Overheard a guy at Starbucks say 'frequency is more important than reach' and it hit me hard

I was grabbing coffee last Tuesday and some dude was on the phone talking about his ad campaigns. He said something like 'frequency of 3 beats any broad reach if you actually want conversions.' I had been dumping $2,000 a month into broad targeting on Facebook and getting junk results. Now I'm testing a smaller audience with higher frequency and my cost per lead dropped from $47 to $28 in just 10 days. Has anyone else found that bumping up frequency helped more than trying to chase new eyeballs?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_robin7d ago

You're making a classic mistake by confusing correlation with causation. Dropping your lead cost from $47 to $28 sounds great, but that smaller audience could just be lower hanging fruit that you'd exhaust in another week or two. Once you burn through those warm leads, frequency will actually hurt you because people get annoyed and start ignoring your ads completely. Reach builds brand awareness over months and years, while frequency is a short term trick that gives you diminishing returns fast.

lewis.troy7d ago

but nobody's talking about what happens when you're running a tight retargeting funnel and frequency actually works in your favor because of the message stacking effect. i've seen it with some local service businesses where we hit the same 500 people 8 times in a week with different angles - first ad is "we exist," second ad is "here's a case study," third ad is "limited time offer," and by the fourth hit they're calling. the trick is you need fresh creative every single time, not the same boring static image. burn through the warm list and you pivot to a lookalike or a different offer, you don't just keep hammering the same people with the same thing. so yeah diminishing returns is real if you're lazy, but if you treat frequency like a sequence instead of repetition it's a different ballgame.