Resource Label: Creative insights

Creative fatigue in 2025: How to detect it, prevent it, and outsmart it

In 2025, creative fatigue is still one of the biggest threats to campaign performance.

No matter how compelling your ad creative is, audiences will tune it out at some point. And today’s sophisticated ad platforms, whether it’s Meta, Google, or TikTok, aren’t waiting for your CTR to drop before moving your creative to the sidelines. Their algorithms are designed to sense stagnation, and they’ll respond before you even realize there’s an issue.

That’s why many of the teams we work with are treating creative performance as a key growth lever versus a downstream design function. They build processes and tech around creative ideation, testing, tagging, analysis, and refresh.

These marketers and develoeprs use platforms like Singular to do it faster, smarter, and at scale.

Creative is your edge – if you can keep it fresh

The smartest mobile marketers don’t just track creatives; they engineer pipelines around them. In-house design teams collaborate with UA and lifecycle marketers, sharing metrics in regular sprint reviews.

Together, they evaluate performance across platforms and regions, identify winning concepts, and kill underperformers fast. More mature organizations tend to group creative assets by concept, format, or theme, using naming conventions and metadata to analyze at scale.

With thousands of variations across channels, this level of creative tagging and clustering is essential. It’s also built into Singular’s creative optimization suite.

So, how often should you refresh ad creatives?

Ask 10 marketers, get 10 answers. Some refresh weekly, some monthly. Others can only add new creatives when their design team can squeeze it in.

The truth is that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer.

The optimal creative refresh rate depends on factors like:

  • Creative type (videos vs. statics vs. playables)
  • Channel algorithm behavior (e.g., Meta vs. TikTok vs. Unity)
  • Campaign budget and bid strategy
  • Audience saturation speed
  • Geo and cultural relevance

Still, there is a practical framework you can follow to assess creative fatigue and optimize your refresh cadence.

A quick way to analyze creative fatigue

We’ve seen our partners use this simple and lightweight method to monitor performance trends and spot signs of creative fatigue before it’s too late.

Cadence

  • Weekly or bi-weekly

Data input

  • Creative asset performance from all channels (Singular does that out of the box: check out our API)
  • Campaign targeting option data, particularly around the major self-attributing networks, to identify targeting methodology (value optimization, bid optimization, etc. …)
  • Channel, country, region, plus any other breakdowns that makes sense to you
  • Four weeks of data
    • Period A: first 2 weeks of data
    • Period B: second 2 weeks of data
  • Two simple data outputs
    • Check the trend of currently running creatives to detect big drops that might suggest these creatives should be cycled.
    • The drops could be in clicks, installs, eCPM, or any other metrics that make sense
    • For customers using Singular’s attribution, we enable ROI granularity all the way down to the creative level, so you can check for a drop in your main KPI (which is often what the ad engines optimize against)
  • Isolate the creatives that did not exist in Period A, but existed in Period B, and identify how they are trending. Learn from new concepts that are succeeding well, and some that are failing to ramp up.

One example:

Creative Period A Period B
  CTR     Conversions     eCPM     CTR     Conversions     eCPM  
Creative 1     3% 7,500 $9.50 1.5% 3,300 $11.75
Creative 2 n/a n/a n/a 3.5% 15,000 $11
Creative 3 n/a n/a n/a 1.5% 3,400 $9
Creative 4 1% 2,200 $3.40 2.3% 4,300 $4.23

What is creative fatigue and what does the behavior really look like?

Contrary to popular belief, creative fatigue is evidenced by more than just a steady decline in CTR over time.

That’s not always how it works, especially on platforms with smart delivery algorithms like Meta. These systems throttle impressions before performance visibly declines, reducing exposure to ads that may have hit saturation.

That means your CTR might look fine when, in fact, your ad impressions are quietly plummeting.

In other cases, algorithms might raise your bids in order to force delivery of your higher-performing creatives, resulting in higher CPMs and lower ROAS without obvious creative underperformance. The result is that what looks like a stable creative may actually be a liability.

Other signs of creative fatigue (and why they matter)

You might also see these signals:

  • CTRs are flat, yet CPMs are rising?
    This is a symptom of a platform working harder to show your ad. 
  • Impression is spiking, but engagement is starting to drop off?
    A bid or budget change may have unlocked more inventory, but not necessarily better audiences.
  • Audience overlap has increased?
    If you’re hitting the same users too often, conversion rates may plummet.

These problems aren’t the result of targeting issues or channel quality. They are the less obvious symptoms of creative fatigue.

Diagnosing creative fatigue is hard. Singular makes it easier.

Singular has always offered you the ability to analyze campaign performance. But our newest solution, Creative IQ, makes it easy to analyze performance at the creative level.

With Creative IQ, you can:

  • See ROI and ROAS by creative asset across all channels
  • Visualize trends and drops across time
  • Identify saturation and fatigue patterns before they impact performance
  • Use insights to brief design on new variations that align with top-performing concepts

Ultimately, the takeaway here is that creative fatigue is real, but with the right tools and processes, it doesn’t have to kill your campaign performance. With a keen eye and solid preparation, you may just be able to stay ahead of it – and keep ahead of your KPIs.

Want to see how Singular can help your team get ahead of fatigue?

It’s simple. Just request a demo.

We’d be happy to listen to your challenges and show you a few potential solutions.

8 reasons why digital marketers need need need granularity (from experts at Kabam, Yelp, Nexon, Postmates, & N3twork)

Pebbles on a rocky beach are granular. The white sugar that we all hate to love is granular. The stars of the Milky Way that smudge together into a glorious sheet of light are, under closer inspection by a powerful telescope, also granular.

And so is the very best of digital and mobile marketing.

Why?

“Granularity sustains profitable scale,” says Singular’s Vice President of Customer Strategy Victor Savath. “Without granularity, you can scale… but it’s hard to monitor quality.”

Granularity is important both cross-channel and within channels, Savath said recently at UNIFY conference, where he interviewed experts from Yelp, Kabam, Postmates, Nexon, and N3twork on the topic. It’s important for creative. Granularity is also important for bids and CPIs. It’s critical to evaluating publishers and sub-publishers. And it’s something that impacts your daily budgets.

But exactly what is granularity?

And what does it achieve for digital marketers?

And … how has the concept of granularity changed with iOS 14.5 and SKAdNetwork?

Granularity in digital marketing can be defined as the ability to dissect big blocky chunks of marketing activity and ad buys to see the smaller building blocks. For example:

  • If your ad campaign is spread over 15 different agencies, you can view each one individually
  • If each agency uses multiple ad networks, you can see how each is performing
  • If each ad network employs different publishers and sub-publishers in your campaign, you can dive into sub-publisher metrics
  • If you’re using varying creatives and forms of targeting, you can see how each performs
  • As users or customers engage, you can see their journey and react personally to their preferences and needs

As you can see in the video from UNIFY, experts from top mobile companies had a lot to say about the concept of granularity. Here are eight things they highlighted:

 

1. Granularity tells you how to maximize channels

Clearly, seeing which ad network or publisher is providing the best results is a good thing. But it’s sometimes even more important to really understand what’s working within a network or publisher.

“Obviously Facebook is the biggest social channel, but Pinterest, which is often overlooked, is an interesting play,” says Yelp’s Head of Performance, Eyal Grundstein.

The key to unlocking performance for Yelp on Pinterest was experimentation… and granularity.

Initial generic campaigns produced generic results, but when Yelp started targeting “odd things” like nail salons, click-through rates jumped 5X. Another finding: tattoos are huge on Pinterest, because people search for tattoos that they’ll consider. Targeting on tattoos and showing tattoos in the ads boosting conversions 10X.

“You can be granular not only in the targeting but also in the copy,” Grundstein says.

 

2. Granularity tells you which publishers are performing

Most ad networks fulfill impressions and conversions for their clients by purchasing inventory from publishers or sub-publishers. When this happens, sometimes advertisers lose the ability to optimize for maximum performance because they either lack the capability or are not looking below the top line campaign numbers to the sub-publisher results.

Hint: some will be rock stars; some will be duds.

“We have a two to three times per week process of pruning out the low performers,” says Eric Seufert, Platform at N3twork. “We kill them at the line-item level if they’re not performing.”

That process does vary from week to week, Seufert says, as publishers change. There’s some natural variance between good, acceptable, and bad, so some level of discretion is warranted. Still, the overall learning remains: advertisers need to be able to probe down to sub-publisher levels to really fine-tune performance.

 

3. Granularity helps you avoid ad fraud

Granularity is table stakes for avoiding fraud, says Grundstein. Impression-level data, for instance, is an absolute must.

It’s also a way to tie the technicalities of adtech to the ground-truth realities of customers, users, and your product. And there’s no better way, says Warren Woodward, Nexon’s Executive Director of User Acquisition, to really see what’s going on.

“Show me this ad in the wild,” Woodward will often ask his ad partners. “It’s amazing how many sources break down when you ask them… where is your traffic? Can you show it to me?”

And, just as source-level data allows you to pinpoint top performers, it also allows you to isolate potential fraud. Especially when you explicitly state your goalposts in the ad insertion order:

“This game that usually has a 90% tutorial completion… if we see a source as over ‘x’ number of installs and [it] deviates from that norm by over 50%… we’re going to consider that incentivized or some other type of fraud,” says Woodward.

 

4. Granularity helps you avoid bidding against yourself for adspace

Granularity on the publisher level helps us to “strategize and understand where not to overbid or bid against yourself,” says Yelp’s Head of Performance, Eyal Grundstein. “For example, if you’re buying on two different DSPs and they’re both buying on Mopub… they will bid up against each other potentially, especially on a particular placement if there is enough volume or if it is relevant enough.”

In other words, the ad space is complex and busy. And if you’re a significant advertiser, you’re probably using anywhere from ten to over a hundred advertising partners, which means you could potentially have campaign collisions.

There’s only one thing less cool than ad fraud, and that’s bidding against yourself.

 

5. Granularity helps you customize to different geographies

Country and regional level data is critical when marketing, says Kabam’s Director of User Acquisition, Andy Park.

“How people consume media across geos is different,” Park says, noting that people in China like to like and comment on ads, particularly on Tiktok, the country’s top video platform. “[One] ad got 37,000 likes and 600 comments in two days.”

Creatives come in many different sizes, shapes, and user experiences, Park says. The key is being able to present different creatives to different audiences, and react appropriately depending on which ones work.

This also enables regional targeting, says Postmates’ Director of User Acquisition Patrick Witham.

“We operate city-level targeting,” Witham says, while noting that there are some limitations with ad network data for geotargeting.

Separating campaigns for different geographies can also make overall campaign analytics more challenging, he added, and does put some limits on scale. However, tighter targeting almost always leads to better results, and “specificity drives conversions.”

 

6. Granularity allows you to “try wild things” and still be successful

Some of the best things you’ll do in marketing are crazy.

At least, at first glance.

“Our approach has been to build tools that allow us to be radically experimental,” says N3twork’s Seufert. “We’re building about 50 videos a week… we deploy them to test and then deploy more universally.”

Some of those videos are going to be incredible. Some are going to be horrible. But by building the engine to enable creativity at scale and fast failure, N3twork is opening itself up to those rare oddball explosions of lightning in a bottle that drive mass conversions.

Nexon’s Woodward agrees.

“Try wild things,” he says. “You want something that’s going to stand out… when you have a completely different experience, it’ll be the biggest winner or a complete loser.”

One example for Nexon was an ad that featured almost no gameplay — an extreme rarity in the mobile game ad world. Instead, it simply showed fans talking about the game. Essentially, it broke every rule… and it was the company’s biggest winner.

“It carried about a quarter of our user acquisition,” says Woodward.

 

7. Granularity helps you avoid poorly performing genres of publishers

Sometimes you want to avoid one publisher in particular. Sometimes, though, you want to avoid an entire genre of publishers.

That’s exactly the scenario that Kabam’s Park found himself in (watch the video for full details… including precisely what he was trying to avoid.

Some things just don’t work for your company, your brand, your product, or your app. And granularity enables you to avoid them.

 

8. Granularity helps you test creative versus creative

Every marketer wants to know which ad units are performing. That’s table stakes… and yet also an example of granularity.

Smart marketers also want to know their conversions from different creative types: banner, text, interstitial, video… and playable ad. You just might be surprised at what you find.

For example, playable ads doubled Nexon’s app installs from one particular source, says Executive Director of User Acquisition Warren Woodward.

“Now we’re making as many playables as possible,” Woodward says. “If you’re not games, think about other ways you can make interactive ad units. The rest of us are… you won’t be in the game if you’re not.”

 

But what about iOS 14.5 and SKAdNetwork?

Old-school mobile marketing relied on granular device-level data to get detailed data on impressions, clicks, installs, and post-install activity, and on iOS that is no longer all relevant. (For now Android is business as usual.) On devices running iOS 14.5 and later (which is now almost all devices) you can only get that level of data if people opt in to tracking … which you can only know after they install your app.

For that reason — and the fact that 75-85% of people are not allowing tracking via the App Tracking Transparency pop-up — your best source of data arrives via Apple’s SKAdNetwork data.

The good news for mobile marketers: it’s deterministic.

The bad news: it’s incomplete by design, it arrives at variable times, it’s adopted with different practices and policies across different ad networks, and it’s explicitly not device level in order to be privacy-safe.

This doesn’t mean marketing optimization on iOS is over. It does mean that mobile growth marketers need to use new ways of measuring advertising and marketing success and learn to be comfortable with a certain missing layer of granularity. However, using Singular SKAN, marketers can still get good, usable, reliable data on which to base marketing optimization tactics.

 

Summing up

Granularity isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s an incredibly useful attribute for marketers who want to scale profitably.

The good thing: it’s easy to get on Android.

The challenge: you have to work for it — and earn it — on iOS, and in some cases, you simply can’t get it.

Dig deeper: See how the best growth marketers succeed.

Introducing global-first Cross-Device, Cross-Platform ROI analytics

How do you grow ROI while maintaining CPA and scale?

This is a question marketers face every day. And answering this question has become more complex as they advertise on more platforms across more devices than ever before. When conversions happen, it’s a struggle to connect the dots and understand what caused them.

Back when Singular was founded in 2014, we focused on solving this challenge first for the complex, highly fragmented, mobile ecosystem: providing a single solution that automatically collects and combines spend data and conversion data to expose mobile marketing performance, including ROI, at unrivaled levels of granularity.

That is powerful. And we quickly became the de facto solution for unifying campaign analytics and mobile attribution to expose ROI.

But in 2019, the game is different

Top brands advertise over a wide range of platforms to users on multiple devices. A customer may see an advertisement for a product on her desktop, and later buy that product on her mobile app. With today’s analytics, it’s hard to connect the two experiences and measure the customer journey accurately.

For mobile-first brands, this often leads to two separate teams, one web, one mobile app, using different tools, and even different metrics, to measure the customer journey. For web-first brands, it results in limited investment in mobile apps, preventing them from diversifying their marketing efforts to bring in incremental users, leaving untapped growth potential on the line.

Moreover, inaccurate measurement leads to misguided decision-making. Matter of fact, poor data quality costs brands an average of $15 million annually, according to Gartner. Making an investment and creative decisions with inaccurate and incomplete datasets is just plain costly.

In true Singular spirit, we sought to solve this new challenge for our customers so they can drive growth more effectively and efficiently in this multichannel world. And I’m happy to say that we have leveraged our vast experience in attribution and marketing analytics to do just that.

Cross-device, cross-platform attribution

Today, Singular is announcing the first-ever cross-platform and cross-device ROI analytics solution for growth marketers.

With the release of Cross-Device Attribution, Singular’s Marketing Intelligence Platform connects marketing spend data to conversion results across devices and platforms. First, we ingest granular spend and marketing data from thousands of sources. Then we connect it with attribution data from our easy-to-implement in-app and web SDKs as well as direct integrations with customer data platforms, analytics solutions, and internal BI systems, bringing the full customer journey into a single view. Finally, we match the two datasets.

The result is the most accurate cohort ROI and CPA metrics available to marketers, at the deepest levels of granularity including campaign, publisher and even creative.

That’s ground-breaking. It’s revolutionary.

But bringing cross-device and cross-platform ROI into Singular and measuring it accurately, at granular levels, is only the beginning to driving impactful growth.

Granular data for growth

Marketers can now access granular ROI cohort reporting that is more accurate than ever, as you can get clear, combined revenue for users across all devices. This is critical to achieving profitable growth and only possible with Singular – a complete platform that innovates beyond a single attribution solution.

Moreover, marketers can also utilize the wide set of capabilities that Singular’s Marketing Intelligence Platform offers to make smarter decisions and optimize their growth efforts with additional cross-device visibility; plus, they have more visibility into essential context such as the exact creative customers engaged with and the audience segments they belong to.

For example, you may find that a web channel’s impact is much higher than expected for specific types of customers. And now you can analyze the impact of the same creative across mobile and web.

In fact, we won’t be surprised if marketers start shifting investments with this new level of clarity. We are excited to see how growth strategists are going to rise above the crowd using this new solution to become part of the future wave of sophisticated marketers. Gone are the days of attribution feature wars – Marketing Intelligence has arrived.

Launching Cross-Device Attribution is just another step towards achieving our goal: to be every marketer’s indispensable tool in driving growth. We keep working not only to ensure that you can innovate your growth processes and have access to the highest data accuracy but also to ensure that we bring you the right insights at the right time to help you make timely strategic and operational decisions.

Are you ready to take part in the future of growth?