Creative Fatigue

Creative fatigue (or ad fatigue) is the decline in an ad's performance over time as the same audience sees it repeatedly.

Fatigue shows up as rising CPM or CPC, falling CTR, and increasing negative feedback (hides, reports) on the same creative and audience combination — even with no change to targeting or budget. It's a frequency problem more than a creative-quality problem in most cases: the same ad shown too many times to the same people just stops working, regardless of how good it was on day one.

The standard fix is creative refresh (new variations, not necessarily a totally new concept) on a regular cadence, plus frequency caps and audience rotation to spread exposure more thinly.