Creative fatigue
The decline in performance that comes from an audience having already seen the ad too often.
It shows as a specific pattern rather than a single number: frequency climbing, link click-through falling, and cost per thousand impressions rising, all at once, while nothing in the setup has changed.
Why it matters for HVAC
Service-area advertisers hit this far harder than national ones. A metro might hold eighty thousand qualifying households, and a campaign at real budget cycles through them in weeks. A national advertiser’s audience keeps refreshing; a contractor’s does not.
This is one of the few places in a Meta account where the numbers genuinely point at the ad rather than at the targeting or the tracking, which makes it one of the few times "we need new creative" is the correct diagnosis rather than the default one.
How it is measured
Plot frequency, link click-through rate and cost per thousand impressions on the same timeline. The three moving together in that pattern is the signature. A single metric moving alone usually means something else.
A worked example
Week one: frequency 1.4, link click-through 1.9%, cost per thousand $14. Week six: frequency 4.1, link click-through 0.8%, cost per thousand $23. Cost per lead has nearly doubled and nothing was changed. The audience has simply seen it.
These figures are invented to show the arithmetic. They describe no real business.
The defence
Volume of genuinely different creative, not variations on one. Different hook, different format, different offer. Recolouring an image and rewriting its headline counts as one creative whatever the ad count says.
Where this is demonstrated
The Creative production pillar scores every listed agency on what they document here, and gives you the questions that tell you which one you are being sold.