Creative Fatigue

Creative fatigue is what happens when an ad stops working because people have already seen it. The creative itself has not changed and neither has the offer, but response falls away: fewer clicks, fewer add-to-carts, less revenue for the same spend. It is a function of repeated exposure to a fixed audience, not of the ad being bad.

It is not the same as a weak ad that never worked, and it is not a seasonal dip affecting everything you run. People most often confuse it with Frequency Cap, which is a setting you apply to limit exposure. Fatigue is the outcome you are trying to avoid; the cap is one lever against it.

You measure it by tracking one metric for a single creative over time against the audience it is served to. Click rate, Hook Rate and ROAS per ad, plotted weekly alongside frequency, show the shape clearly. The honest denominator is unique people reached, because that is what exposure actually accumulates against. Impressions is the flattering one: impressions keep rising as frequency rises, so a per-impression figure can look stable while each person is responding less. Blending several creatives into one account number hides it entirely.

Frequency Cap is the control you set to slow fatigue; this is the decline itself. Hook Rate and Thumb-Stop Rate measure how a creative opens and often fall first as fatigue sets in. Break-Even ROAS tells you the point at which a fatiguing ad starts losing money. A/B Test compares two creatives; fatigue compares one creative against its earlier self.