Took me 8 months to see my ad frequency was too high

I was running the same retargeting campaign for a Denver bakery for 8 months and kept wondering why our cost per click kept going up. Then I looked at the frequency report and saw people were seeing my ad 14 times before clicking. How do you decide on a max frequency cap for your campaigns?

3 comments

3 Comments

felix_lane9915d ago

Is it just me or does this kind of tunnel vision happen with everything once you get hyper focused on one thing? I notice the same thing when I'm cooking. Like I'll spend an hour perfecting the sauce but forget the rice is burning on the other burner. Same with dating apps honestly. People obsess over their profile pics but don't realize they're swiping past the same 10 people every day because their radius is set to 5 miles. The frequency thing is just another version of that. You get so caught up in one detail you miss the bigger picture until something forces you to look up.

margaret_williams514d ago

That "same 10 people" thing you mentioned is the part that gets me. Because in marketing, we talk about frequency like it's just a number, but the real issue is attention scarcity. People have a limited number of times they'll notice something before their brain tunes it out completely. My buddy runs a small hardware store and he'd run the same Facebook ad to 500 people for three weeks straight. Sales were flat. When he finally checked, 90% of those people had seen the ad over 20 times. They weren't ignoring his product, they were ignoring the ad itself. Once he cut frequency and changed the image each week, engagement went up. The bigger picture is that frequency limits aren't just about budget, they're about respecting how much noise people can filter out before they stop hearing you at all.

blakem3715d ago

...and the weirdest part is I was so focused on getting the creative right I completely ignored frequency. For me, 3-4 per week per person is the sweet spot for most campaigns, especially if it's a small local business where people will actually notice the repetition. I use a 7-day lookback window and cap at 5 impressions max, then rotate in new creative if I need more reach. You'll probably see your CTR jump pretty quick once you drop that cap down, just make sure your audience pool is big enough so you don't run out of people to show it to.