2 principles and 8 ways to combat ad fatigue in your paid acquisition efforts

Photo credit: Pexels.

The first thing to understand about building a growth model is that there is a ceiling for how a product or company grows—some lower and closer than others.

Paid acquisition on Facebook, Instagram, or Google is one of the fastest ways to grow. But it’s also one of the fastest ways to hit audience saturation because it’s much faster and easier to scale up than organic alternatives.

The good thing about user acquisition on advertising platforms, however, is that you can get a good idea of where your ceiling is simply by doing burst tests. In a burst test, you increase your ad spend in a specific audience and channel for a single day (or a few days) to understand how the variables in your growth strategy perform at that spend level.

Makes sense, right? In the rest of this post, I’ll go over two different ways to think about the audience saturation problem and why burst testing may not always be the best way to go.

The Mongol Horde vs the European Explorer

When it comes to beating audience saturation, you have two basic approaches, each with a set of trade-offs. Let’s call them the Mongol Horde approach and the European Explorer approach.

In the Mongol Horde approach, you go from audience to audience, squeezing as much return as possible as quickly as your budget will allow. Once you’re done with an audience segment, you typically won’t come back to it for a while, which isn’t a bad thing.

In the European Explorer approach, you first “test” many different audiences to observe the saturation (aka efficiency or diminishing return) curves and any potential audience overlap. As part of this approach, you can run the burst tests (works great for Facebook advertising) that we talked about earlier, in which you vary your daily budget to observe the relationship between spend and return. This allows you to gain data before investing further.

The trade-offs of the approaches are as follows:

Predicting the loss of efficiency on ad platforms

Who doesn’t want to predict the loss of efficiency? But be careful here.

8 ways to combat audience saturation