Ad Frequency: Why It Matters and How You Can Control It
It feels like the most common advertising trope always follows the same structure:
“Your customer needs to see your ads [4/5/6/7/146] times in order to [remember you/make a purchase/some other desired action]”.
This statement might make sense logically, but what does it actually mean and how do we control it?
The answer to these questions lies within a little looked at metric: Frequency.
Frequency is actually easy to understand and calculate. Frequency is the number of times a user has seen your ad or campaign in a certain period of time. In order to find frequency, you divide impressions by reach.
For example, let’s say your campaign had 100,000 impressions this month and reached 20,000 people. Your frequency is 5.00, meaning that the average person your campaign reached saw your marketing materials five times. Some may have seen it four times, while others may have had six exposures, but it all averages out to five.
- Impressions/reach
- 100,000/20,000 = 5.00
What’s a good frequency?
A desirable frequency primarily depends on the goals of your campaign. For the purposes of this blog post, we’re going to focus on Meta advertising on Facebook and Instagram, but a lot of these concepts transfer over to other platforms you’re advertising on.
For a prospecting campaign where we’re hoping to drive website traffic or website engagement, a good frequency to target is 1 to 2.5.
In our campaigns, we’ve seen that a frequency higher than about 2.5 results in a reduced clickthrough rate and less website traffic that can be used to serve ads that drive bookings later.
If your frequency is approaching 2.5, it is a good sign that your prospecting targeting is too narrow for your budget; try targeting a larger geographic region, more age groups, or more interest groups in order to increase the reach of your campaign.
For a retargeting campaign where we’re driving conversions on a hotel’s booking engine, the range of a good frequency is a little broader, from 2.5 to 9.
Out of an analysis of 80 retargeting campaigns during Q2 of this year, we identified some key insights:
- 19 retargeting campaigns were identified as high performers with a ROAS (return on ad spend) in excess of $50:1.
- Out of those 19 high-performing campaigns, 17 had frequencies between 2.5 and 7. The remaining 2 campaigns had frequencies of 9.8 and 10.7.
- No campaigns with a frequency of less than 2.5 broke the $50:1 threshold to be identified as a high-performing campaign.
- The remaining 20 retargeting campaigns with a frequency of less than 2.5.
- 10 were identified as low-performing campaigns with room to improve. 50% of campaigns in this frequency range falling in the bottom tier performance is higher than any other campaigns within a given frequency range.
- For example, campaigns with a frequency above 2.5 had only 16% in the bottom tier of performance. Don’t let your frequency get too high, though; data indicates that frequencies above about 12 produce conversions at a much lower rate.
That said, a high frequency only unlocks the possibility of high performance; it doesn’t guarantee it. Successful campaigns still presented great offers, high performing individual ads, and followed our best practices for facebook ad optimization.
How do we manipulate frequency?
Now that we know what frequency in our conversion campaigns we want to target, we have to look at how to get there.
Increasing frequency
If your campaign’s frequency falls below 2.5, you likely aren’t reaching the same people often enough to drive them to convert. If that’s the case, we need to look at either increasing impressions while keeping reach static or decreasing reach while keeping impressions static.
In order to increase impressions, we can add additional budget while keeping our target audience the same. For example, if our current target audience has 20,000 users and we are only serving 40,000 impressions (a frequency of 2), an increase of 25% of impressions to 50,000 should let us reach our target frequency of 2.5.
- Impressions/reach
- 40,000/20,000 = 2.00
- Impressions/reach
- 50,000/20,000 = 2.5
If the budget is inflexible, we can look at decreasing reach. In order to do this, we’ll shorten the amount of time a website visitor remains on our retargeting lists, maybe from 30 days to 20 days. In the example above, we’d still maintain our 40,000 impressions since our budget is the same, but our reach could decrease to 14,000 (about ⅔), leading to a frequency of 2.8. Although you may be missing out on conversions from the 20-30 day audience, the data indicates that the increased frequency of ad delivery to recent website visitors outweighs these potential losses.
Decreasing frequency
If your campaign frequency falls above 12, you are likely reaching the same people too often and being less efficient than you could be with your ad spend. If that’s the case, we need to increase reach while keeping impressions static.
To decrease frequency and drive higher performance, we need to reach additional users by increasing the size of our retargeting lists. For example, we could push additional budget to prospecting campaigns to fill the top of the funnel more, increasing the size of our website visitor list. We could also begin to target past guests who haven’t visited our website recently, increasing our pool of potential guests to deliver ads to. Finally, we could increase the duration that users remain on our website visitor list.
At the end of the day, frequency is just one of the tools we have to optimize Facebook campaigns. While having a frequency in our recommended range might unlock higher performance, it’s still important to pay attention to the quality of your offers, imagery, and copy so that your additional impressions don’t go to waste.
