Social Media Audience Fatigue Is A Silent Campaign Killer

Audience fatigue is a real issue when running social media campaigns.

Unlike, say, within search.

After all, how many times a year do you search "cheap flights to London"?

Search, be it paid or organic, tends to unlock fresh audiences daily, which is why Google Ads and SEO generally focus on evergreen activity.

Social audiences, on the other hand, are often referred to as "standing armies", meaning organisations tend to reach the same people every time.

Be it "Likers", recent website visitors or contacts from your email database.

Social media fatigue is even more likely, in instances whereby organisations have larger budgets and relatively small target groups.

While not all social channels report on audience fatigue, Facebook (and Instagram) does.

Within Facebook, audience fatigue is determined in a variety of ways, such as monitoring cost per impressions (CPMs), ad frequencies, audience overlap, auction overlap and audience saturation.

Although, of above, the clearer indicator is perhaps the latter, audience saturation.

Audience saturation data can help you determine whether people have seen your ads multiple times and are no longer responding to them.

At SMK's upcoming Social Media Strategy + Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn Advertising Masterclass, we will be examining how to manage and mitigate audience fatigue and much more.

Accessing Audience Saturation Reports

Audience saturation reports initially launched in 2017 and, at the time, resided within Facebook Delivery Insights.

Delivery Insights offered a treasure trove of useful ad data but were buried away within the broader Facebook Business Manager navigation.  

Hence, few organisations were aware of the feature.

To be fair, Business Manager is a bit of a pig. So it's hardly surprising that only a tiny percentage of marketers take advantage of smart features and functions.

In 2019, Facebook redesigned and streamlined Facebook Ads Manager, as well as began work on a new, less pig-like, version of Business Manager.

As part of the design reshuffle, several under-used, yet useful, features were brought to the fore, including audience saturation reports.

At SMK's upcoming Social Media Strategy Masterclass, we will be exploring many of the latest updates and new feature launches within Ads Manager and Business Manager.

Audience saturation reports now reside within Facebook's Delivery View, which is available at the ad set level, within a campaign.

Delivery view lets you review active ad sets and take action to improve performance.

You can access the delivery view for an eligible active ad set in Ads Manager by selecting the new Inspect option, in one of two ways:

• Select the Inspect icon that appears when you hover over the ad set's name
• Select the Inspect icon that appears in the right-hand menu

The delivery view will show you a summary card and four modules:

1. Bid strategy
2. Audience saturation
3. Auction competition
4. Auction overlap

Annoyingly, the delivery view is only currently available within Ads Manager for campaigns running specific objectives:

• Traffic
• App Installs
• Lead Generation
• Conversions
• Campaign budget optimisation

All other objectives are presently excluded, including popular ones such as Reach, Engagement, Video Views and Messages.

See above comment about how annoying this is.

What's In The Saturation Reports?

Delivery Insights provides the following metrics to help you understand the impact that audience saturation is having on your ad sets.

Impressions: The number of times your ads were on screen.

First Time Impression Ratio: The percentage of your daily impressions that comes from people seeing your ad set for the first time.

Reach (Lifetime): The number of people who saw your ads at least once over the lifetime of your campaign. This metric differs from reach in that it's based on the number of people who saw your ads at least once over the lifetime of your campaign as opposed to your selected date range.

Audience Reached Ratio: The percentage of your estimated audience size that you've reached so far. Your estimated audience is estimated based on the placements and targeting criteria that you select and includes factors such as Facebook user behaviours, user demographics and location data.

Growing audience saturation levels are not necessarily a bad thing.

Seeing ads multiple times can help build awareness and recall, but if you want results like conversions, it can also lead to diminishing returns.

Therefore, subject to your desired outcome, this will determine how you interpret and manage audience saturation levels.

For performance marketers, it is something which is best perhaps kept on a tight leash, but for brand builders, it is less of an issue.

In fact, for brand builders, providing costs are not exploding; it could well be exactly what you want to achieve?

In certain cases, even for performance marketers, simply rotating imagery or creative, within an existing campaign, could have the effect of improving performance and reducing costs, while still maintaining high levels of audience saturation and brand recall.

SMK will be exploring the latest opportunities, systems, processes and features for optimal Social Media Marketing in 2020 in a few weeks time. Expanding upon the key feature launches across all major platforms from the past six to twelve months.

Courses run through March and April, with earlybird rates available, alongside not-for-profit discounts and group bookings discounts. It is also possible to tailor any course to your needs as part of an In-house Training program.