Creative fatigue in mobile games marketing: How to identify and combat it

If you have ever found yourself in a position where your ad has been running for a few months and showing a strong performance but then suddenly it drops off, you’re not alone. This situation is common when running mobile ads with the same creative on paid social traffic sources.

In this guest post, AdQuantum’s head of user acquisition, Anton Kuzmin breaks down why you may be experiencing creative fatigue and what steps can be taken to prevent it.

In the context of mobile game advertising, “creative fatigue” (or ad fatigue) occurs when the target audience loses interest in an ad due to frequent exposure.

People tend to get tired of seeing the same ad repeatedly. This leads to decreased ad effectiveness. Moreover, when a creative goes mainstream, other advertisers may copy it after seeing it on spy services, causing the ad concept to become exhausted even more quickly.

So, how do you actually spot that a creative is on a stage of fatigue? If you see these signs, most likely, your creative is “exhausted”:

• Declined click-through rate 
• Declined conversion rate to purchase or target action
• Increased cost per acquisition 
• Increased CPM
• Decreased interaction time with the ad
• Proxy metrics, which aren’t key to user acquisition but are important as they provide secondary performance insights. For example, IPM (Installs Per Mille) shows the number of installs per thousand impressions. It helps track initial creative performance during tests and can also be used to monitor creative burnout.

The frequency of ad display per user increases (the more users see the ad, the worse the performance metrics). To evaluate properly, frequency and conversion rate should be considered. If there is a negative correlation between them, the creatives are likely "burned out," and it's time to publish new ads.

Why it's important to detect creative fatigue timely

The sooner you notice that your creative is burning out, the better.

Firstly, the longer you stick with outdated approaches, the more money you lose due to poorer unit economics. Therefore, setting benchmarks for purchasing and evaluating creatives and regularly monitoring metrics is important, especially when scaling campaigns, as increased spending accelerates creative burnout.

Secondly, the longer you run burned-out creatives, the more time and competitive advantage you lose since your competitors are constantly improving their ad campaigns.

If you don't update your creatives promptly, you risk falling behind competitors and losing a share in the advertising auction. You could be pushed out if you take too long to change working concepts.

Combating creative fatigue

There are primary and additional strategies for combating creative fatigue.

Working with iterations + combining approaches

Consistently update your ad creatives. It's worth allocating some resources to refining and iterating approaches to varying degrees – this can help "revive" the creative and temporarily slow down the burnout of the main approach. Even small changes matter.

Consistently updating your ad creatives, even minor tweaks, can make a significant difference. Change colours, adjust the copy, or switch up the imagery to keep your ads fresh.

Simultaneously, search for new ad concepts that can significantly boost metrics. If a new ad concept is found, you can temporarily set aside the burned-out concept and return to it later – this can work. Creatives have a way of “resting”.

Here’s an example of two creatives for the Lumber Idle Empire mobile game. One ad featuring a coconut wasn’t performing well, so a small change was made: an apple was punched instead of a coconut being smashed with a hammer. This tweak significantly improved the metrics and gave new life to an old creative.

Insights on working with creative fatigue

The narrower the niche and smaller the GEO, the more often your audience will tire of your creatives. For large projects in big GEOs, this problem will be less pronounced. However, this depends on the specific case. Even in top titles, creatives might not last more than $10k in spend while the production searches for a top creative.

From subjective experience, creatives burn out the most on platforms like TikTok Ads and Snapchat. On these platforms, creatives last much shorter than on Meta Ads and Google Universal Ad Campaigns. What can run for a month or two on Meta may often die within two weeks or less on TikTok.

However, it's important to note that the overall lifespan of a working campaign on TikTok is shorter than on Meta, so it's essential not to confuse campaign burnout with the burnout of a specific visual asset.

In in-app networks, creatives last significantly longer than on Paid Social, particularly Meta.

The main recipe for combating creative fatigue is simple: assuming you regularly update/improve your product and have a perfect understanding of your target audience, you must also regularly work on your creatives in the following areas:

• Improve existing creatives
• Constantly seek new approaches
• Properly prioritise and balance the share of the first and second strategies

Final thoughts 

Dealing with creative fatigue in mobile game marketing means staying sharp and open to change.

Catch the signs early and regularly refresh your ads to keep your campaigns performing well. Mix small tweaks with new ideas to keep things interesting.

In the fast-paced world of mobile advertising, flexibility and creativity are key. Keep experimenting and stay adaptable, and your campaigns will continue to engage and convert like a charm.