Please don't say "ad fatigue"

The problem with excuses in growth

When performance drops, most teams reach for the nearest label:

• Ad fatigue

• Learning phase

• Algorithm changes

But let's be real: those aren't answers. They're excuses dressed up as insights. And excuses are dangerous because they let you believe you've found the cause…which means you stop looking deeper.

And that's fine if you like to burn money like the Joker in The Dark Knight Rises. But in the real world when you have to hit your numbers or face backlash, you can't just hand wave a system failure.

Here are 5 of the most common excuses and what they actually mean when you run them through the Growth Marketing OS (which you can download here for free).

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✅ Ad Fatigue

The Excuse: Our audience is tired of the creative.

The Truth: Your offer isn't evolving.

The creative needs to connect with the value prop. There might be some initial traction but those purchases are most likely coming from people who would have purchased anyway. If performance tanks after a period of time, your creative isn't connecting with your audience anymore. Or, more to the point, your creative isn't connecting with your value prop and your audience isn't convinced that your value prop is worth their dollars.

Diagnostic Lens:

• Did the ad promise align with the landing experience?

• Was the offer differentiated from competitors?

• Did we test the angle behind the creative or just new colors?

✅ Learning Phase

The Excuse: We just need more time in learning.

The Truth: You're equating change log activity with leverage.

The Google and Meta learning phases occur when you make big changes to campaigns (like large budget increases/decreases or bidding strategy changes) or when the system doesn't have enough signal density to learn in the first place. The algo isn't a magician. It needs clean data, clear goals, and enough conversions to optimize.

Diagnostic Lens:

• Is conversion tracking firing correctly?

• Are we feeding the algo enough daily conversions (20+)?

• Are we narrowing in on the right audience, or boiling the ocean?

• Is our change log miles long like a CVS receipt?

✅ Seasonality

The Excuse: People just don't buy this time of year.

The Truth: Blaming "seasonality" gives your team superficial cover

Seasonality explains some of the variance, like the Q4 holiday season for ecommerce businesses. That's typical. There are "off-seasons" in some verticals. But the seasonality we're talking about is an atypical slow-down in revenue or orders for an extended period of time that masks itself as "seasonality" but a systemic issue you haven't diagnosed:

• Creative fatigue that never laddered up

• A traffic mix that went stale

• A funnel that lost relevance

• An offer that no longer resonates

Diagnostic Lens:

• Did performance dip align with a known seasonal trend or did it start mid-cycle?

• What changed in the offer, funnel, or traffic mix when the dip started?

• Are we tracking insights across seasons to separate pattern from panic?

✅ Algorithm Changes

The Excuse: The platform updated and now performance dropped.

The Truth: You were over-optimized to a loophole.

When Meta or Google shifts, real growth systems survive because they're built on first principles rather than hacks. More to the point, Google and Meta were always rent-seeking machines. They thrive on businesses needing their audiences to survive. You pay a premium to not know what you're buying.

Diagnostic Lens:

• Were we leaning too hard on one tactic (e.g., audience hacks)?

• Did we have redundancy in creative testing and traffic sources?

• Are we capturing first-party data to reduce platform dependency?

✅ New Competitors in the Auctions

The Excuse: Other brands drove up CPCs.

The Truth: You were winning on arbitrage, not advantage.

If competitors can knock you off just by entering the auction, your LTV and positioning weren't strong enough. Your edge was temporary. You were benefiting from underpriced clicks, limited competition, or platform inefficiencies. You were lucky.

Sustainable growth comes from competitive advantage. If your cost-per-click rises and your system collapses, that means:

• Your positioning wasn't differentiated enough to justify a premium

• Your MER wasn't high enough to outbid weaker brands

• Your creative wasn't strong enough to win attention in a crowded feed

• Your conversion engine wasn't efficient enough to compete at scale

A real growth engine can absorb pressure.

Diagnostic Lens:

• Do we understand our real CAC ceiling based on LTV and payback?

• Have we defined our unique angle or are we saying the same thing louder?

• Can our funnel still perform when CPCs rise by 30%?

• Are we investing in compounding advantage (e.g., owned channels, referrals, product UX), or are we still renting growth from Google and Meta?

What founders and startups should actually do

Every excuse above is just a symptom. The real cause lives in one of four places:

• Traffic → Wrong audience or oversaturated

• Offer → Value prop isn't laddering up

• Funnel → Leaks at the landing page or checkout

• System → Tracking, bidding, or structure sabotaging results

So what can you actually do?

1. Run a root cause audit.
   Map each excuse to the real failure: traffic, offer, funnel, or system.

2. Build Minimum Viable Experiments.
   One hypothesis. One metric. One insight. Run it. Learn fast. Scale what works.

3. Ladder up, don't spin in circles.
   Every test should move you closer to strategic advantage, not short-term hacks.

4. Download the Growth Marketing OS.
   It's the full system: frameworks, playbooks, templates, dashboards built for startups that don't want to waste another dollar guessing.

Until next week,

Adam

P.S. Found this helpful? Forward it to another founder who might benefit. We're all in this together.

P.P.S. Don't forget to download the Growth Marketing OS by clicking the button below.

P.P.P.S. What marketing challenges are you facing in your startup journey? Reply directly to this email with your questions or topics you'd like to see covered in future issues.