Ad frequency

Example

A beauty studio runs an ad for a new treatment with a budget of €600 over two weeks in one city. The report says: reach 20,000 people, impressions 60,000. The frequency is 60,000 ÷ 20,000 = 3, so each of those 20,000 people saw the ad three times on average.

In the first week the frequency is 1.4 and an enquiry costs €4. In the second the audience is used up: frequency reaches 3, clicks fall away and an enquiry costs €7. Same ad, same budget — the only thing that changed is how many times the same people saw it.

Why it matters for a business

Frequency is how you see that a campaign has run its course. A small audience and a long campaign push the number up quickly: with 20,000 reachable people, two months of advertising means the same faces watching the same message a dozen times over. The platform keeps spending, the result gets more expensive, and the comments under the ad start to sour.

The opposite is also a problem. A frequency near 1 means almost nobody saw the ad twice, and for a considered purchase one exposure rarely moves anyone. So the number is read next to reach and clickthrough rate: clicks falling while frequency rises is the sign that the creative is worn out.

How to improve it

• Widen the audience or the area instead of pouring more budget onto the same people.
• Replace the creative every few weeks; a new video wins attention back even with identical targeting.
• Cap the frequency on the objectives that allow it — reach and awareness — and exclude people who have already bought or already written to you.
• Read the number for the period you are looking at — seven days and a full month give different figures, and an average hides the people who saw the ad ten times.
• Split campaigns for strangers and for people who already know you; the two tolerate very different frequencies.

We track frequency in the monthly report for Facebook and Instagram ads and change the creative before the cost per result starts to climb.