What fatigue actually is
In a fixed local geography your audience is small and finite. Run the same ad long enough and the people most likely to respond already have. What remains is the harder half, and the platform has to pay more to reach them.
The signature is specific: frequency climbing, click-through rate drifting down, cost per outcome rising while conversion rate on the site stays flat. Nothing is broken. The audience has just seen it.
Telling fatigue from a real problem
If cost per outcome rose and site conversion rate fell too, the problem is downstream — the landing page, the offer, the follow-up.
If cost rose sharply overnight, suspect a setting change, a competitor entering the auction, or a tracking break — not fatigue, which arrives gradually.
If it crept up over three to six weeks with frequency climbing, it is fatigue.
The cheap fix
Not a new campaign. New creative inside the existing one, so you keep the learning you paid for.
Have three to five variants in rotation and retire the weakest every few weeks. Change the hook, not just the image — a different first sentence outperforms a different photo. Seasonal and offer-based angles do most of the work in local advertising.
Build it into the calendar
Fatigue is predictable, so treat it as maintenance rather than an emergency. New creative on a fixed monthly cadence, whether or not the numbers have started to slip.
Businesses that do this run flat cost per lead for years. Businesses that wait for the numbers to hurt pay a premium every time they react.
For the full version, with the four numbers to watch, a quick check to rule out other causes and a refresh schedule by channel, read why your ad creative stops working, and what to do about it.