts
One of the best ways to reduce ad fatigue is by using Frequency Capping. This feature allows you to limit the number of times a specific user sees your ad within a certain time frame (e.g., 1-2 impressions every 24 hours).
By setting a frequency cap, you ensure that you aren’t “over-exposing” your ads to the same person. When a user sees the same banner too many times, they stop noticing it, which leads to lower CTR and wasted budget. Capping your frequency keeps your message fresh and gives your creatives a longer lifespan before they start to lose their impact.
Focus on quality: High-resolution creatives matter
It might seem obvious, but the quality of your creatives is often the difference between a click and a scroll past. In a competitive digital space, sometimes you only have a split second to grab a user’s attention. We recommend using creatives with the highest quality possible within our format specifications.
Relevance: Connecting the creative to your product and audience
Ad creatives are crucial in a marketing funnel, as they need to accurately reflect your offers. When visuals and messaging align with your landing page, user engagement and conversion increase. A mismatch can lead to reduced trust and increased bounce rates, wasting your advertising budget.
Formats like Native ads blend with surrounding content, typically not allowing text on images, so it’s vital to subtly reference your offer. ExoClick offers tools like dynamic tokens and predefined video CTAs to help maintain relevance while preserving the natural look of ads.
Tailoring creatives to your target audience is equally essential. Understanding users’ interests and cultural nuances in specific regions can enhance engagement. Ads that resonate with local trends and preferences are far more effective than generic ones. For more insights, check our blog on market research for different geos, including tips for Southeast Asia.
Seasonal relevance: Stay on trend
Aligning your ad creatives with the season or upcoming holidays is a simple but highly effective way to boost engagement and prevent ad fatigue. Users are naturally drawn to ads that feel relevant to what’s happening around them. For instance, by planning your ad variations around events like Black Friday, Valentine’s Day, or holidays like Chinese New Year, you ensure your campaigns feel fresh, timely, and much more engaging than generic banners that users have seen repeatedly.
Leveraging AI Tools
As we step into the AI era, it’s the perfect time to use AI for content creation and to enhance the performance of your creatives. We’ve previously shared tutorials and tools to help you generate high-quality video creatives using AI. You can check them out here:
Final Thoughts: How ad creatives affect CTRs?
In the fast-paced and competitive world of online advertising, a hands-off approach rarely leads to sustained success. Regularly monitoring your CTR, using optimization tools effectively, and keeping creatives seasonally relevant, utilizing AI support, can help you avoid ad fatigue and maintain strong performance. Your creative is often the first impression you make on a potential customer, so keeping it fresh can make a meaningful difference.
If you’d like us to review your creatives or campaigns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Account Manager or contact our Customer Success team.
