Ad platforms might continue to distribute these creatives because they have performed well in the past, but their effectiveness is already declining.

Common signs of ad fatigue include a decrease in click-through rates (CTR), an increase in cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and cost per click (CPC), and a drop in conversions, even though the volume of impressions remains stable. This issue is especially critical in performance marketing, where the effectiveness of creatives directly impacts return on marketing investment (ROMI).

The risks of running fatigued ads

Running fatigued creatives can gradually undermine the performance of your campaigns. Initially, everything may appear stable—especially if your budget and impressions remain consistent—but beneath the surface, important metrics can start to decline. Here’s what this can lead to:

Escalating Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). As CTR declines and users become desensitized to repeated messaging, platforms must work harder—and invest more—to generate clicks and conversions. This results in increased costs per click and cost per acquisition, which quickly reduces your margins, especially in campaigns sensitive to return on ad spend.

Wasted budget on Underperforming creatives. Failure to detect fatigued ads promptly can lead to wasted ad spend. If your campaign is still receiving impressions but generating fewer conversions, you're effectively paying more for less—day after day.

Delayed optimization cycles. Many teams tend to wait until performance dramatically declines before taking action, which creates a delay between recognizing a problem and resolving it. During this time, performance continues to worsen while creative production struggles to keep up. This reactive approach diminishes your agility and places additional pressure on content teams.

Misleading attribution and decision-making. Stale creative can distort campaign-level metrics, masking underlying issues. For instance, a decline in ROAS might be attributed to audience saturation, channel effectiveness, or landing page quality—when the true problem is actually outdated advertising content.

Brand damage. On platforms like Meta and TikTok, where users see ads frequently, repeating the same creative too often can annoy or alienate your audience. In extreme cases, this overexposure can lead to ad hiding, negative comments, or a drop in brand favorability.

How to identify fatigued ads using Google Sheets and attribution platforms

If you’re not using automated tools to detect creative fatigue, you can still monitor it manually with Google Sheets:

Export performance data. From your ad platforms (Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Ads, Criteo, etc.), export per-creative metrics like impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, CPA, and ROAS—ideally broken down by day.

Searching for fatigued ads using Google Sheets has become so popular among advertising specialists that template spreadsheets with formulas are frequently bought and sold. We won't provide a link :-)

Import to Google Sheets. Set up automated imports using Google Ads Scripts, Supermetrics, or a custom Google Apps Script that connects to platform APIs.

Build a dashboard. Use pivot tables and dynamic charts to track each creative over time. Watch for:

→ Sharp or consistent CTR declines while impressions remain stable.

→ Rising CPC or CPA.

→ Drop in conversions with no audience or offer changes.

Create an alert formula. Add conditional formatting or a logic column like:

=IF(AND(CTR < 0.5%, CPC > 20, CPA > 100), "Fatigue?", "").

Or create a color-coded heatmap using conditional formatting to highlight:

→ CTR below target
→ Frequency above threshold
→ Rapidly increasing CPC

Tip. Apply a red background to any row where CTR < 0.5% and Frequency > 5.

Cross-check with frequency and audience size. If available, monitor reach and frequency. A high frequency (above 4–5) combined with declining CTR strongly indicates fatigue.

Tip. If more than three creatives in a campaign are flagged as “Likely Fatigued,” trigger an alert to the media buyer or creative team.

Automate fatigue detection with Bïrch

Let’s say, you are a marketer at an advertising agency or a medium-sized company working in online retail.

You launch 200–300 ads per month with a total advertising budget of $12–15K. You also use several advertising channels at once: you run videos on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

From time to time, you experience spikes in CPC and CPA at the most random times (for example, on Sunday evening).

This happens because users see more and more of your ads on one or more social networks. For example, first, your target audience sees your ad on Facebook, then they go to Instagram, and there it is again. You need to keep your finger on the pulse at all times. And if you miss a fatigued ad, you can easily overspend several thousand dollars a month.

Bïrch automates this process: the service finds and stops fatigued ads on its own. Even on Sunday evenings.

Actionable insights for optimizing creatives’ performance

Manually exporting data, building dashboards, and writing formulas works—but it’s time-consuming, error-prone, and simply not scalable when you're managing multiple ad accounts and creatives.

With Ads Explorer by Bïrch, in just a few clicks, you can connect your ad accounts to monitor ad performance across platforms in one place.

Ads Explorer gives you:

• A centralized view of all creatives and their performance trends
• Automated detection of fatigued ads based on customizable metrics
• Ready-to-use visual reports that update in real time
• Filters to quickly find high-frequency, low-performing ads

Instead of juggling spreadsheets and scripts, you get actionable insights in a clean interface—so you can focus on creative strategy and scaling campaigns, not data wrangling.

If you wish to compare groups of ads, try Ad Groups in Ads Explorer. It will clearly show how each ad group performed:

Key takeaways

• Fatigue kills performance quietly. CTR drops, CPC rises, and conversions fall—even when impressions look fine.
• High frequency is a red flag. When the same audience sees your ad 4–5+ times, effectiveness usually declines fast.
• Manual tracking works, but doesn’t scale. Google Sheets can help, but it’s slow, error-prone, and not suited for managing dozens of creatives across platforms.
• Fatigued ads waste the budget. Every extra day you run stale creatives costs you money—especially in performance-driven campaigns.

Automation keeps you ahead. Use Bïrch to automatically detect and pause underperforming ads before they damage your ROI.