Build your own seasonal CPM baseline. Paste your daily numbers and the workbook indexes every month against that account’s own August, so you can tell auction pressure from creative fatigue instead of guessing.
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Questions about this resource
How do I tell ad fatigue from audience saturation?
Put the same creative in front of a larger pool. Widen the geography, remove an age restriction, or drop a stale exclusion list, and change nothing about the asset. If CPM falls and CTR recovers with the identical creative, it was saturation. Frequency and CTR alone cannot separate the two, which is why most checklists fail here.
Why is my CPM rising when my ads haven't changed?
Most commonly because auction competition increased. CPM is a market price, not a quality score. Confirm it by checking a campaign you have not edited in thirty days or more. If its CPM rose by a similar proportion, the change is environmental and no creative decision will reverse it.
What frequency means my ad is fatigued?
There is no universal threshold. Frequency is a symptom shared by fatigue, saturation and narrow targeting, so a number alone diagnoses nothing. What matters is whether response is falling among people seeing the ad for the first time. If first-exposure response is stable, high frequency is a reach problem, not a creative one.
Does refreshing creative reset the learning phase?
Significant edits to an ad set return it to the learning phase, and Meta's documentation describes exiting that phase after roughly 50 optimisation events in a seven-day window. This is why creative refreshes should be diagnosed carefully rather than applied reflexively, particularly during high-cost periods.
Can a broken landing page increase my CPM?
Yes. Meta's auction weighs estimated action rate alongside your bid. When downstream conversion signal degrades through a slow page, a failing payment method or an out-of-stock item, the estimated action rate falls and you must bid more aggressively to win impressions you were previously winning. Post-click breakage shows up as an ad delivery symptom.
Why does my CPM rise every Diwali even when my ads are performing well?
Because from September to November, Indian advertisers across nearly every category raise budgets simultaneously while available impression inventory stays broadly flat. It is market-wide auction pressure. Refreshing creative during this window usually makes performance worse, because it resets delivery on assets that were working.
Should I use Google Ads seasonality adjustments for festival season?
Not for the season as a whole. Google's documentation states that seasonality adjustments are intended for short events of one to seven days and may not work as well beyond fourteen days at a time. Use them for a specific 48 or 72 hour sale event. For the eight to ten week festival window, adjust tCPA or tROAS targets and scale budgets instead.
How long should I wait before deciding an ad is fatigued?
Long enough to have a trend rather than a data point. Read four-week trends, not day-to-day movement, and run the differential first. Most decisions labelled fatigue after seven days are decisions made on noise.
