Frequency capping

How to calculate ad frequency

Divide impressions by unique people reached to get ad frequency. An impression is one time the ad was shown. Unique people are the distinct humans (or devices) who saw it, not the view count.

Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. Their 15-second runner video is shown 50,000 times to 10,000 women in 7 days. 50,000 ÷ 10,000 = a frequency of 5. The average woman in that audience saw the can-open five times in a week.

Always name two things when you quote ad frequency:

• The window: 7 days, 28 days. Five times in a week is not five times in a month.
• The object: one ad, one ad set, or the campaign (a group of ads with its own budget).

Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. A campaign frequency of 2.1 can hide the runner video at 7 and a new TikTok at 1.2. The average is a headline. The tired ad is the decision.

Why frequency matters

A little repetition helps memory. A lot of repetition is how creative fatigue starts. Frequency is the counter. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. On a small audience of active women over 50 with a large June budget, frequency climbs fast. That is a media setup problem as much as a creative one.

Agencies see frequency when a client wants more spend in a thin geo. In-house teams see it when one product set is the only thing in the account. Either way, frequency is how the drink brand notices before CPM (cost per mille: the price of a thousand views) and CPA (cost per acquisition: cost per order) move. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. The drink brand can catch the 50,000-view runner video at frequency 5 before cost per order follows.

How to read ad frequency

Read ad frequency with CTR (click-through rate: how often a view becomes a click) and CPM (cost per mille). Rising frequency with a stable CTR can still be fine for a short burst (a Memorial Day flight). Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. Rising frequency with falling CTR on the runner video means rotate now. Do not wait for CPA (cost per acquisition) to confirm it.

Frequency capping

A frequency cap is a limit on how many times one person can see the ad in a window. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. The drink brand can cap the runner video at 3 per week so Meta (Facebook and Instagram) cannot show it 12 times to the same woman. Use a cap to stop a tired ad from burning the audience, not as a default on every campaign. A cap so low the algorithm never leaves learning is the opposite of a fatigue fix.

Common frequency mistakes

• Setting a frequency cap so low that the algorithm never leaves learning.
• Reporting average frequency across countries with very different audience sizes. 4 in a small United States age band is not 4 in a national campaign.

If frequency is high and results are still holding, you may be in a short burst on purpose. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. If frequency is high and click-through rate (CTR) is falling on that runner video, rotate. The number only means something next to the ad it belongs to.