Have you noticed your Facebook ads drop in performance soon after you put a new campaign on the platform? You’re definitely not alone. The Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram still have the largest audiences in social media, but Facebook’s ad dominance has eroded in the past few years. That’s both in terms of how much ad business it controls and what returns advertisers can expect. This is one reason why enterprise brands are turning to Generative AI for Facebook ads.
There are a number of systemic reasons for that. They include the economic doldrums that make consumers choosier about their spending. Advertisers also are looking to diversify their ad spend as younger demographics take their activity to alternative platforms—such as TikTok for Gen Z specifically. Moreover, the continued loss of cookies coupled with the increased privacy protections for iPhone users with iOS14 have decreased Facebook’s ability to target ads to the right audience. None of that is within an advertiser’s control.
Beyond these systemic, industry-wide issues, however, lies your ad creative. Ad performance can degrade also because your creative misses the mark. That you can influence and improve to combat ad fatigue and produce better returns by using Generative AI for Facebook ads. Here’s how:
Speak to the right audience
Sure, every marketer knows to start with the audience. But, in today’s market of many options and fast-moving behavior, “the audience” may change faster than you sense it. Former brand advocates may age or stage out of your product, switch platforms, re-prioritize their spending. Any and all of these factors can affect how well your ads perform.
The demographics on Facebook are one well-documented factor that is worth considering as a factor. Adults between the ages of 25 and 34 are Facebook’s largest audience segment. Facebook’s recent challenges with ad targeting may mean that your ads geared to other demographics may not reach the right people.
But let’s not overstate that. Millennials may be the largest segment, but they still make up only about 23% of all Facebook users. That leaves millions of people in other demographic groups to speak to. Perhaps the bigger factor is, are they listening? Do they want to see your ads on Facebook?
Research into the different engagement rates by industry suggest wide variations in the answer. Brands in the retail and apparel industries see some of the highest click-through rates on the platform. But the highest performance goes to legal advertisers. And the lowest performers? Ads for employment and job training. Maybe they’d have more luck on LinkedIn?
The take-away is for brands to make sure they have updated research and sentiment analysis to ensure the audiences they want to reach are on the platform.
Refresh and optimize your creative
Another cause of degrading Facebook ad performance is ad fatigue, when customers just get sick of seeing an ad. This can manifest on social media as banner blindness, which happens when customers have seen the same ad so many times that it fails to register. They literally can’t see it when it goes by because the brain tells them they don’t need to pay attention.
One reason this happens is excessive exposure to the same creative copy and visuals. Even people who like your brand will turn off if they aren’t in the market for what you’re offering and they see the same ad too many times.
Facebook’s ad platform will stop showing your ads to audiences after a certain number of views. Having alternative creative options allows you to swap out underperforming versions and replace them with refreshed new ones that have not yet degraded due to banner blindness.
Making multiple ad creative options was cost-prohibitive in the past, when all creative depended entirely on the talents and attention of human copywriters and designers. With Generative AI for Facebook ads, however, brands can cost-effectively develop multiple creative options for the same campaign and have them ready when old versions get stale.
The results can be even better if the creative copy has been optimized. That is the difference customers get from using a Generative AI such as the Persado Motivation AI Platform—an enterprise Generative AI solution with the equivalent of 645 years of consumer response data built in. Persado-generated content is optimized based on historical evidence about what works to motivate customer engagement and action. The average performance for a Persado-generated ad is 40% higher than independently human-created copy.
Personalize the message using Generative AI for Facebook ads
The next stage along the progression to combat Facebook ad fatigue is to personalize messages. There’s plenty of research showing that consumers develop a better view of brands that engage with them in a way that is informed about their needs and experiences, but without crossing over into intrusive or creepy. In fact, the majority of consumers say it’s annoying when brands don’t personalize their messaging.
There are many levels to personalization and Facebook has long allowed advertisers to choose the audiences for their ads. Cookie degradation coupled with increased security features in iOS14 makes that harder for Facebook to do—that’s one of the reasons advertisers, especially DTC advertisers, have noticed higher costs per click on Facebook.
There remain a number of underutilized personalization levers brands can use, however, that remain in your control. Personalizing how you position and focus the message is one of them. Typically, marketers think of personalization in terms of the offer—what product will they promote with what incentive. But taking the same offer and leveraging more effective language can also have an outsized impact on engagement.
Persado saw that impact with a Facebook loyalty credit card ad campaign. We developed multiple versions to appeal to different audience segments. For example, the credit card company knew that some loyalty customers like to use their points to pay for travel while others like cash back, and so on. Persado generated personalized language associated with these offers for the different audiences and tested their impact compared with a non-personalized alternative. The personalized messages outperformed the generic message by 60% for the travelers and 44% for the cash-back customers, respectively.
Facebook isn’t going anywhere. It will be a key part of the advertising mix for the foreseeable future. As a result, marketers need all the levers they can use to combat Facebook ad fatigue and optimize performance. Make sure to include the language and messages in your creative is one of them.Learn more about the results you can achieve using Persado to deliver the right message in our 2023 Customer Motivation Report: What 20.9 Billion AI-Generated Messages Tell Us About Customer Motivation.
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