Free tool
Fatigue forecast
How many days before this ad burns out? Drop in your numbers — get a date you can act on.
Want this running 24/7 on your account?
Free tool
How many days before this ad burns out? Drop in your numbers — get a date you can act on.
Want this running 24/7 on your account?
Creative fatigue is what happens when an audience has seen an ad enough times that it stops working on them. The mechanics are visible in two numbers moving in opposite directions: frequency climbs as delivery re-serves the same people, and click-through rate falls as those people stop reacting. CPM often rises alongside, because Meta prices in the lower engagement.
The trap is that either signal on its own is ambiguous. A high frequency with a stable CTR usually just means a tight audience. A falling CTR at low frequency is more likely a targeting or offer problem. Fatigue is the specific case where both move together.
You give it four numbers: frequency today, CTR today, your first-week baseline CTR, and how many days the ad has been running. From those it derives two daily rates — frequency gained per day (frequency ÷ days running) and CTR lost per day ((baseline − today) ÷ days running) — and projects each forward to its threshold.
The two thresholds are frequency 3.5 and CTR at 85% of baseline. The forecast reports whichever one arrives sooner, so an ad with a gently rising frequency but a fast-decaying CTR gets its date from the CTR side. If your CTR has not fallen at all, that projection is skipped and frequency decides.
This is a straight-line projection, not a survival model. It assumes the last few days keep repeating, which is a fair approximation over a one-week horizon and a poor one over a month. Re-run it every few days rather than trusting a single distant date.
Fatigued now — frequency is already past 3.5 and CTR is already below 85% of baseline. The decision has been made for you: pause or refresh today. Imminent (3 days or fewer) means the replacement should already be in production — ship it tomorrow. Soon (4 to 7 days) is the comfortable window: brief the variant this week. Healthy means leave it alone.
The CTR decay percentage next to the date tells you how far gone the creative already is. When you do refresh, change the hook rather than the whole concept — the ad variation engine spins one winner into ten angles that keep the proven structure. If several ads across the account are fatiguing at once, that is usually an audience-size problem, and the audience overlap calculator will show whether your ad sets are burning through the same people twice.
Last updated August 31, 2026. All 17 calculators and AI helpers are listed on the free tools hub.
FAQ
This forecast uses frequency 3.5 as the burnout line — the point at which the average person in the audience has seen the ad three and a half times in the last seven days. Frequency alone is not fatigue, though. The tool only calls an ad fatigued now when frequency is at or above 3.5 and CTR has also fallen below 85% of its first-week baseline. High frequency with a holding CTR usually means a small audience, not a dead creative.
It projects both curves forward at the rate they have moved so far and reports whichever threshold arrives first. Under 3 days is flagged imminent, 3 to 7 days is soon, and anything beyond 7 days is healthy. If your CTR is flat or improving there is no decay to project, so the CTR side returns a placeholder and the frequency side decides the date.
Raising budget on a fatigued ad accelerates the problem — more impressions into the same audience pushes frequency higher and CTR lower. Ship a new variant instead, keep the ad set and its learning intact, and let the fresh creative take delivery. Kill the old ad only once the replacement is out-performing it.