How do you balance creativity and relevance to combat ad fatigue in SEM?

This seems like a stretch this statement although it can happen with aggressive advertisers. I would recommend running new messaging/offers, new design layouts, and new landing pages to cut through the fatigue and familiarity

Ad fatigue is a real thing in SEM—it happens when your audience sees your ads so often that they start tuning them out. This usually occurs if you're running the same ad creative, copy, or offer over and over without mixing it up. When people begin to ignore your ads, it can hurt your Quality Score on platforms like Google Ads. This score is super important because it affects where your ads get placed and how much you pay per click. To avoid this, it's crucial to keep your ad content fresh and engaging. Regularly updating your ads not only keeps your audience interested but also helps maintain a healthy SEM strategy.

Don't forget to regularly run A/B tests on your RSA (Responsive Search Ads) and Landing Pages. Making small tweaks and carefully analyzing the results can significantly impact the success of your online campaigns.

I don’t agree, ad fatigue is more relevant to YouTube ads and social media marketing. For Pmax, shopping and search. I think familiarity is a good thing. Especially if it is covnerting

This is correct. We executed this on 4 clients over the last 6 months - specifically with new video creative on YouTube and Facebook Ads. The new video element gave us the ability to recapture a high intent audience that had previously lost its edge with CTRs dropping which lead to decreases in lead volume and increases in cost per lead.

Ensuring relevance while maintaining content quality in advertising is crucial for effectiveness. Following are some steps to achieve this: Keyword Research: One can utilize free tools like Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, Google Trends or paid tools such as Ahrefs, or SEMrush to identify the keywords your target audience is searching for. Long-tail Keywords: Focus on long-tail keywords that are more specific and have less competition. They often reflect more precise user intent. Search Intent Understand the intent behind the keywords (informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial investigation) and tailor your ads accordingly.

Always ensure the creative and messaging is aligned with what the prospect is searching & looking for. You will always beat a fancy competitor when you make is clear and specific that you are offering what they do.

A/B testing, or split testing, is all about comparing two versions of an ad to figure out which one performs better. By tweaking just one element at a time—like the headline, image, or call to action—you can really see what changes make a difference. This approach is super data-driven, letting you make decisions based on solid performance metrics. It's a great way to keep your ads fresh and engaging without losing the punch of your message. Regular A/B testing helps maintain user interest, prevents ad fatigue, and ensures your SEM efforts are always dialed in for the best results.

We have found running A/B tests on landing pages to be more of a 'A/B test' rather than the ad platforms, as Google, Meta/Facebook and others make it hard to run a traditional A/B test. You can run different variations of ads although the algorithms in the platforms will skew towards top performers on a small volume of data.

Segment your audience based on demographics, behavior, and interests. Deliver personalized ads to each segment to increase relevance and engagement.

This is extremely important on Facebook Ads because it gives you insights into what audiences deliver results. Many advertisers bulk their audiences together which does not allow them to see what is work and, more importantly, what is not. In Google Ads, in Performance Max this does help a lot. For search, I have never seen it work.

People do talk about this, although in practice it is rarely done correctly. It is more important to be aware of seasonality to avoid making reactive changes in accounts due to clients or you own expectations.

Seasonal adjustments still don’t work well on Google ads. I still find manually managing this to yield far better results. It does mean you need to understand the business and the products though. Otherwise this becomes very hard. Google overbids when search volume drops off. It wastes so much money